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audio] The Irish Land Question: what it involves and how alone it can be settled, 1881 [bk] [1884 ed. retitled The Land Question [bk] [1911 CW, v.3] [rsf]
, 1881 [bk] [1884 ed. retitled [bk] [1911, v.3] [rsf] Social Problems, 1883. [bk] [1911 CW v.2], [rsf]
, 1883. [bk] [1911 v.2], [rsf] "Testimony to Senate Committee upon the Relations between Labor and Capital", February 1883 [in 1885, Report to the Committee of the Senate on the Relations between Labor and Capital, v.1]
, v.1] "Scotland and Scotsmen", speech in Glasgow, Feb 18, 1884, unpub [rsf]
"The Reduction to Iniquity", 1884, Nineteenth Century (July), p.134 (reply to Duke of Argyll) [offpr, offpr as Property in Land ] [rsf]
(July), p.134 (reply to Duke of Argyll) [offpr, offpr as ] [rsf] "Is our Civilization Just to Workingmen?", Oct 1884, 9th Church Congress, p.135
, p.135 The Crime of Poverty: an address Apr 1, 1885, 1885 [bk] [ CW v.8, p.187] [rsf]
, 1885 [bk] [ v.8, p.187] [rsf] "Land and Taxation: A conversation", 1885, North American Review (Jul), p.1 [ CW v.8, p.221] [rsf]
(Jul), p.1 [ v.8, p.221] [rsf] Protection or Free Trade: An examination of the tariff question, with special regard to the interests of labor, 1886. [bk] [1890 ed] [1911 CW, v.4] [rsf]
, 1886. [bk] [1890 ed] [1911, v.4] [rsf] "Thou Shalt Not Steal", speech in New York, May 1887, pub. The Standard (May 14, 1887) [ CW v.8, p.243] [rsf]
(May 14, 1887) [ v.8, p.243] [rsf] "Why the Landlord cannot shift the tax on land values", 1887, The Standard (Sep 10) [rsf]
(Sep 10) [rsf] "What we Stand For", speech Nov 1887 [rsf]
"Henry George and the Socialists: A Debate", 1887, The Standard
"Socialism vs. the Single Tax", 1887, The Standard (Dec 31) (vs. R.T. Ely)
(Dec 31) (vs. R.T. Ely) "To Workingmen", 1888, Belford's Magazine (Jun), p.36 [ CW, v.8, p.265]
(Jun), p.36 [, v.8, p.265] Land and People, 1888 [bk]
, 1888 [bk] They Kingdom Come: a sermon in Glasgow, 28th April 1889, 1889 [bk] [ CW, v.8, p.288] [rsf]
, 1889 [bk] [ v.8, p.288] [rsf] "The Land for the People" address in Ireland, July 11, 1889, unpub [rsf]
"Peace" speech in Poughkeepsie, Aug 25, 1889 [first pub. in Financial Reformer, Oct 1898] [rsf]
, Oct 1898] [rsf] "Justice the Object - Taxation the Means", speech Feb 4, 1890, unpub [ CW, v.8, p.295] [rsf]
, v.8, p.295] [rsf] "The Single Tax - What it is and why we urge it", 1890, Christian Advocate [rsf]
[rsf] "Remarks of Henry George at Single Tax Debate at Saratoga, Sep 5, 1890", 1890, JSSA (No. 29), p.73.
(No. 29), p.73. The Condition of Labour: An open letter to Pope Leo XIII, 1891 [bk], [1892 2nd ed, 1897 ed] [rsf]
, 1891 [bk], [1892 2nd ed, 1897 ed] [rsf] A Perplexed Philosopher: being an examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer's various utterances on the Land Question, with some incidental reference to his Synthetic Philosophy, 1892 [bk] [1911 CW v.5] [rsf]
, 1892 [bk] [1911 v.5] [rsf] "How to Help the Unemployed", 1894, North American Review (Feb), p.175
(Feb), p.175 "Causes of the Business Depression", 1894, Once a Week (Mar 6) [ CW v.8, p.323] [rsf]
(Mar 6) [ v.8, p.323] [rsf] "Peace by Standing Army", 1894 (July 12 speech), unpub [ CW, v.8, p.333]
, v.8, p.333] "Utility and Futility of Labor Strikes", 1897, Cleveland Recorder (Sep 5), [rsf]
(Sep 5), [rsf] The Science of Political Economy, 1898 [bk] [1911 CW, v.6 & v.7] [rsf]
, 1898 [bk] [1911 CW, v.6 & v.7] [rsf] Memorial Edition of the Writings of Henry George, 1898-1900 v.1 - Progress & Poverty, Pt. 1 v.2 - Progress & Poverty, Pt. 2 v.3 - Social Problems v.4 - Land Question, Property in Land, Condition of Labor v.5 - Protection or Free Trade v.6 - Perplexed philosopher v.7 - Science of PE, Pt. 1 v.8 - Science of PE, Pt. 2 v. 9 (1901) - Our Land & Land policy v.10 (1900) Life by George Jr
, 1898-1900
The Complete Works of Henry George, 1904. (Doubleday ed) v.1 - Progress & Poverty
v.2 - Social Problems
v.3 - Land Question
v.4 - Protection or Free Trade
v.5 - Perplexed philosopher
v.6 - Science of PE, bks 1-2
v.7 - Science of PE, bks 3-7
v. 8 - Our Land & Land policy
[1911 Fels ed. v.1, v.2, v.3, v.4, v.5, v.6, v.7, v.8, Life, v.9 & v.10]
, v.9 & v.10] The Law of Human Progress, 1917 [bk] (reprints of chapters of P&P )
, 1917 [bk] (reprints of chapters of ) The Prosperity Paradox: the economic wisdom of Henry George, 2000 (reprints)There are various undertones to this question. One is literally the questions itself, and other similar sounding questions could be
For all of above mentioned questions (including this one) I have my own hypothesis however I don't even claim to be original person who came up with this hypothesis.
This is from a small piece of text, either from a book or newspaper where Yogaraj Bhat (director of Mungaru Male fame) was talking about his working relationship with Ananth Nag (another famous Kannada actor in his own right). Apparently one fine evening they were having drinks and talking about lot of things and in the passing Yogarj Bhat asked the very same question to Ananth Nag, Why can't Kannada film industry be like Tamil or Telgu in terms of vastness and commercial aspect? The article was in Kannada, so I will try my level best to translate it in English to everybody's benefit and hope that I don't dilute or distort what he said.
As per Ananth Nag in the contemporary times any society or community which is culturally rich in it's literature and has strong intellectual activism mind set will find it difficult to appreciate some thing as superficial, unreal and larger than life as cinema. He also went on to say that such societies and communities have traditionally have had strong appreciation, support and participation in art forms like theater.
This is a very profound statement. When I read this I felt this guy had some genuine point to make, I just wanted to validate it for myself to believe it.
There have been 56 Gnana peetha awardees till 2015. If you exclude Hindi with 10 awards (because of it's pan Indian presence and not being a regional language) Kannada has highest number of awardees.
Kannada - 8 Bengali & Malayalam-5 each Urdu, Oriya, Marathi- 4 each Telugu, Gujarati-3 each Assamese, Tamil - 2 each
Now let us consider movie awards, not the FilmFair kind, but real intellectual kind - National Film Awards. I was actually expecting Telugu and Tamil films to have a higher share of awards because principally they have bigger film industries. But once again it is underdogs of South Indian film industry that take major piece of the cake. There have been 62 awardees so far and if you see the distribution of awards, language wise, it is quite contradictory to our assumption and once again aligns with trend that we see in Gnana Peetha awardees list.
Bengali - 22 Hindi - 13 Malayalam - 11 Kannada - 6 Marathi - 4 Sanskrit - 2 Tamil - 2 Assamese - 1 Beary - 1
When you have a society which is in general very well informed, educated and highly critical of intellectual bankruptcy, you can't engage them to something as fluffy and superficial as these mass movies. You also see lesser hero worship in these kind of societies.
If you try to understand film industries of west, it's french, German, Iranian movies which make highly complex and experimental movies. Hollywood might is big quantitatively, but it's European movies that take the major piece of the cake when it comes to quality and intellectual content.
Now coming to theater aspect that Ananth Nag talks is dominance of theater or plays.
Two of Kannada Gnana peetha awardees (Girish Karnad and Chandrashekar Kambar) are major play writers. I mean people of Gnanaa Peetha caliber are active participants in Kannada theater scene and have written some of the really innovative, bold and experimental dramas. Even generally speaking lot of intelligentsia is associated with theater because there is not much money in theater and these people are not in it for money.
But is there market and mass consumption of theater (professional or amateur) in these regions and cultures.
Let me talk about Karnataka. There are groups like Rangayana, Ranga Shankara, Benaka, Neenasam who are very active theater groups and play happen regularly in Chawdayya Memorial Hall and RangaShankara. I am from Dharwad which is typically called cultural head quarters of North Karnataka. The drama/theater scene in Dharwad is hot and happening. People still pay to watch dramas be it professional or amateur. This is because historically North Karnataka has been associated with Bombay Presidency and Marathi culture is still a big influence.
Maharashtra is known for it's dominant theater culture. My father who has spent major chuck of his youth in Pune and Bombay and was a amateur dramatist, says he was awe struck by Marathi theater scene is Pune and Bombay. Marathi plays were more watched than films. Marathi theater halls better, bigger, and had more glamour than cinema halls.
Ramesh Tendulkar (father of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar) was well known Marathi play writer. Even today Marathi theater is more intellectually evolved than Marathi movies.
In The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, it has been mentioned that
In fact in the post-independence era, besides Bengali theater, Marathi theater has been a singular driving force behind innovations and significant dramaturgy in Indian theater.
Ananth Nag himself comes from theater background. Before he became part of Kannada film industry he used to work in Bombay (in a Bank). In Bombay he and his younger brother Shankar Nag (of Magudi Days fame) were very active circles Marathi and Konkani theater. Even after they became big stars in Kannada film industry they continued to be part of theater and created "Sanket" troupe which went on to become Sanket Studios under which they produced lot of critically acclaimed and successful Kannada films. Arundhati Nag (wife of late Shankar Nag) who now manages Ranga Shankara also comes from Marathi theater background.
I myself am an avid drama enthusiast and I try to keep track of play festivals that happen in Bangalore so that I can attend if possible. Whenever any theater festivals happen in Bangalore the most often seen language are English, Hindi, Gujarti, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi even Urdu theater groups. I see very less of Tamil and Telugu play groups visiting here. I might be wrong here. Probably they are active in their native states, but at least we don't get to hear about it outside or its not something well recognized.
Cinema is cheapest form of healthy entertainment and if there is anything that comes nearest to it in content or presentation, it has to be plays, theater and performance arts. Wherever tradition of theater has been strong, cinema has failed to occupy that space. For most of the common people intellectualism doesn't matter. As long as they are going to get entertained and if theater is an cheaper alternative to cinemas for getting entertained then why not?
However it doesn't mean Kannadiga's don't watch Kannada movies. We watch only if it is worth our time. There was horrible period in Kannada film industry when only violent, rowdy /goonda, longu/Katti based movies were coming. People were fed up with these kind of movies.
Then came Mungaru Male which was breath of fresh air and over a period of time movies improved. Now we are seeing another wave of good films in Kannada.
People here are passionate about cinema so much so that they don't mind funding it if content is good (Lucia and first crowd funded movie in world was Kannada movie). Lucia, Rangitaranga have definitely made me hopeful seeing some really good Kannada movies in future.
So as long as there is no good content in Kannada movies, for that matter any movies, people are going to reject it, and more so in case of KannadigasThe explosion, which took place in the centre of the capital as commuters travelled home from work, injured up to 100 people
A powerful blast has ripped through a metro station in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, killing at least 11 people and injuring up to 100.
The explosion took place at the Oktyabrskaya station in the centre of the city just before 6pm on Monday as commuters travelled home from work.
Video shot by witnesses on mobile phones showed survivors reeling across a smoke-filled platform where a woman with a damaged leg sat propped against a wall.
In other images, a tide of frightened people rushed out through exit doors into an underpass as men with stretchers descended into the station. At street level, on Minsk's Independence Avenue, emergency workers tended to more than a dozen seriously injured victims in shredded clothes, lying in pools of blood. Some had severed limbs. A young woman wailed "Mum, I'm alive! I'm alive!" into her telephone, while at least two corpses lay under a sheet of plastic.
The Oktyabrskaya station is situated close to the residence of Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus. Lukashenko, a Soviet-style dictator, sent security forces to violently crush an opposition rally after disputed presidential elections in December.
Several opposition candidates were arrested and are awaiting trial on charges of "organising mass public disturbances".
There is likely to be speculation that the blast will play into the hands of the hardline regime, who may use it as an excuse to crack down on the opposition.
News agencies said that President Lukashenko visited the scene and laid flowers.
"I can't exclude that this gift was brought to us from outside, but we need to look at ourselves," he told his defence minister, Yury Zhadobin, at an emergency government meeting."You must check all the warehouses to see if ammunition and explosives are in place."
Lukashenko said the explosion could be connected to an unsolved incident in July 2008 when a bomb exploded in a park in Minsk, injuring about 50 people. "Maybe it's a link in the same chain," he said.
Security sources said it was most likely a terrorist attack, but it was unclear who might have detonated the blast, which happened at rush hour at one of the city's busiest transport hubs. There appeared to be no suicide bomber and Belarus has no history of confrontation with Islamists, like its larger neighbour, Russia.
Witnesses described a scene of horror in the moments after the device went off. "It happened between the second and third carriages of the train on the Moscow line," one man told reporters. "There were a lot of people covered in blood. I carried six young people out of there. I think there are fatalities."
Another man told Interfax: "I heard a muffled sound, like someone opening a champagne bottle, then the wave from the blast blew out the windows in the carriage. There was a great deal of smoke; we even became afraid that we might choke to death." Some witnesses spoke of a crater on the platform, not far from an escalator.Even if you’re a 9th level Vegan, chances are pretty high that at some point in time in your life, you’ll develop a deep-seated, insatiable craving for mankind’s greatest achievement (aside from nachos), the hot dog. And if, when such a craving strikes, you go anywhere other that Stuggy’s (809 South Broadway) in Fells Point, you’re wasting your time and/or money. Stuggy’s menu boasts nine specialty dogs and sausages along with your standard quarter pound classics (all made to your customized liking, natch), including the Chi-town Dog (pictured, $5.99) heaped with corn relish, peppers, onions, tomato and a pickle spear. I came this close to ordering The Cuban ($7.09), which features pulled pork, swiss, pickle and mustard all piled on top of a 1/4 pound dog, but whatever. Either way, rest assured whatever dog you choose you’ll walk (or stumble, if you’re shithammered) away satisfied.
And as a bonus, the guy running the joint gave me a free drink for announcing that Saliva’s “Click Click Boom” really sucks, since it was on the radio at the time. Nice!Social media played a predominant role in shaping the course of major events leading up to, during, and after the United States presidential election of 2016. It enabled people to have a greater interaction with the political landscape, controversies, and news surrounding the candidates involved. Unlike traditional news platforms, such as newspapers, radio, and magazines, social media gave people the ability to share, comment, and post below a candidate's advertisement, news surrounding the candidates, or articles regarding the policy of the candidates. This accessibility, in turn, would have a great influence on the events that ultimately led to its outcome.
Candidates would often use multiple social media accounts, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.[1] Depending on the digital architecture of each platform, candidates would post, create support videos, link to news articles, and challenge other candidates via fact-checking, discrediting, and response. In turn, users could share, like, or comment on these actions, furthering the candidates outreach. By doing so, candidates and users both would influence or change peoples views on a specific issue.[2] With candidates using different combinations of these actions, they built a unique style of communication with the public, influencing the portrayal of themselves in the news, and in their own accounts.[3] These accounts then would help build electoral coalitions, which identify voters and, in turn, raise money. As a result, they ultimately aided in voter mobilization and electoral impact.[4] Researchers from Stanford have found that 62% of U.S. adults get their news on social media and that people are more likely to believe in news favoring their choice of candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social networks[5]
Throughout the campaign, candidates have debated over immigrational, foreign, economic, healthcare, criminal, domestic, educational, environmental, and electoral policy.[6] Using social media, they expanded their base further beyond the broadcast debates, both in the Republican and Democratic primary, and in the general election. In one instance, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton feuded over economic and educational policy in a series of tweets.[7] In another, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump feuded over Obama's endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and the deletion of Twitter accounts.[8] Overall, these and many other events on social media contributed to the outcome of the 2016 election by endorsement, controversy, or other exhibits providing discussion for political discourse.[9]
Background [ edit ]
As the campaign began, analysts assumed that, because of the increased reach and capacity of social media sites of all kinds since the last election cycle, social media would be used in potentially powerful new ways. The Wall Street Journal predicted that the use of campaign advertisements targeted at individuals using newly available data would be among the more notable innovations.[10]
The political newspaper, The Hill, concluded not only that "[s]ocial media's influence in this presidential election is stronger than it has ever been," but that it "will shape campaigns for years to come."[11] According to The Wall Street Journal, the "traditional media" and the Democratic and Republican parties have lost "dominance" of public opinion to the "digital revolution."[12]
Frank Speiser, co-founder of SocialFlow, said, "This is the first true social media election." He added that before the 2016 presidential primaries, social media were a mere "auxiliary method of communication," but in this new era, "folks on social media to act on your behalf by just sharing it around. You don't have to buy access to reach millions of people anymore." According to Republican political strategist Patrick Ruffini, in the 2012 election cycle, candidates would make short statements, and re-tweet or thank followers.[11] The candidates were able to use social media to get free advertising from their supporters. Attendees of political rallies would take photos with the candidates that would then be shared on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. This generates more visibility for the candidate at no cost to them.[13]
The Guardian compared Internet memes to political cartoons, arguing, "For the first time in a US election cycle, community-generated memes have grown to play a significant role in political discourse, similar to the classic printed cartoon." While an Internet meme is unlikely to destroy a political career, lots of memes targeting a candidate might.[14]
Donald Trump campaign [ edit ]
Donald Trump's tweet activity from his first tweet in May 2009. His tweet activity pattern has changed from 2013.
The Trump presidential campaign benefited from large numbers of supporters who were active on social media from the beginning of the campaign. Donald Trump was perhaps one of the most provocative presidents in recent times, creating a strong divide within the country as there seemed to be very few people who felt only moderate feelings for him. With such a large divide created, it is no surprise that issues would arise on the Internet from both the supporters, who would call themselves "Centipedes" online[15] and the liberals (who sometimes refer to each other as comrades online).
In the first Republican Presidential debate, held on August 6, 2015, the moderator asked candidate Jeb Bush if he stood by a statement made the previous April that illegal entry into the U.S. by undocumented migrants is "an act of love."[16] Bush replied that he did and the Trump campaign immediately posted his comment as part of a video showing mugshots of illegal immigrants who committed violent crimes in the US, alternating with footage of Bush saying, "Yeah, they broke the law, but it's not a felony… It's an act of love."[17][18] According to Eric Fehrnstrom, political analyst and media strategist, the video marked a crucial turning point in the campaign for the Republican nomination.[16] Political analyst Michael Barone regarded the ad as a key moment in Trump's political rise.[19] The San Francisco Chronicle described the ad as pivotal in transforming Instagram from a personal photo-sharing app that some celebrities and politicians used to enhance their images, into a propaganda tool.[20]
"The Great Meme War" was an Internet campaign conducted by supporters of Donald Trump and opponents of Hillary Clinton between June 2015 and November 2016 in an effort to sway the election.[21] During this time period users of social media, especially Reddit and 4chan, conducted numerous "operations" to sway public opinion using Internet memes, Internet posts and online media.[22][23][24]
Right Side Broadcasting Network frequently uploaded live streams of Donald Trump rallies on YouTube. As of September 2016, the channel has received over 210 thousand subscribers, exceeding the subscribers of MSNBC's YouTube channel.[25]
On Reddit, /r/The Donald is a pro-Trump subforum (termed a subreddit on Reddit) which ranks consistently as the most active on the site.[26][27] Due to the very active community that outpaced the rest of the website, the algorithm that dictated what content reached the "/r/all" page of the website resulted in the significant portion of the page being /r/The_Donald content. In response, Reddit made changes to its algorithms on June 15 in an attempt to preserve variety of /r/all.[28] On July 27, 2016, Trump participated in an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on /r/The_Donald, answering thirteen questions from his supporters.[29] /r/The_Donald is more active and has a higher subscriber count than the subreddit for Hillary Clinton, /r/HillaryClinton.
Trump has become well-documented in his frequent Twitter posts.[30] With social media acting as free media and publicity, Trump harnessed Twitter as a platform to respond quickly to his opponents and tweet about his stance on various issues. Before the Republican National Convention where Trump was named the Republican candidate,[31] he would relentlessly target his fellow Republican candidates when their poll numbers would rise.[32] President-elect Donald Trump utilized Twitter frequently both during and after the 2016 presidential election, explaining that social media helped him win the primary and general elections even though his opponents spent "much more money than [he] spent".[33] While Slate explains that Trump succeeded because he retained his "vulgar vigor and translated it into the political arena",[34] the Washington Post has called his Twitter account "prolific, populist, and self-obsessed".[32]
Hillary Clinton campaign [ edit ]
Twitter activity of Hillary Clinton from her first tweet in June 2013 to September 2017. Her tweet activity pattern has changed in 2015.
In April 2016, Correct the Record, a pro-Clinton super PAC, announced a program called "Barrier Breakers" intended to rival the largely online volunteer efforts of Sanders and Trump supporters. With $1 million in funding, Correct the Record employed paid staff described as "former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers" to post "exclusively positive content".[35]
On June 9, 2016, as a response to Donald Trump's tweet regarding Obama's endorsement to Clinton, she wrote with a three-word tweet: "Delete your account"; it became her most retweeted tweet of all time.[36][37] After the Democratic National Convention, Clinton began campaigning with running mate, Tim Kaine, and while on the campaign trail, she stated, "I don't know who created Pokémon Go...I try to get them to have Pokémon Go to the polls".[38]
Clinton began using social media platform Snapchat to chronicle her campaign across America.[39] One of her videos, where she proclaimed that she was, "Just chillin', in Cedar Rapids", quickly became a meme on video-sharing app Vine.[40]
Ted Cruz campaign [ edit ]
Twitter activity of Ted Cruz
According to The Guardian, Cruz was "skewered by social media memes". His run for the Presidency was ended by a series of memes, including a viral video of an unusually awkward attempt to shake hands with his running mate Carly Fiorina, which was edited to emphasize his awkwardness in reality. The video was viewed 3.5 million times online. In addition, a mock-conspiracy theory faux-asserted that Cruz was actually the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer active in northern California from the late 1960s to the early 1970s.[14]
Bernie Sanders campaign [ edit ]
Twitter activity of Bernie Sanders from his first tweet in November 2010 to September 2017. His Twitter activity increased during his presidential campaign.
Social media is widely acknowledged to have played a crucial role in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. As of May 2016, 450,000 people belong to the Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash, one of the several online groups supporting Sanders. Memes were used as the primary means of starting conversational topics in groups such as Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash and Bernie Sanders is my HERO, which were primarily devoted to debating & educating, and praising Bernie whilst pointing out flaws in rival candidates Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton in comical ways. Another group, Bernie or Hillary?, dedicated to creating mock-campaign posters comparing Sanders to Clinton.[14] Sanders supporters who succeeded in closing down a planned Trump rally in Chicago in March 2016 were organized via Facebook.[41]
Bernie or Hillary [ edit ]
"Bernie or Hillary?"[42][43][44] (or "Bernie vs. Hillary"[44] [45]) was an Internet meme made popular during the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination in the United States 2016 election, in which Internet users who mostly favored Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton compared the two candidates in faux political posters.
Gary Johnson campaign [ edit ]
The humorous Balanced Rebellion video in which "Dead Abe Lincoln" endorses Johnson has been the most widely viewed viral video of any candidate the 2016 campaign.[46] The advertisement shows the many negative aspects of both Hillary and Trump, and states that Johnson will protect our freedoms.[47] Another video that made headlines shows the former New Mexico governor[48] faking a heart attack during a debate on the legalization of marijuana.[49] Johnson also received a 5,000 percent increase in Google searches when Ted Cruz dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination.[50] As a third party candidate, one of Johnson's main focuses was to convince dissatisfied Republicans and Democrats to vote for him.[51] One way to attract more voters was to go to the Democratic National Convention to persuade disheartened Bernie Sanders supporters to vote for him. This method proved to be somewhat effective as Johnson had a surge in online interactions about the former Governor during the two days of the convention, July 26 and 27.[52]
Jill Stein campaign [ edit ]
Twitter activity of Jill Stein from her first tweet in February 2010 to September 2017. Her Twitter activity increased during her presidential campaign in 2012 and 2016
Jill Stein made extensive use of Twitter for her presidential campaign. She used the social media platform to communicate with Americans before, during, and after the presidential debate at Hofstra University.[53] Stein used her Twitter influence in hopes that it would demonstrate a "changing political landscape" where voters weren't only faced with two options for president.[54] Stein was trending for the first time on Twitter the week of July 20, 2016 and gained 27,000 new followers.[55] Stein also had the same idea as Gary Johnson to sway discouraged Bernie Sanders supporters to vote for her in the election. This led to a boost in online conversation about Stein during the DNC, just as it did with Johnson.[52] After the end of the election, Stein requested a recount in Wisconsin.[56] She used her social media influence to raise millions of dollars for recounts in not only Wisconsin, but also Pennsylvania and Michigan.[57] Stein stated that the reason for the recount was to assure that no hacking of voting machines or voter results occurred.[58]
See also [ edit ]The Nephites gather to the land of Cumorah for the final battles—Mormon hides the sacred records in the hill Cumorah—The Lamanites are victorious, and the Nephite nation is destroyed—Hundreds of thousands are slain with the sword. About A.D. 385.
1 And now I finish my record concerning the of my people, the Nephites. And it came to pass that we did march forth before the Lamanites.
2 And I, Mormon, wrote an epistle unto the king of the Lamanites, and desired of him that he would grant unto us that we might gather together our people unto the of, by a hill which was called Cumorah, and there we could give them battle.
3 And it came to pass that the king of the Lamanites did grant unto me the thing which I desired.
4 And it came to pass that we did march forth to the land of Cumorah, and we did pitch our tents around about the hill Cumorah; and it was in a land of, rivers, and fountains; and here we had hope to gain advantage over the Lamanites.
5 And when hundred and eighty and four years had passed away, we had gathered in all the remainder of our people unto the land of Cumorah.
6 And it came to pass that when we had gathered in all our people in one to the land of Cumorah, behold I, Mormon, began to be old; and knowing it to be the last struggle of my people, and having been commanded of the Lord that I should not suffer the records which had been handed down by our fathers, which were, to fall into the hands of the Lamanites, (for the Lamanites would them) therefore I made out of the plates of Nephi, and up in the hill Cumorah all the records which had been entrusted to me by the hand of the Lord, save it were few plates which I gave unto my son.
7 And it came to pass that my people, with their wives and their children, did now behold the of the Lamanites marching towards them; and with that awful of death which fills the breasts of all the wicked, did they await to receive them.
8 And it came to pass that they came to battle against us, and every soul was filled with terror because of the greatness of their numbers.
9 And it came to pass that they did fall upon my people with the sword, and with the bow, and with the arrow, and with the ax, and with all manner of weapons of war.
10 And it came to pass that my men were hewn down, yea, even my who were with me, and I fell wounded in the midst; and they passed by me that they did not put an end to my life.
11 And when they had gone through and hewn down my people save it were twenty and four of us, (among whom was my son Moroni) and we having survived the dead of our people, did behold on the morrow, when the Lamanites had returned unto their camps, from the top of the hill Cumorah, the ten thousand of my people who were hewn down, being led in the front by me.
12 And we also beheld the ten thousand of my people who were led by my son Moroni.
13 And behold, the ten thousand of Gidgiddonah had fallen, and he also in the midst.
14 And Lamah had fallen with his ten thousand; and Gilgal had fallen with his ten thousand; and Limhah had fallen with his ten thousand; and Jeneum had fallen with his ten thousand; and Cumenihah, and Moronihah, and Antionum, and Shiblom, and Shem, and Josh, had fallen with their ten thousand each.
15 And it came to pass that there were ten more who did fall by the sword, with their ten thousand each; yea, even my people, save it were those twenty and four who were with me, and also a who had escaped into the south countries, and a few who had deserted over unto the Lamanites, had fallen; and their flesh, and bones, and blood lay upon the face of the earth, being left by the hands of those who slew them to molder upon the land, and to crumble and to return to their mother earth.
16 And my soul was rent with, because of the slain of my people, and I cried:
17 ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord! O ye fair ones, how could ye have rejected that Jesus, who stood with open arms to receive you!
18 Behold, if ye had not done this, ye would not have fallen. But behold, ye are fallen, and I your loss.
19 O ye sons and daughters, ye fathers and mothers, ye husbands and wives, ye fair ones, how is it that ye could have!
20 But behold, ye are gone, and my sorrows cannot bring your return.
21 And the day soon cometh that your mortal must put on immortality, and these bodies which are now moldering in corruption must soon become bodies; and then ye must stand before the judgment-seat of Christ, to be judged according to your works; and if it so be that ye are righteous, then are ye blessed with your fathers who have gone before you.
22 O that ye had repented before this great had come upon you. But behold, ye are gone, and the Father, yea, the Eternal Father of heaven, your state; and he |
, ABC News. Accessed at:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/2000-dead-cost-war-afghanistan/story?id=17367728#.UIguv4bnNGI
“Afghanistan: Green-on-blue attacks show there’s no easy way out” By Sajjan Gohel, September 18, 2012, CNN. Accessed at:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/18/opinion/opinion-afghanistan-green-on-blue/index.html
“Afghanistan forces prepared for NATO withdrawal, Karzai says” by Ned Parker, October 18, 2012, Los Angeles Times. Accessed at:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/18/world/la-fg-afghan-karzai-20121019
“Army Seeks Death Penalty in Afghan Massacre” by Kirk Johnson, November 13, 2012, The New York Times. Accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/army-seeks-death-penalty-for-robert-bales-in-massacre.html
“CIA ‘revives attacks on rescuers’ in Pakistan” by Chris Woods, June 4th, 2012, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Accessed at:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/06/04/cia-revives-attacks-on-rescuers-in-pakistan/
“Death from afar” The Economist, November 3rd-9th, 2012. Accessed at:
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565614-america-uses-drones-lot-secret-and-largely-unencumbered-declared-rules-worries
“Do Targeted Killings Work?” By Daniel L. Byman, Senior Fellow Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, July 14, 2009, The Brookings Institute. Accessed at:
http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2009/07/14-targeted-killings-byman
“Dodging the drones: How militants have responded to the covert US campaign” By Aaron Y. Zelin, August 31, 2012, Foreign Policy. Accessed at:
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/31/dodging_the_drones_how_militants_have_responded_to_the_covert_us_campaign
“Get the Data: Obama’s terror drones” by Chris Woods, February 4, 2012, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Accessed at:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/get-the-data-obamas-terror-drones/
“Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan” the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and the Global Justice Clinic (NYU School of Law), September 2012. Accessed at:
http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Stanford_NYU_LIVING_UNDER_DRONES.pdf
“Second Day, Wednesday, 11/21/1945, Part 04”, in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Volume II. Proceedings: 11/14/1945-11/30/1945. [Official text in the English language.] Nuremberg: IMT, 1947. pp. 98-102. Accessed at:
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/jackson.html
“Predator Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)” September 26, 2012, The New York Times. Accessed at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/u/unmanned_aerial_vehicles/index.html
“Pretrial Hearing Starts for Soldier Accused of Murdering 16 Afghan Civilians” by Kirk Johnson, November 5, 2012, The New York Times. Accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/us/hearing-begins-for-robert-bales-accused-in-afghan-murders.html?_r=0
“Prosecutors seek death for U.S. soldier charged in Afghan rampage” by Bill Rigby, November 5, 2012, Reuters. Accessed at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/06/us-usa-afghanistan-trial-idUSBRE8A407T20121106
“Prosecution Cites Revenge as Motive for Afghan Massacre” by Neal Karlinsky and Luis Martinez, November 5, 2012, ABC News. Accessed at:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/prosecution-cites-revenge-motive-afghan-massacre/story?id=17646561#.UKY5j4aoEsc
“Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950” Report of the International Law Commission covering its Second Session, 5 june – 29 July 1950, Document A/1316. Accessed at:
http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/390
“The Moral Case for Drones” by Scott Shane, July 14, 2012, The New York Times. Accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-moral-case-for-drones.html?ref=opinion
“The Charter of the United Nations” June 26, 1945. Accessed at:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/intro.shtml
“U.S. hearing on Kandahar massacre to include video testimony from Afghans” by Laura L. Myers, October 12, 2012, Reuters. Accessed at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/13/us-usa-afghanistan-trial-idUSBRE89C01720121013Revenge of the carp: Fish hunted by woman armed with bow and arrow leaps out of the water to smack her in the face
A carp hunted by a woman armed with a bow and arrow has got his own back – by delivering a well-aimed slap to the face of his pursuer.
The bizarre shot was caught on the reservoirs of the Illinois River, where the population of Asian carp, an invasive species, has exploded.
The fish, who have habit of jumping out of the water when boats approach, are regarded as a nuisance, which has led to the sport of hunting them.
[caption]
[caption]
By providing participants with bows and arrows, Chris Brackett and his team have coined the term ‘extreme aerial bowfishing’ – conducted from a moving speedboat.
But while the sport is rapidly catching on, it is fraught with danger – for the hunters as well as the hunted. Indeed Brackett’s fiancée, Jodi Barnes, was pictured being hit in the face by a flying carp as she prepared to take aim and fire an arrow at it.
While Barnes’ prey managed to score a direct hit against his assailant, it is not known if the flying carp managed to leap back to the safety of the river following the daring move.
Ouch: Barnes winces as the fish disappears from sight after its strike
[caption]
[caption]Texas Instruments 2011 Co-Op Design Challenge
The Texas Instruments Co-Op Design Challenge is a program that offers TI Summer Co-Ops a fun outlet for creativity, a great opportunity to boost networking amongst other TI-ers, and to generate cool new projects & applications.
Each participant will receive a free MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) and Capacitive Touch BoosterPack (430BOOST-SENSE1). In addition, participants will have the chance to win awesome prizes such as cash and iPads. Last but not least, the content generated here will benefit all MSP430 users in the future!
I would recommend that your project is in a plug-in board form factor for the LaunchPad (similar to the Capacitive Touch BoosterPack).
Check out submissions from last year's design contest, which was based on the MSP430 eZ430 Chronos watch.
How do I participate?
All you have to do is create and submit a project based on the MSP430 LaunchPad development kit, and post it online by July 28th, 2011 @ 11:59pm CST. The winners will be selected by online voting by TI-ers from all around the world, so make sure your design and submission is as appealing as possible. Video demos, pictures & clean documentation go a long way!
There are no restrictions on the kind of design you create/submit. However, each submission should include source code and any design files needed such as schematics or PCB layouts.
There will be an info session @ June 6th (Dallas site) and June 7th (Houston/Stafford site) to kick off the event. However, you do not have to be present to participate!
To participate, either stop by the info session, or send a message to University Relations (i-annillo2@ti.com) to get your free development kits.OTTAWA—The federal government has tapped an international public relations firm to roll out a $22 million advertising campaign promoting the oilsands and Canada’s natural resource sector across the world. The Canadian arm of FleishmanHillard has been awarded a $1.695 million contract to oversee the first phase of the ad blitz, expected to be deployed in United States, Europe, and Asia this year.
Trucks drive along a road at an oilsands mine facility near Fort McMurray, Alberta. The oil industry will get a boost abroad from an ad campaign meant to stress Canada’s “responsible” resource development. ( Jeff McIntosh / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo )
Should the firm’s contract be extended into 2015, the work could be worth as much as $4 million, with the remaining $18 million budgeted for media buys. The PR firm, which has previously done strategic communications work and public opinion research for at least two other federal departments, boasts a number of offices in all three targeted markets. According to Natural Resources Canada, FleishmanHillard will be responsible for developing and producing the print, Internet and television ads, as well as drawing up overarching public relations, advertising and social media strategies.
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The firm is also being asked to liaise with Department of Foreign Affairs trade missions to tailor the ads to the different concerns and requirements in the three markets. The federal government has already suggested draft messaging for the campaign, mostly focusing on Canada’s “responsible” resource development — with the word “responsible” underlined in the department’s request for proposals — and the country’s environmental record. The department also called investment opportunities in Canada’s resource sector “unparalleled,” and suggested the country is a leader in sustainable and stable energy sources when compared to the alternatives. While the campaign is intended to include Canada’s natural resource sector as a whole, the RFP explicitly mentions Alberta bitumen only. Similar messaging was tested in Washington focus groups in April 2013. In a September report to the department, HarrisDecima found the groups had “neutral to positive” responses to ads proposing increased energy partnership between the United States and its northern neighbour.
“Overall, it was fairly clear that Canada is held in fairly high regard, even if it is not often considered, and that an element of that high regard relates to Canada being a competent and trustworthy neighbour/partner — both in terms of industrial partnerships and acting responsibly,” says the report, commissioned at a cost of $58,000. One focus group considered Canada a “preferred energy supplier,” and others reacted positively to a greater reliance on “friendly oil” and continental energy security.
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Despite those positive results, Ottawa has received a chilly reception from the Obama administration on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a project vehemently opposed by environmentalists in the U.S. The federal government also faces continued domestic opposition to the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline, which would transport Alberta crude to the British Columbia coast. David Provencher, a spokesman for Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, said the advertising campaign will “better inform” other markets about Canada’s natural resource sector to ensure “a fact-based public dialogue.” “The objectives of the ad campaign are to raise awareness of Canada’s environmental record and the shared U.S.-Canada energy interest and needs,” said Provencher, in a written statement. “The campaign is also intended to raise awareness among decision-makers in Europe and the Asia Pacific that Canada is a secure, reliable and responsible supplier of crude oil, natural gas and other natural resources.” NDP House leader Nathan Cullen, who has been fighting against the Northern Gateway project, accused the government of using the ad campaign to “greenwash” Canada’s international reputation — a reputation he says has been severely damaged in recent years. Cullen also questioned the need to spend public funds to help natural resource companies sell their products. “Of all the industries, I didn’t know that oil and gas and mining companies were so impoverished that they couldn’t take ads out in newspapers,” Cullen said Tuesday. “I don’t know why we’re subsidizing Shell and Chevron in their efforts to sell oil. I think they’re more than capable of doing that themselves.” Requests for an interview left with FleishmanHillard’s Ottawa office — listed as the bid winner on a federal government website — were not returned. Natural Resources noted that while the estimated budget for the ad campaign is $22 million, the final cost will not be released until the government’s 2014-2015 annual report on advertising expenses.
Read more about:Sorry, True Grit is not an academic source. Skeptical Jeff Bridges is not happy.
As it turns out, those snake bite kits are nothing but snake oil. This time, the comic was based on a specific study (caution: science). Also, this, and numerous others.
In the US, the only course of action for a snakebite in the field is a set of car keys, or a cell phone and a helicopter. Just try to get to a hospital, and you’ll likely be fine anyways. Most snake bites are not from venomous snakes, and many bites from venomous snakes turn out to be dry bites without venom injection (est. 25-30% for rattlesnakes, can’t find a reputable source though). There isn’t much you can do in the field, even tourniquets aren’t recommended anymore.
Another interesting snakebite treatment I had never heard of is applying electrical shock, via car battery or stun gun, to the bite. Talk about tasing a guy when he’s down. Luckily this appears to be bunk too.
My skeptical sense is tingling about sleeping with a rope to ward off the snakes, but I haven’t researched it yet.
For my Australian readers, you’re completely on your own with this one. I tried to look up a few examples of your much more deadly venomous snakes, and instead learned that every single wild animal in your country is capable of killing a tourist in seconds.
Specifically, I found this: DROP BEARS. Cousins of the cuddly koala bear that use their claws for vengeance.
I mean seriously, Australia, WHAT THE FUCK.
↓ Transcript ROB
Let's go off-trail hiking. Awesome idea, Mitch!
MITCH
It's not my fault nature preys on the weak.
MITCH
How bad is it?
ROB
Just a snake bite, I'll be fine.
MITCH
I have a snakebite kit in the car, I'll hike back-
ROB
Don't bother. Efficacy tests in a lab have shown they're incapable of removing any radio-labelled fluid.
MITCH
Ok sure. But this is real life.WOODINVILLE, Wash.—It’s August, and the Mariners are on TV, which means Evelyn Jones has settled into her favorite chair, remote nearby, the volume cranked way up. The closest wall is lined with bobbleheads, a yellow toy train from a Felix Hernandez promotion and a baseball nestled inside a plastic case.
This is not just any baseball, but an important, historic, official Major League baseball that Jones lobbed exactly once July 11. That day, she donned the team jersey she wore inside her apartment a month later. That’s her name stitched across the back. And there’s a number, three digits: 108.
“You’re from Sports Illustrated?” she asks.
Pause.
“I suppose you’re not here for the swimsuit edition.”
SI was there because Jones had thrown out the first pitch at that Mariners game: from near home plate, on her birthday, in front of thousands who showered her with cheers. She did so on the 101st anniversary of Babe Ruth’s first major league pitch, and that’s the thing about Jones and her story and a routine toss now viewed almost 60,000 times on YouTube. She was alive when Ruth embarked on his Hall of Fame career.
The number on her jersey? That’s her age. One hundred and eight.
Hers is a story about baseball. And a story about hope.
Jones turned back to the game. Mariners against the Orioles, in yet another lost campaign, the 39th-straight year without a championship, their last postseason appearance 15 seasons ago. Pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma had yet to allow a run through three innings. “She has one rule here when the Mariners are on,” said her caretaker, Donna Jansen. “Don’t interrupt the game. Or she’ll throw you out.”
She made an exception, as she and her daughter, Kay Vea, told the broad strokes of her life story between pitches. Born in Leahy, in central Washington, in 1907. Born before the Titanic and Woodstock and computers and email. Born before the Seattle Mariners came into existence in 1977. She was 70 at that time.
Jones grew up in Almira, population roughly 280, on a wheat and cattle farm of more than 3,000 acres. Her grandparents had emigrated from Wales.
Work started as soon as Jones could walk. She milked eight cows by hand twice daily. She drove the wheat truck and toiled in the fields.
She also played basketball and rode horses, only, because she was a combination of tomboy and daredevil, she would ride the horses while standing on their backs, or turned backward, or standing and turned backward. One time, she decided it would be a good idea to catch hold of a new colt. It kicked her. “She had a big horseshoe on her stomach,” Vea said.
“It’s a wonder it didn’t kill her,” she added.
Jones laughed at the recollection, at cheating death.
That was about a century ago.
Iwakuma continued to roll on the screen in front of her. Four innings, no runs, no hits.
Jones remembers what it’s like to ride in a buggy. She screamed the first time. She had never been in anything that moved that fast.
It went 15 miles an hour.
Another time, rabid coyotes chased Jones on her way home from the ice-skating rink. She slid under a barbed-wire fence to safety.
All of which is to say that no one in Jones’s family expected her to live long enough to become the oldest person to throw out a first pitch in the history of Major League Baseball. “Nobody,” she said. Self included.
She grew up a sports fan. In her family it was practically required. Sometimes, they watched the Spokane Indians play minor-league baseball. At night, they listened to sports radio broadcasts.
Jones met her soul mate in Almira. His name was Stanley, and he asked her to dance one Saturday at the local community hall. After they got hitched, they sashayed almost every Saturday night for the 55 years they were married, even imbibing with an alcoholic beverage or three. “I recuperated on Sundays,” Jones said.
Stanley died in 1983 of cancer. Evelyn never remarried. She never wanted to. “I already had the best,” she said.
Jones traveled after that, visiting Boston and Washington and Hawaii. She went to Wales to learn more about her heritage.
The rest of her time went to baseball and her beloved Mariners. Sometimes, they even won. She treasured the mid-1990s in particular, and all those icons: Edgar Martinez and Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson. They came so close.
Jones gardened. She canned fruits. She ate beef and wheat toast and vegetables. She never dieted, but she didn’t consume processed or junk food, either. She baked her own bread until recently and walked three miles a day for most of her life—until age 96.
She did crossword puzzles. She watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and every Mariners game she could find on TV. All that kept her going. Especially baseball. It’s what she looked forward to each night.
Iwakuma finished the sixth inning against the Orioles. He still had not allowed a hit. “Looking good,” Jones said, not wanting to jinx it.
Her mother lived until age 89, her father until 95, an uncle until 104. When Jones turned 105, her family compiled a book about her life and held a party, with steak and scallops on the menu. Jones even danced.
Jones hosts family every Sunday at the assisted living facility where she lives. There’s a rotating cast of her grandchildren (seven), great-grandchildren (nine) and great-great grandchildren (four) in attendance. Every week, she picks up the tab.
She did almost everything herself until about six months ago, when Jansen, a hospice nurse, started to assist. She brings Jones coffee and makes her breakfast and cleans the apartment and watches baseball. The first time Jansen made Jones’s bed, Jones told her, “That’s the first time in 100 years I haven’t made my own.”
It was Jansen’s son who told the Mariners about Jones’s story, and then it happened. The call. The plan. The Mercedes van that showed up at the retirement home to whisk Jones and all five generations of her family to Safeco Field.
The Mariner Moose presented Jones with a cake and all the souvenirs that line the wall in her apartment. The family watched the game from a suite. And before the toss, Hernandez asked Jones if there was anything he could do for her.
“I want a hug,” she said.
“I do, too,” he responded.
“I’m never washing my hands,” Jones said. “Or my waist.”
People at the game kept asking: What did she want? Her response never changed: a win. The Mariners delivered. As Jones left the stadium, fans sought pictures. And selfies. And autographs.
Before Jones, the oldest person believed to have thrown a first pitch was Agnes McKee, who did so last season at a Padres game at age 105. “She probably has a hitman out for mother now,” Vea cracked.
News of Jones’s pitch reached as far as Australia and Japan. Everyone wanted to know her secret. “Keep having birthdays,” she told them.
Iwakuma went on to throw a no-hitter in the game against the Orioles. Jones watched, mostly silent. This game, like the perfect golf swing, was what kept her coming back. That’s one thing she loves about baseball. The promise of every season, even for a Mariners fan.
I pulled up the video on my cell phone. Jones viewed it for the first time, giggling throughout, studying her form. City officials had called her earlier that day. They wanted her to ride in a parade that weekend. She wasn’t sure. It had been an exciting summer. But an exhausting one at that. A week later, a heart attack sent her to the hospital. She was released in early September.
She told the city officials the same thing she says about the Mariners.
“There’s always next year.”Pathways Into Darkness Resurrected For Modern Macs
6:00 AM
Bungie Software's classic Pathways into Darkness has been brought back to life for modern machines by Man Up Time Studios. Available for free from the Mac App Store, Pathways gives fans the chance to enjoy the nostalgia, and newcomers the opportunity to experience Bungie's early foray into first person shooters.
Painstakingly recreated and updated for OS X, Pathways into Darkness is now free and available for ancient grizzled fans and newcomers to the series.
Sixty-four million years ago, a large extra-terrestrial object struck the Earth in what would later be called the Yucatan Peninsula, in southeastern Mexico. The dust and rock thrown up by the resulting explosion caused enormous climactic changes in the ensuing years, and many of the Earths species became extinct during the long winter that followed.
The object itself was buried thousands of feet below ground, its nearly two kilometer length remarkably intact. It remained there, motionless, for thousands of years before it finally began to stir- and to dream. It was a member of a race whose history began when the Milky Way was still a formless collection of dust and gas- a powerful race of immortals which had quickly grown bored of their tiny universe and nearly exterminated themselves in war.
This particular being, whose name no human throat will ever learn to pronounce, was part of the cataclysmic battle that formed Magellanic Clouds, billions of years ago. It died there, or it came as close to dying as these things can, and drifted aimlessly for millions of light years before striking the Earth.
The heat of impact liquefied the rock around it, which later cooled and encased the dead gods huge body far below ground. As it began to dream, it wrought unintentional changes in its environment. Locked deep beneath the Earth, strange and unbelievable things faded in and out of reality. Vast caverns and landscapes bubbled to life within the rock, populated by horrible manifestations of the dead gods dream.
Only during the last few centuries has the god begun to effect changes on the surface of the Earth. Grotesque creatures have been sighted deep in the trackless forest of the Yucatan, and strange rumors of an ancient pyramid- which is neither Aztec nor Mayan- in the same area have been circulating in the archaeological community since the early 1930?s.
It is up to you to prevent the sleeping god from waking up by detonating a low-yield nuclear weapon. Unfortunately things dont go quite as planned. During the jump from the C-151 your primary parachute fails, and you are able to pull the reserve only moments before crashing through the forest canopy toward the ground.Two hours later you awake, unharmed except for a few bruises, to realize that most of your equipment is missing or damaged (fortunately someone else jumped with the nuclear device). The muzzle of your M-16 is bent just enough to render it useless, and the bag holding the spare clips for your Colt.45 is lost in the deep jungle underbrush. About the only things which didnt break were your flashlight and survival knife.
You finally reach the pyramid, by foot, at a little after 0600 (6:00 AM). The rest of your team must have entered nearly four hours ago. Armed only with a knife, and the knowledge contained in this briefing, you follow themTech giant Microsoft has recommended that an update released in the latest Patch Tuesday be removed, after users reported incidents of the "blue screen of death" after installation.
Microsoft released two critical security updates and others rated as "important" for Windows and Internet Explorer as part of its latest round of Patch Tuesday updates.
However, a number of Windows 7 users have reported issues with security update 2823324, which is part of security bulletin MS13-036.
MS13-036 was meant to fix three privately disclosed flaws and one publicly disclosed flaw in an NTFS kernel-mode driver related to the elevation of privileges when a user is logged in. However, once installed, security update 2823324 -- part of the bulletin -- may produce a "STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}" problem for users. The error occurs early in the startup process, and no Memory.dmp file is created.
As a result, Microsoft has temporarily pulled the patch from its security bulletin while the issue is being investigated.
Microsoft recommends that users uninstall the patch, and warns that another issue with the security update may cause anti-virus programs cease to work correctly. The Redmond giant says that Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Workstations and Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Servers versions 6.0.4.1424 and 6.0.4.1611 may display an error message stating that licenses for the products are not valid, and so the software will cease to function.
Security update 2823324 was meant to patch a "moderate" risk for users. Aside from the dysfunctional update, Microsoft also released patches for Internet Explorer 6 and above on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. One flaw that can now be fixed prevents attackers from remote code execution and infiltration after a user visits malicious websites, and another stops the Remote Desktop Client being manipulated in the same manner.
Security updates for Windows users are available online, or through Windows and Microsoft Update. Microsoft is preparing to stop support for Windows XP in a year's time, and security updates for the platform will finish on April 8, 2014.It Will Take an Insane Amount of Rain Before the Highland Lakes Recover By Terrence Henry Email
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Photo courtesy of the LCRA
Central Texas is having a pretty decent year, rain-wise. We’re sitting just below normal. And it’s been a good week, too: early Thursday, one part of Austin got over seven inches of rain.
So much rain fell over downtown Austin that the statue of Stevie Ray Vaughan along Lady Bird Lake looked like he was walking on water. It brought back memories of the Halloween floods last fall — back then Stevie was standing in water waist-deep. But these big rain events all have something in common: They really haven’t fallen where we need them most.
“The watershed that helps our water supplies isn’t here in Austin; it’s way up into the counties to the north of us. It’s the drainage that goes into Lakes Buchanan and Travis,” says John Hofmann, Executive Vice President of Water for the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA).
Hofmann says while the areas around the lakes got some decent rain earlier this summer, other than that it’s been pretty dry up there. So while Lake Austin is getting doused, the creekbeds that go into the Highland Lakes can stay relatively dry. Lake Travis has risen over a foot this week, and could go up another foot today. But it’s still nearly 40 feet below where it should be, and lower than it was a month ago.
And it’s not just where the water is falling that’s preventing the lakes from recovering. It’s the condition of the ground that it’s falling on.
If the ground is dry, it can soak that rain right up.
“You know, the water falls from rain. Some of it runs off into the reservoir, some of it recharges the groundwater. But a lot of it stays right near the surface. And it’s taken up by the plants. Or it just evaporates,” says Michael Young, an Associate Director at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology.
“Even though 2014 so far has been near-normal precipitation or maybe a couple of inches behind,” Young says, “we’re getting no response from the reservoirs, and it’s because most of the water is soaking into the soil.”
Young is part of a team working on tools to better track soil moisture levels. He estimates that water lost from the soil could account for anywhere from 20 to 80 percent of the water losses during 2011, the driest year in Texas history.
“Outside of precipitation, [soil moisture] is one of the most important components of the water balance in this state,” Young says. “And we don’t know what that component is. It’s a complete black box across the state.”
Those water losses to dry soil continue today. “The first inch or two of rainfall in most of these events that we’ve had scattered around the summer are immediately soaked up by the soil,” says Hofmann with the LCRA. The rain this week has basically bought Central Texas a few weeks of water supply, he says.
All of this adds up to a struggling reservoir system for Central Texas. If you look at the water levels of Lake Travis over the years and graph them out, it’s almost like a heartbeat monitor. And starting in the mid-2000s, the lake looks likes it could use some life support.
If we have a dry fall, the Highland Lakes could reach their lowest levels by the end of December, and that would mean that from a reservoir standpoint, this drought is worse than the drought of record in the fifties.
So what would it take to bring the lakes back?
“A series of rain events that would result somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 inches of rainfall, widespread throughout that area, before we could see real meaningful improvement in our supplies,” says Hofmann with the LCRA.
There is a silver lining, however. Even though the lakes aren’t recovering yet, rainfall over the city still helps reduce the demands on them. It cools things down, reducing evaporation; it increases soil moisture, setting the stage for better runoffs next time it rains; and hopefully it keeps you from watering your lawn.
“We’re all optimistically watching the skies right now,” Hofmann says.
Mose Buchele contributed reporting.America is ready to catch World Cup fever early in 2014.
ESPN’s opening broadcast of the Brazil-hosted tournament, between the host nation and Croatia, drew a 3.2 overnight rating. That’s up 52% from the South Africa-Mexico opener in 2010 (which drew a 2.1 overnight rating). ESPN has only been keeping overnight figures since 1998, but that marks the best overnight rating ever for the opening match on ESPN.
The match, which was marred by controversy, drew higher ratings than either of NBCSN’s telecasts of the Stanley Cup Final.
The game also nearly topped 10 million total viewers. Univision’s Spanish-language telecast drew 5.1 million, while ESPN hit with a cool 4.4 million. For the non-math majors, that equals a cool 9.9 million viewers for the opening match.
Locally, you always wonder what markets are big for international soccer. The top 10 for ESPN were Washington (5.1), Boston (5.0), Miami (4.7), Los Angeles (4.6), New York (4.5), San Francisco (4.3), Hartford (4.3), Providence (3.9), Austin (3.9) and Orlando (3.8). A lot of very large cities with soccer cultures and big immigrant populations.
A big rating for the opening match is a good sign for the rest of the tournament, which is mostly airing when Americans on the east coast can watch. A 4 p.m. ET Thursday match getting a large audience is certainly a good sign. Welcome to another month of World Cup fever.Summary
This is a petition against greed, inaction, cynicism and destructiveness caused by the Britannia Group in regard to the 'Gateway' to Manchester, the London Road Fire Station. For 29 years the site has stood unused under Britannia Hotels destructive ownership since 1986.
This English Heritage Listed II* decaying icon was placed on the National Historical Buildings At Risk Register in 1998. Standing opposite the main station for Manchester, this historic and exceptional architectural asset should become something iconic to represent this thriving City and its future. Instead its advertises to visitors decay and neglect, the very opposite image Manchester deserves to have.
Manchester must demand better and must overcome this injustice, before this unique National and world wide building of significance is lost forever. Now there is a second chance to CPO this building once and for all. Support this petition and raise your voice for public involvement in this CPO.
By supporting the Friends of LRFS you support Manchester finding the best model for this great building of potential and finding the best outcome for the buildings redevelopment.
A 3 minute LRFS Documentary (YouTube) is in this link here > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzdxCp3bV_k
Recent History of Case
On 22 December 2014, the second attempt by Manchester City Council to legally acquire London Road Fire Station in a new Compulsory Purchase Order was announced. An important aspect of this case is 'public interest'. Emma Curtin expressed the concerns of the Friends of London Road Fire Station. Our commitment is to showing that citizens are stakeholders in the future of this Iconic building and we seek the best sympathetic reuse. Despite the complex nature of a CPO it is important for Manchester to win this Icon back as it is arguably the last chance to save this building.
In the previous CPO strategy in 2010 and 2011 Britannia made commitments to preserving and bringing this central iconic building back into use in order to avoid a Compulsory Purchase Order in June to November 2011. Those impassioned 'promises' have been shown to be yet again untrue.
In a letter to English Heritage in February 2012: 'Developing the scheme as it stands, would not be sustainable either in the current climate or the foreseeable future'. This is despite the pivotal defence it made for keeping the property being just a few months before relying on its vision and promise for redevelopment the CEO said he would personally fund.
Eric Pickles ruled in December 2012, the full costs of this expensive legal battle of 1.5 million to Britannia, despite none of the promises that the building would be fully developed by 2014 being truthful. To incur these costs for these 'broken promises' in a time of austerity, sets a precedent and a shameful legal legacy for Heritage Abuse and corporate liability for dishonesty, inaction and neglect.
Planning Permission was extended on 19 December 2013 despite no plausible commitment or model for redevelopment. The Friends of London Road Fire Station called this 'Ground Hog' day. Historically they have been granted Planning Permissions for 'a hotel' in 1986, 1993, 2006 and 2010. None have been acted on.
Universally, the media, the local council and many commentators are shocked and disgusted by the appalling situation. Since 1986 there have been three major booms in the Manchester economy, yet the promises for a banal hotel have not been acted upon across these grand economic opportunities where other private organisations could and would have thrived.
The point of this petition is to encourage the public to share and support a new CPO to go ahead and be approved, to save this building and bring it back into use. As a symbol, as a building of opportunity and vision, this company no longer deserves this Grade II* listed building, to neglect, damage and potentially destroy.
Unique Municipal British |
typical increase in HPA axis tone in response to social isolation (Parker et al., 2005). In rats, OT provokes prolonged reductions in blood pressure (Petersson et al., 1996) and upregulates the activity of the inhibitory noradrenaline autoreceptor (Petersson et al., 1998). In humans, higher OT levels are correlated with reduced heart rate and blood pressure (Light et al., 2005). Finally, there is direct functional evidence for the hypothesis that OT informs the relationship between social interactions and reduced stress in humans. OT modulates the relationship between affiliative social interactions and reduced cortisol levels (Heinrichs et al., 2003). Future work will be necessary to determine whether OT plays a modulatory or even mediating role in these effects in non-human models of social support, in which invasive and transient blockades of OT signaling can be employed to determine whether OT is necessary for the protective health benefits of social interactions.
Oxytocin (OT) May Mediate the Effect of Social Groups on Vigilance
Intriguingly, some of the same social behaviors that predict reduced stress also predict other behaviors, such as reduced vigilance for predators. Therefore, we now examine evidence that OT may be involved in regulating predator vigilance, elucidating one testable prediction that naturally springs from the hypothesis that the fundamental role of OT is to mediate the relationship between affiliative interactions and their behavioral consequences.
In ethology, “vigilance” is a state of scanning the environment for threat, be it a predator or a threatening social partner (Pulliam, 1973; Roberts, 1996). However, vigilance is opportunistically costly. Attention can, by definition, only be directed towards one target at a time, and time spent scanning the environment for threat is time not spent foraging for food, grooming, or pursuing other goals. It is maladaptive to maintain a state of high vigilance when it is not warranted. Indeed, many species reduce their levels of vigilance when predation threat is low (Hunter and Skinner, 1998). Vigilance also decreases as social group size increases (Roberts, 1996). Traditionally, this is interpreted as a “many eyes” effect in which vigilance is reduced because more individuals can detect and orient the group to sources of threat as group size increases (Pulliam, 1973). However, this hypothesis does not address the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate the effects of social grouping on vigilance.
Larger groups provide not only more eyes, but also more opportunities for affiliative social interactions (Dunbar, 2010). Moreover, social interactions may themselves predict variation in vigilance. Neighbor proximity is a better predictor of vigilance than group size in many species (Roberts, 1996) and controlling for neighbor distance may reduce or eliminate the effect of group size on vigilance (Pöysä, 1994). Similarly, vigilance is low during grooming in monkeys (Maestripieri, 1993; Cords, 1995). Unfortunately, rates of vigilance have only been studied in the grooming monkey, not the recipient of grooming, so it remains possible that this effect is due solely to attentional competition and not to the hormonal changes that accompany grooming (Maestripieri, 1993). Future research is needed to determine whether rates of vigilance are similarly reduced in the animal being groomed, who experiences little attentional competition but significant neuroendocrine changes (such an effect would come as no surprise to anyone who has observed a bout of grooming). It will also be critical to examine the time course of these effects in order to determine whether grooming suppresses vigilance through direct attentional competition, which would be an instantaneous effect on vigilance, or though neuroendocrine changes, which would continue to shape behavior long after the grooming interaction ends.
It is not simply the proximity or interaction with a neighbor, however, that determines the effect of group size on vigilance. Rather, the effect of others on vigilance is modulated by the relationship between the vigilant individual and the other; for example, the effect of neighbor proximity on vigilance behavior is modulated by partner familiarity (Kutsukake, 2006; Macintosh and Sicotte, 2009). Similarly, OT release can be modulated by the quality of the relationship between signaler and recipient: more OT is released during grooming when partners are frequent groomers, compared to when they are only distantly related (Crockford et al., 2013). These striking parallels between known determinants of vigilance behavior and the effects of OT provide strong justification for evaluating the role of this peptide in vigilance.
There is also some limited empirical evidence in support of this link. First, OT reduces vigilance behaviors, defined as instances of rearing up onto hindquarters, during noise stress in the rat (Windle et al., 1997). Second, in the rhesus macaque, social vigilance decreases following OT delivery (Ebitz et al., 2013; Parr et al., 2013). However, it remains unknown whether OT reduces vigilance for predatory threat in primates, though the anxiolytic effects of the peptide and its effects on the amygdala are consistent with this idea. Thus, future work is necessary to determine whether OT suppresses predator vigilance and, if so, whether it mediates the relationship between social grouping and vigilance in nature.
Concluding Remarks
The complex effects of OT on social decision-making highlight the need to dissociate the cause from the consequence of OT release. While OT appears to be consistently released in response to positive social interactions, it does not have consistently prosocial consequences. Rather, OT appears to make decisions more prosocial only in circumstances that already evoke prosocial behavior. Instead of a hardwired means by which prosociality begets prosociality, OT provides an internal signal that reflects affiliative interactions and which can, in turn, shape social behavior in sometimes counterintuitive but potentially adaptive ways.
The interactionist component process model provides an important and insightful framework for probing the behavioral effects of OT, but additional work is needed to identify the component processes within each species. Future updates to this model should incorporate what is known about OT receptor distribution and local neural function. In particular, examining the behavioral effects of local OT delivery will prove insightful in updating this model. By injecting OT directly into the cortical and subcortical structures in which its receptors are found, the component effects of OT can be identified and dissociated in terms of their effects on behavior. Research utilizing this technique has shown great promise in rodents (Huber et al., 2005; Guzmán et al., 2013). Continuing this line of inquiry in primates will provide insight into both the mechanism of OT’s behavioral effects, but also into the function of these structures in regulating the comparatively complex social behaviors and decisions of primates.
Additionally, comparisons between the behavioral effects of OT and other agents with known mechanistic consequences will have profound consequences for our understanding of OT function. For example, a substantial open question in the literature is whether the behavioral effects of OT require a central mechanism, or, rather, if any are due to changes in peripheral arousal (Kemp and Guastella, 2011). It is possible that some of the apparently complex cognitive effects of OT, such as changes in social decisions or attention, may be more simply due to changes in arousal or task engagement. Comparing the social attentive effects of OT and beta-blockers, for example, might provide insight into this question, as will careful analyses of the level of task engagement before and after OT.
Response time is too infrequently reported in studies of the decision-making effects of OT, largely due to experimental designs not optimized for the collection of this information. However, this data is essential for understanding decision-making effects and will prove critical in the development of computational models of OT’s effects on social decision-making. Future studies should consider collecting and reporting this data. The few studies that have reported response times indicate that OT slows response times when subjects are making reward-sharing decisions (Chang et al., 2012), classifying emotional stimuli (Petrovic et al., 2008; Di Simplicio et al., 2009), or making decisions to seek social information (Ebitz et al., 2013). However, it does not seem that OT has uniformly sedative effects on response time. For example OT speeds response time when attending to social stimuli would slow performance instead of facilitating it (Ebitz et al., 2013).
The OT literature is truly unique in both the breadth of species studied and the diversity of methodological traditions that have conducted work in this domain. Though we have attempted to draw parallels across this vast literature, and others have previously made admirable contributions to understanding the role of OT across species (Insel and Young, 2001; Donaldson and Young, 2008), future work on OT is poised to make truly interdisciplinary progress in understanding the function of this peptide. In particular, direct comparisons of behavioral effects across phylogenetically distant species may prove informative, as well as collaborations between groups hailing from distinct research traditions. Understanding OT will further not only our knowledge of this fascinating peptide, but also our understanding of the sociality that unites so many species.
Author Contributions
R. Becket Ebitz formulated the hypotheses with input and guidance from Michael L. Platt. R. Becket Ebitz and Michael L. Platt wrote the manuscript.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Steve Chang, Karli Watson, Brian Hare, and Alison Adcock for invaluable discussions. The National Institutes of Health (R01-MH-086712 and R01-MH-089484) and the Department of Defense (W81XWH-11-1-0584) supported the authors.
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The CoreLogic RP Data Home Value index, a closely followed index of home prices in the capital cities, rose 1.7 per cent in the month from the previous month. It was a little higher than preliminary 1.5 per cent rise released by CoreLogic last Thursday.
"The annual rate of growth in Sydney peaked at 18.4 per cent in July last year and has since moderated back to slightly less than half the peak rate of growth, at 8.9 per cent over the most recent 12-month period," CoreLogic RP Data research director Tim Lawless said.
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In April, prices rose 2.4 per cent in Sydney and 1.1 per cent for Melbourne. Brisbane and Adelaide also showed growth of 2 per cent or more for the month. Even Perth, which has been hit by the end of the mining boom, rose 0.5 per cent. Only prices in Hobart and Darwin fell for the month.
Recent housing data shows investors are starting to return to the market, after a period of absence in response to regulatory limits on investor lending last year, ANZ Research said in a note. Investors still make up about 46 per cent of all new mortgage commitments, Corelogic said.Story highlights Hatch's spokesman: "Sen. Hatch has a great sense of humor"
Hatch previously engaged in a funny Twitter exchange with Sen. Ben Sasse
Washington (CNN) Sen. Orrin Hatch knows how to be blunt. And, yes, that is a marijuana reference.
When introducing a Medical Marijuana Research Bill, the Republican lawmaker did not shy away Wednesday from including weed puns in his statement. Eight, to be exact.
"It's high time to address research into medical marijuana," Hatch said in the statement. "Our country has experimented with a variety of state solutions without properly delving into the weeds on the effectiveness, safety, dosing, administration, and quality of medical marijuana. All the while, the federal government strains to enforce regulations that sometimes do more harm than good. To be blunt, we need to remove the administrative barriers preventing legitimate research into medical marijuana, which is why I've decided to roll out the MEDS Act."
"I urge my colleagues to join Senator Schatz and me in our joint effort to help thousands of Americans suffering from a wide-range of diseases and disorders," he added. "In a Washington at war with itself, I have high hopes that this bipartisan initiative can be a kumbaya moment for both parties."
The weed references include: "high time," "experimented," "delving into the weeds," "strains," "to be blunt," "roll out," "joint effort" and "high hopes."
Read More(From top) : C.V. Raman, S. Radhakrishnan, C. Rajagopalachari
Three Indians were decorated with the Bharat Ratna in the very first year — 1954 — that the civilian awards were instituted: the elder statesman, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the vice- president, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and the Nobel laureate, C.V. Raman. No one said at the time that all three were south Indian, all three Brahmins. Their pre-eminence was manifest. They accepted the decoration with respect and went about their work according to their lights.
All three had a Calcutta connection. CR had served as the first governor of West Bengal, the other two had taught, with distinction and dedication, at the University of Calcutta. Om krato smara kritam smara, the Isha Upanishad tells us. The work alone is to be remembered, the work alone.
It is instructive to see, on the anniversary of our Independence, what these men had to say in the midst of and, indeed, from the very heart of their work, about their country, their people.
CR was a prisoner of the raj in 1921. Holed up in Vellore Jail, he could have been bitter about his jailors, about the imperial power. He could have looked forward to swaraj as one might to a dreamlike goal. But no, he did something that surprised his contemporaries then and surprises us now. He wrote in his jail diary: “We all ought to know that Swaraj will not at once or, I think, even for a long time to come, be better government or greater happiness for the people. Elections and their corruptions, injustice, and the power and tyranny of wealth, and inefficiency of administration, will make a hell of life as soon as freedom is given to us. Men will look regretfully back to the old regime of comparative justice, and efficient, peaceful, more or less honest administration. The only thing gained will be that as a race we will be saved from dishonour and subordination.”
This was a full quarter century before swaraj was attained.
Radhakrishnan was a member of the constituent assembly on the midnight of August 14/15, 1947 when, with Jawaharlal Nehru, he made a speech of surpassing value. Reminding the nation of “our national faults of character, our domestic despotism, obscurantism, narrow-mindedness, superstitious bigotry”, he said almost exactly what CR had said 25 years earlier. Radhakrishnan’s words: “Our opportunities are great but let me warn you that when power strips ability, we will fall on evil days… From tomorrow morning — from midnight today — we can no longer throw the blame on the British. We have to assume the responsibility ourselves for what we do. A free India will be judged by the way in which it will serve the interests of the common man in the matter of food, clothing, shelter and the social services. Unless we destroy corruption in high places, root out every trace of nepotism, love of power, profiteering and black-marketing which have spoiled the good name of this great country in recent times, we will not be able to raise the standards of efficiency in administration…”
That was said at the very moment free India was born.
I do not have access to any comment made by C.V. Raman on the eve of Independence but the following observation of CVR’s to young Indians is an agnatic cousin of CR’s and SR’s: “Success can only come to you by courageous devotion to the task lying in front of you and there is nothing worth in this world that can come without the sweat of our brow. I can assert without fear of contradiction that the quality of the Indian mind is equal to the quality of any Teutonic, Nordic or Anglo-Saxon mind. What we lack is perhaps courage, what we lack is perhaps driving force which takes one anywhere. We have, I think, developed an inferiority complex. I think what is needed in India today is the destruction of that defeatist spirit…”
Today, those three Bharat Ratnas would have been saddened to see their apprehensions and prognoses coming true. Generalizations are wrong but who can deny that efficiency of administration is not India’s best introduction? Who can deny that our elections have brought us a great stature in the world but have also brought corruption? And where is the doubt that the power and tyranny of wealth — CR’s startling phrase — rules the land?
Power, political and monetary power, outstrips ability by a long measure. And corruption in high places — Radhakrishnan’s astonishingly prescient expression — has disfigured the image of our public life.
As for the sweat of the brow, Raman’s ideal, that has long since ceased to be valued, especially in oneself. The concept of hard work, of service, of what used to be called pride in one’s work, is now an archaism. Except in our gifted artisans who survive miraculously, in our armed forces, in the body of farm labourers across the country and in a few remarkable professions like those of nurses and teachers, ‘work ethic’ is a national casualty.
We seek to derive the maximum advantage from the minimum effort. There is a mentality, widespread if not omnipresent, which sees the plodder as a fool, the successful shirker as clever. It only follows that the man or woman who is honest with money is regarded as naïve, to be pitied and the crook who gets caught making illegal money as unlucky. It is the honest politician, by which I mean one who does not encash files, sell favours, turn opportunities of service into ATMs, and there still are many of those, who keeps us in hope. It is, likewise, the exceptional official, doing the work of a hundred, who keeps the administrative machine from collapsing. Thank god there are some such exceptional men and women, still, amidst us. But by and large, the surface density of work-shirking, responsibility-dodging, blame-shifting, back-biting, tale-carrying and, alas, palm-itchy laggards has swelled beyond belief. What we are, the State is.
Radhakrishnan also spoke of intolerance.
This trait takes many forms but nowhere more seriously than in politics. Ironically and paradoxically, the denominationally intolerant are being projected as administratively able. Those with a questionable secular integrity are said to be men of unquestionable financial integrity.
The first three Bharat Ratnas foresaw more than ordinary mortals can. But even they could not foresee the self-contradictory piquancy of our predicament today. The liberal Indian, the Indian with a secular conscience, an innately democratic instinct, a value for civil rights, is shown up as effete, a political pansy, whereas the macho rattler of sabres, is offered to the nation as its saviour. A country with its work ethic weakened, its abilities outstripped by narrow self-interests, and its domination by the power and tyranny of wealth well-nigh complete, is easily persuaded to say ‘give us a benign dictator’. Fascism comforts the sloth of mind, the slow of thought, the valuationally sluggish. Fascism excites the timid, the languid and the bored.
And so we are seeing rise in the very heart of a democratic but languorous India a poison plume of the most corrosive intolerance. In the coming months the nation will be obsessed with who will ‘make it’ to the Lal Qila next August 15. That is only natural. But we should be agonizing about what kind of flag will be unfurled on its ramparts — the great national tricolour or one with a skull and crossed bones sewn behind it.A Santa Clarita couple has been arrested for allegedly engaging in lewd acts with at least 10 children, and sheriff's deputies fear there could be additional victims.Francisco Avendano, 42, and Jacqueline Wadsworth, 32, molested several children at numerous locations across the Santa Clarita Valley, according to the Santa Clarita Sheriff's Department's Special Victims Bureau.Authorities began investigating the allegations at the beginning of the year. Avendano and Wadsworth were arrested at their residence in Santa Clarita on March 31 on suspicion of having committed lewd acts upon a child, sheriff's deputies said.The couple allegedly targeted mostly neighborhood kids, grooming them and their parents to gain their trust."Many times they've threatened the kids that 'if you say something, I will harm you, I will harm your family,'" Sgt. Brian Hudson said.Investigators say the abuse typically happened during sleepovers. It was after one of those sleepovers that a 12-year-boy told his mother what happened to him."It's a horrific case, and that's why we're concerned there may be other kids out there just based on the nature and the amount of kids that have been involved so far," Hudson said.The victims' ages range from 3 to 17 years old. Some of the alleged sexual abuse took place at a mobile home park in the 30000 block of Sand Canyon Road in Canyon Country, sheriff's deputies said, but the couple moved several times. Investigators say they also lived in Castaic and Newhall, where they were arrested two weeks ago. Their most recent home in Newhall was located across the street from an elementary school.Avendano is being held in lieu of $2 million bail and Wadsworth is being held in lieu of $220,000 bail. The suspects are scheduled to appear in court on Friday.Detectives believe the suspects may have sexually assaulted additional children during the course of the last 10 years.Anyone with further information or who may have been victimized by the suspects is asked to contact the Special Victims Bureau at (877) 710-5273.Pandora's long awaited real subscription music service is almost here. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is in the process of finalizing agreements with record labels for an on-demand music service that would challenge Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Tidal, and other services. Pandora's interest in shifting to a premium offering was made clear when the company acquired the failed Rdio service late last year.
According to the Journal, Pandora will run with a three-pronged strategy: Pandora's hugely popular free internet radio service will remain, as will Pandora One, a $5-per-month add-on that removes advertisements and lets users skip more tracks. And then there'll be a brand new $10 / month subscription option, which will give customers on-demand access to the same massive vault of music you'd find from Spotify and others. But how will the company fare when it comes to the exclusives that competitors are fighting over?
We'll know soon enough. Pandora could launch its revamped streaming products as early as next month, the report claims — first in the United States, and then expanding internationally. Pandora is hoping that the move will also enable the company to offer its free tier in more countries across the globe. Additionally, the existing Pandora One option will gain new features like offline playback and a greater number of skips, since users still won't be able to choose a particular song or album to listen to with the $5 tier. Pandora will undoubtedly market its new $10 offering to the massive base of users that listen for free.The history of the revolutionary movement in the Ukraine - the anarchist Makhnovists - at the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
The revolution in the Ukraine was a libertarian revolution, and the workers and peasants fought both Tsarist reaction and Bolshevik domination.
Official historians have failed to record the military genius of Nestor Makhno and the heroic deeds of his comrades in the Revolutionary Insurrection Army of the Ukraine. If the Makhnovists, as they became known, are mentioned at all they are referred to as "bandits" or (rather bizarrely) as part of the local right-wing "Kulak" movement. But if truth is the first casualty of war, then the history of war must be a pack of lies.
Long live the revolution
In February 1917, there was a Popular uprising in the Russian empire. The Tsar abdicated the principal political parties - most of them Socialist, and began to set up a crude parliamentary democracy, led by the Mensheviks. But Russia was a big, bleak, backward old empire that sprawled across five time zones, communication was bad; the uprisings continued. Radicals were released from prison, dissidents returned from exile, and ordinary people became increasingly aware of the possibilities of communal power. Peasants chased out the landowners, workers took over the factories and many organized themselves democratically through local mass meetings - Soviets.
Freedom was in the air. Much of the population had tasted it or at least had a whiff of it, it seemed to be out there for the taking. There seemed nothing to fear but the fear of freedom. Lenin (of the minority Bolsheviks) was one of the first politicians to sense the mood of the people. He realized that by adopting the popular slogans of the masses - "land to the peasants," "'worker control," and "all power to the soviets," the Bolsheviks, under his leadership could seize power and move to the next phase of the "Marxist" revolution - "The dictatorship of the Proletariat.
In the months that followed, Lenin persuaded the Bolsheviks that his scam was a runner and they concentrated their efforts on gaining influence in the Soviets and in the army. The October revolution of 1917 was a spontaneous affair, The Bolsheviks simply pushed through the crowd shouting "Stand aside! There's nothing to be afraid of- trust me, I'm a doctor". Freedom was quarantined and strictly rationed. Soon, with the Bolshevik Secret Police, the Cheka quietly overseeing the running of the Soviets and the trade unions, freedom had disappeared.
Anarchy in the Ukraine
During the uprisings and reaction that followed the October Revolution, the fertile earth of the Southern Ukraine was trampled under the boots of at least four advancing and retreating armies. Variously at war with each other [and] faced with a strong spirit of independence amongst the local insurgent peasants, none of these forces conquered the region or stayed long enough to set up any form of government.
Official historians have failed to record the military genius of Nestor Makhno and the heroic deeds of his comrades in the Revolutionary Insurrection Army of the Ukraine. If the Makhnovists, as they became known, are mentioned at all they are referred to as "bandits" or (rather bizarrely) as part of the local right-wing "Kulak" movement. But if truth is the first casualty of war, then the history of war must be a pack of lies.
Makhno was of poor peasant stock, an anarchist who had spent many years in prison for "terrorist activities" against the Tsar. He had been released in the February amnesty, and by October was in the thick of it - redistributing the land and resources. The Bolshevik party found it difficult to recruit or organise in the Ukraine, so Lenin decided to use the republic as a bargaining chip with Germany in Russia's withdrawal from the First World War.
Threatened by powerful enemies on all sides, Makhno and thousands of his fellow peasants launched a campaign of armed resistance so wild and imaginative that it became the stuff of instant legend. Theatrical hit-and-run attacks disguised as enemy officers, daring assassinations, robbing the rich, giving to the poor, it all reads like the further adventures of Robin Hood. And Makhno, though only 28, was honoured with the title of Batko ("little father") as he was 5'4".
The Revolutionary Insurrection Army soon became a fully operational volunteer army numbering 50 000, and for three years, the million or so peasants of |
roland, is a unit of conventional retinal illuminance. It is meant as a method for correcting photometric measurements of luminance values impinging on the human eye by scaling them by the effective pupil size. It is equal to retinal illuminance produced by a surface whose luminance is one nit when the apparent area of the entrance pupil of the eye is 1 square millimeter.[1]
The troland unit was proposed in 1916 by Leonard T. Troland, who called it a photon.[2]
The troland typically refers to the ordinary or photopic troland, which is defined in terms of the photopic luminance:
T = L × p {\displaystyle \mathrm {T} =\mathrm {L} \times \mathrm {p} }
where L is the photopic luminance in cd m−2 and p is pupil area in mm2.
A scotopic troland is also sometimes defined:
T ′ = L ′ × p {\displaystyle \mathrm {T'} =\mathrm {L'} \times \mathrm {p} }
where L′ is the scotopic luminance in cd m−2 and p is pupil area in mm2.
Although named "retinal luminance", Trolands should not be confused with actual photons flux incident on a retina Lr. Conversion between the two is dependent of the specific eye optical parameters and not done by a simple units conversion factor.
Units conversion [ edit ]
Troland does not directly convert to other units, being a retinal luminance per unit area of a pupil.
However Troland is linked to retinal luminance in lux=lm/m2 as follows. Assuming the corneal luminance L from an extended source, the pupil diameter p and the focal length of the eye F, the retinal luminance is:
Lr [lm / m^2] = pi * L / 4 / (f/#)^2 ~ pi * L * p^2 / 4 / F^2.
Multiplying by the pupil area : T r o l a n d s [ c d / m 2 ⋅ m m 2 ] = L ⋅ π ⋅ p 2 / 4 = F 2 ⋅ L r ≈ 289 ⋅ L r. {\displaystyle Trolands[cd/m^{2}\cdot mm^{2}]=L\cdot \pi \cdot p^{2}/4=F^{2}\cdot Lr\approx 289\cdot Lr.}
Alternatively, the retinal luminance L r [ l m / m 2 ] = T r o l a n d s / 289 [ m m 2 ] {\displaystyle Lr[lm/m^{2}]=Trolands/289[mm^{2}]}
As provided by a more accurate optical calculations, the conversion factor is 278 rather than 289 as demonstrated by simplified considerations above.
Sometimes (by convention only, although not rigorously accurate by definition), retinal luminance is expressed in [ c d / m 2 ] = [ l m / s r / m 2 ] {\displaystyle [cd/m^{2}]=[lm/sr/m^{2}]}. Assuming a Lambertian surface, 1 cd/m^2 = pi lm/m^2 = pi lux. That is, 1 [cd/m^2] = 289/pi [Troland] ~ 92 [Troland]
Physical quantities [ edit ]
luminance
equivalent luminance [3]
Unit system [ edit ]
centimeter-gram-second (cgs) [3]
Basic unit dimensions [ edit ]
[length]^(-2) [luminous intensity] [3]
Comparisons [ edit ]
≈ 0.8 × luminance of a kerosene candle (≈ 12000 cd/m^2 )
≈ luminance of a sperm candle (≈ 10000 cd/m^2 )
≈ luminance of an average daytime clear sky (≈ 8000 cd/m^2 )[3]
See also [ edit ]With one Ford absent from Toronto city council, speculation ran rampant at City Hall Tuesday that another might consider running to take his place.
Councillor Doug Ford, the older brother of Mayor Rob Ford – who is currently taking a leave of absence to address his substance abuse – did not close the door when asked by reporters about the possibility of running for mayor.
The councillor was seen sitting in his brother's usual council seat at various points Tuesday, and when one reporter asked if he'd consider running in his place, he replied "I have no comment."
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Doug Ford had previously announced that he would not be running again as the councillor for Ward 2. He also told reporters earlier this year that he'd put off his plans for a provincial run in favour of working on his brother's mayoral re-election campaign.
At least one of his council colleagues said he'd support Councillor Ford if he ran. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a sometimes ally of the Ford brothers, hand wrote a "Doug Ford" sign in council Tuesday afternoon, which he jokingly affixed atop the mayor's nameplate.
When approached by reporters afterward, Mr. Mammoliti said "someone has to" run under the Ford banner.
But several other councillors reacted with skepticism.
"No, I would not be voting Doug Ford for mayor," said Councillor Jaye Robinson, who stepped down from the mayor's executive committee last year after the mayor refused to seek help for his substance abuse.
"I think we need a mayor with integrity and a mayor who's going to lead us, and a mayor who can collaborate and work in a collaborative way. I don't think Doug has that skill set or those attributes."
Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong – a former ally of the Fords who said he spoke with the mayor Tuesday on the telephone and that he was in "good spirits" – also said he would not support Doug Ford for mayor.
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"I don't believe he has what it takes to be mayor," he said. "With respect."Click the gallery to learn the most common crimes among the inmates, according to data analysed by Texas Tribune. More than 145,000 inmates are housed in Texas prisons. Click the gallery to learn the most common crimes among the inmates, according to data analysed by Texas Tribune. More than 145,000 inmates are housed in Texas prisons. Photo: Guiseppe Barranco Photo: Guiseppe Barranco Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close Federal judge: State must provide water without arsenic to Pack Unit inmates 1 / 25 Back to Gallery
A federal judge in Houston has ordered the Texas prison system to provide safe drinking water to inmates at the Pack Unit in Navasota, saying the unit's arsenic-laden well water "violates contemporary standards of decency."
U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison said the Wallace Pack Unit, a low security facility in Grimes County that holds elderly and sick inmates, has 15 days to replace its water supply.
The emergency motion to replace the drinking water was filed by a group of inmates suing the state on the grounds that the lack of air conditioning during the hot summer months is a form of "cruel and unusual punishment."
The Pack Unit houses mostly elderly, ill and disabled inmates who may take medications that make them especially vulnerable to heat-related illness.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice plans to appeal the ruling, according to a spokesman.
State prison officials say they have known since 2006 that the Pack Unit's aquifer has elevated levels of arsenic. However, experts testified at an emergency injunction hearing before last month that the levels of arsenic in the well water weren't lethal or likely to cause harm. A prison engineer testified he expected a new filtration system to be in place in the next year or so.
The prison's water currently registers between two and four-and-a-half times the amount of arsenic permitted by the Environmental Protection Agency.Starbucks said Tuesday that it expects to sell a record number of gift cards on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 2015. (Photo11: Getty Images)
Millions of last-minute shoppers will have one thing on their mind Thursday: Coffee.
Starbucks said Tuesday that it expects gift card sales to hit a record on Christmas Eve as customers scramble for stocking stuffers before the holiday hits.
Last year, Starbucks sold nearly 2.5 million gift cards on Dec. 24 across the U.S. and Canada. Starbucks cards have become so ubiquitous that in all, one in seven U.S. adults received one last holiday season, up from one in eight in 2013.
Gift cards have been the most requested holiday gift for nine years running, according to the National Retail Federation. This year, nearly 59% of consumers said they'd like to receive one.
Starbucks found itself the target of two controversies this holiday season as some customers raised questions about the company's values and holiday spirit — Starbucks' holiday-themed red cups went viral in November when one customer posted on Facebook that the lack of a Christmas message on the cups was a slight against Christianity.
This month, people started pointing out on social media that cookies depicting a polar bear with a red scarf could be seen as a polar bear with a slit throat.
But, the incidents don't seem to have affected Starbucks gift card sales.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1OlWvzNAn NYPD Internal Affairs cop was suspended for leaving nearly everything she needs for her job in her parked car — which a thief cleaned out on a Brooklyn street, police sources told The Post on Wednesday.
Her service weapon: gone.
Ammo: gone.
Her police-issued phone and radio: gone.
Her vest, handcuffs and duty belt: gone.
Milagros Torres, 38, had to sheepishly walk into the 88th Precinct stationhouse and admit that she left the trove of items in the trunk of her 2016 Honda Civic, sources said.
And she could only tell cops she thought she locked the car, according to the sources, but there were no signs of a break-in.
A surveillance camera captured video of an unidentified prowler making off with the hoard, sources said.
The careless cop has previously joked online about losing her valuables, posting a meme on Facebook in September 2015 that features a photo of 1970s TV star Lynda Carter in her role as “Wonder Woman.”
“I AM “WONDER WOMAN,” the image says.
“I WONDER WHERE I LEFT MY KEYS, I WONDER WHERE I PUT MY PURSE, I WONDER WHERE MY MONEY WENT.”
Torres told cops she parked her car on Waverly Ave., near her apartment in Clinton Hill, around 3:30 a.m. Saturday, sources said.
But when she went back around 1:20 p.m., the glove compartment was open and everything had been dumped on the passenger seat, sources said.
Torres told cops she then checked the trunk and saw that her 9-mm. Smith & Wesson pistol was gone, along with three magazines, a total 46 cartridges, a collapsible baton, pepper spray and two sets of handcuffs.
She also lost her bulletproof vest, duty belt, police radio, NYPD-issued smartphone and a flashlight, as well as two pairs of designer sunglasses — Prada and Salvatore Ferragamo — and some newly purchased clothing from “Fashion to Figure,” sources said.
Although she usually works out of the IAB Command Center in SoHo, Torres on Friday finished a temporary, uniformed assignment in Harlem as part of the NYPD’s “Summer All Out” anti-crime effort, sources said.
Torres joined the NYPD in 2004 and was previously assigned to “homeless outreach,” sources said.
During fiscal 2017, she earned $115,323, of which around $30,000 was overtime, records show.
Torres was suspended without pay for “failure to properly safeguard department property,” said an NYPD spokesman who declined to discuss the matter further.
According to the NYPD Patrol Guide, “loss of Department property” is a “Schedule ‘B’ violation” punishable at the precinct level and can result in the forfeiture of up to 10 vacation days or accrued time.
But the extent — and dangerousness — of the gear that was stolen from her could result in formal departmental charges and far more severe punishment, sources said.
Torres declined to comment when reached by phone Wednesday, saying: “Right now, it’s just a really hard time for me.”For most of us, it’s an uncomfortable tingling sensation—that occasional, disturbing feeling that someone is behind us, watching. But for millions of people around the world who suffer from visual and auditory hallucinations, this minor annoyance develops into a frequent torment.
Feeling of Presence, or FoP, is the disconcerting notion that someone else is hovering nearby, walking alongside you or even touching you. It’s the stuff of ghost stories, but also a real symptom of several neurologic conditions, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists know so little about the underlying causes of FoP that long-term treatments and cures remain illusive.
Now, researchers are chipping away at the neurobiology behind that uncanny feeling. In a paper published November 6 in Current Biology, a team of scientists described how they used a custom-built robot to induce an eerie Feeling of Presence in healthy participants. Their findings confirm that sensorimotor conflict, a neurologic imbalance between what the mind perceives and what the body feels, lies at the root of some FoP illusions.
“You really need a sensorimotor mismatch for Feeling of Presence,” says Giulio Rognini, a doctoral candidate at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, and coauthor on the paper. “This asynchronous condition makes the subjects more prone to that feeling of somebody behind them.”
The scientists began by examining 12 patients who had reported Feelings of Presence in the past. Virtually all of the subjects described similar hallucinations—the distinct feeling that somebody was directly behind them and uncomfortably close. Brain scans also revealed lesions that dotted the subjects’ frontoparietal cortexes, an area of the brain associated with awareness of “self” and integration of sensorimotor signals.
Disturbing hallucinations followed them like shadows, at times. “When the patient was standing, the presence was standing,” Rognini says. “When the patient was sitting, the presence was sitting. When the patient was moving, the presence was moving.”
Based on these common brain lesions and experiences, the researchers suspected that it was not just any disharmony between movement and sensation that might trigger FoP, but a specific disharmony, perfectly coordinated with the body’s movements. To test this theory in healthy participants, they designed a robot that could precisely match each subject’s motions, while still delivering a confusing, mismatched sensation.
When a healthy, blindfolded subject would reach forward, the robot would copy his or her exact motion and tap the participant from behind. If the robot-human interaction was perfectly synchronized, the participants simply reported feeling like they were reaching forward and touching their own backs—a disturbing, but not hallucinatory, sensation.
But when the scientists delayed the robotic reaction even slightly, by a half-second, the participants become disoriented. Many said that they felt like someone else was touching their backs, and estimated that the mostly-empty room was full of people. Some added that they felt as though they were drifting backward, toward The Presence; two participants were so disturbed that they asked to stop the experiment.
“What we are doing is manipulating those sensorimotor signals,” Rognini says. “We found that FoP is only experienced when there is a delay between what participants do and a feeling on their backs.”
Rognini suspects that the findings may have broad implications for neurologic and psychiatric patients who suffer from auditory and visual hallucinations. “If you are able to perturb the system, to induce a Feeling of Presence, maybe you could also tune the sensorimotor system to down-regulate those symptoms,” he says.
Nonetheless, there is a major difference between causing a hallucination and curing it. “Inducing a phenomenon is relatively easy—to control it, and stop it temporarily by electrical stimulation of the brain, is also relatively easy,” says Sophia Frangou, chief of the Psychosis Research Program at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. “The problem we have is making sure that this phenomenon doesn’t return.“
Still, Frangou was impressed by the researchers’ willingness to explore the connection between structure and function in the brain, and to apply that to studying the practical symptoms of psychosis. “It’s really an innovative idea in probing the brain in ways that can be meaningful,” she says. “In that respect, I can see an immediate relevance.”
Judith Ford, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, who specializes in schizophrenia, added that the study might help researchers pin down the mechanism behind Feelings of Presence. “This kind of study is essential to our efforts to understand the neurobiological basis of such symptoms,” she said in a prepared statement.
For Rognini and his team, the next step will be attempting to design a robot that might work with schizophrenic patients to help them distinguish between their own actions and someone else’s actions.
“That would be the dream,” he says. “To, by some robotic simulation, down-regulate psychotic symptoms.”The Mars rover Curiosity is ready to roll and its drivers back on Earth say they are "itching to move".
Curiosity has undergone an "intellect upgrade" on Mars – a planned replacement of its onboard software – to ready it for a two-year mission to explore the 96 mile-wide Gale Crater. The vehicle is currently undergoing thorough pre-planned tests of its instruments before its wheels will start to turn. This first tentative drive will probably be on 21 August, 15 days after landing, and will likely only cover a few metres.
The first 24-hour readings of weather conditions at the landing site will be obtained by Curiosity this week. Meteorologists on the mission are excited by the prospect of obtaining weather data from the rover: few weather instruments have been sent to the surface of Mars before, and winds may be swirling in a complex pattern in the crater where it sits.
Another task that will be completed before moving is imaging of the peak of Mount Sharp – the 3.4 mile high mountain that looms over the landing site, but which was omitted from the rover's first automated panorama. According to Mike Watkins, the Curiosity mission manager, mission scientists are "dying to see" the colour, high-resolution images of the mountain.
The rover is also gradually sending down high resolution frames of its three minute-long landing movie to the operations team at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Based on initial data, the frames are expected to form a spectacular sequence, showing the changing view from the rover during its descent on 6 August. Beginning when the rover was still suspended under a parachute, the movie shows surface dust being kicked up by the rockets on the rover's descent stage, followed by the first post-landing view of the gravelly surface.
All of the commands that the rover followed in the first week had been on board before Curiosity landed on 6 August. The operations team are now sending freshly-written sequences of commands to the rover, which is slowing down operations slightly, as anticipated.
Once this first checkout is complete, many of its systems will be ready for work. The rover will likely drive to its first target before its sophisticated arm will be extended for the first time. The vehicle's ultimate goal is an area of layered rock at the base of Mount Sharp. It will probably take around a year to reach there, negotiating sand dunes and stopping at interesting scientific targets on the way.
Orbiting spacecraft have also been imaging the landing site in colour. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has obtained a spectacular colour image (above) of the rover, sitting in a patch of discoloured material that had been exposed to the exhaust from Curiosity's landing rockets. The discolouration is probably due to surface dust being blown away during the rover's daring landing.I have a sweet tooth. It’s not like that fact miraculously changed when I lost 65 pounds and it’s likely not going to. This is something to remember and something that is extremely important when you start a healthy lifestyle. You have to make your healthy goal using a system that works for YOU. Do you love potato chips, or cookies, or ice cream, or any of those foods deemed “not good for you?” Do not get into the trap of deciding to do away with something you love. Can you tweak it? Yes, and you should. Do I think you will be successful having bag of potato chips every day? Absolutely not, but there are options. It’s about acknowledging that craving and identifying what it is. If you love potato chips you are probably looking for something that is salty and a little crunchy. That can be done without diving head first into a greasy bag of Lays. The fact is, depravity will only cause you to feel resentment and make it harder to stay on program. So this is all to say, EVERY night, I have dessert. It could just be PB2 and apple slices, or a quick waffle. Sometimes I even have the points for a sizable Halo Top Sunday, but either way, I must have one. If I don’t, I inevitably wake up at midnight craving a little something…and no one trusts midnight Tedi. She makes awful decisions. So I have come up with fun, easy, sweet, and satisfying little desserts to enjoy at night, or in this case, even in the morning. I can generally fit in 2 points and since these sandwiches are HUGE, I feel really satisfied and like I am getting away with something. They are filled with protein from the yogurt and nutrients from the banana. The cookies are easy to make and fun with this N-ice cream but they are also delicious as the buns for a PB2&J and on their own as a slightly sweet cookie fix. If you make them ahead of time they will last up to a week in your freezer but… they never last that long in my house. I like them as a quick, grab and go breakfast as well, knowing I am getting some protein and carbohydrates to fuel my day.
I can’t wait to hear about the fun ways you enjoy these slightly sweet, totally yummy “N-ice” cream sandwiches.
Happy Feasting!A Cub scout was kicked out of his group after he questioned a Colorado Republican lawmaker about gun control and contentious comments she made about African Americans.
The story, which spread via social media, represents another political flashpoint for the Boy Scouts of America, of which the Cub Scouts is a part. The organisation faced harsh criticism this summer, after Donald Trump used a speech at its national jamboree to rail against “fake news” and Barack Obama, boast about beating Hillary Clinton and reminisce about his hedonistic life in New York.
'I am livid': Donald Trump criticized for odd, disjointed speech to Boy Scouts Read more
At a group meeting in Broomfield, Colorado, earlier this month, Cub Scouts were told to come prepared to talk to state senator Vicki Marble about issues important to them. Lori Mayfield, the mother of 11-year-old Ames Mayfield, posted footage of ensuing exchanges online.
Reading from a printed sheet, her son asked Marble about “commonsense gun control”. “I was shocked that you co-sponsored a bill to allow domestic violence offenders to continue to own a gun,” he said. “… Why on earth would you want someone who beats their wife to have access to a gun?”
The boy also mentioned a vote to repeal background checks on private gun sales, support for concealed carry without a permit, and the struggles of some victims of the Las Vegas mass shooting to afford healthcare for the injuries.
Fifty-eight people died and nearly 500 were injured in the Las Vegas shooting, when a gunman opened fire on a music festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
“There’s something wrong in this country when Republicans believe it is a right to own a gun but a privilege to have healthcare,” Ames Mayfield said, before listing statistics on support for gun control and eventually being cut off by a male adult.
“That’s a great question and I am really very aware of those statistics,” Marble said. “And I have a concealed carry permit. I shoot. And all my sons shoot.
“And when you talk about the Las Vegas shooting, which was a horrible tragedy, that was a gun-free zone. Did you know that? Did you know the Aurora shooter [who killed 12 in a movie theater in 2012] was [in] a gun-free zone? It didn’t stop it, did it? They went and looked for those zones.”
Marble then said “it has been shown that the more guns a society has, the less crime or murders are committed” and cited Chicago and Detroit as “gun-free zones” with “more crime, more murders, than anywhere else in the United States”.
Advising Ames to “look at a lion in Africa, going after a gazelle”, she said shooters were “predators … and the prey are us”.
Lori Mayfield said a local scout leader told her after the 9 October event that the topic of gun control was inappropriate because of its political nature and that her son’s questions were disrespectful. The Boys Scouts have refused to comment on the reason the boy was asked to leave but have said he will remain in the Scouts after finding a new group.
“The Boy Scouts of America is a wholly nonpartisan organization and does not promote any one political position, candidate or philosophy,” the organisation said in a statement on Friday.
In videos recorded by Lori Mayfield, other scouts were heard asking about why people wanted to vote for Obama just because he was black and about Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexico border.
Marble drew national attention in 2013 after she seemed, during a legislative committee hearing, to link the health of black people to eating fried chicken and barbecue. The head of the state Republican party and others criticized her words. She issued a statement saying she was saddened her comments were taken to be disparaging.
During the scout meeting, Ames told Marble he was “astonished that you blamed black people” for their health problems.
She replied: “I didn’t. That was made up by the media. So you want to believe it, you believe it, but that’s not how it went down.”
Marble went on to say Americans enjoy multicultural food but cautioned that people also need to consider whether they are predisposed to any diseases because of their genetic makeup.
In a statement on Friday, Marble said she did not know about Ames’s dismissal until she read about it. She said she didn’t blame him because she thought there was an “element of manipulation involved”.
Lori Mayfield denied that. She said she and her son, whom she said is gifted and likes to watch the news, researched Marble together and she typed up his questions, using his words. The mother questioned why the Scouts would choose to invite such a controversial lawmaker to speak.By By Greta McClain Jan 12, 2013 in Environment Mumbai - Local governments across India are being told not to grant permission to anyone wishing to establish “dolphin parks”, citing a history of animal cruelty associated with such parks. According to India’s AWBI vice-chairman, S. Chinny Krishna, told the “All types of studies have shown that these animals, after capture, are under a very high level of stress. A wild animal belongs in the wild. That’s why they’re called wild animals – these are not domestic animals.” Krishna went on to say that dolphinariums serve “no educational purpose” and are “purely for making money”. N. Venugopal, chairman of the Greater Cochin Development Authority, denies that dolphin parks are cruel, “It is not cruel. People will be entertained.” The Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations (FIAPO) praised the AWBI’s announcement, saying that animals used in dolphinariums are captured through cruel methods. FIAPO’s campaign manager, Puja Mitra, told “This move of the AWBI’s is a big step forward to ensure that India never has captive dolphins — a barbaric practice that is fast being phased out internationally. Additionally, dolphinariums have absolutely no conservation or educational value.” In 1998, Chennai’s Dolphin City brought in four dolphins to perform for visitors. All of the dolphins died within a few months due to inadequate care and unsuitable infrastructure. The announcement comes nearly a year after government officials in Maharashtra announced plans to allow Sea World to build an oceanarium in Konkan, a city 450 km south of Mumbai. In March of 2012, the Maharashtra government In June of last year, Two emails sent to SeaWorld’s Communications Department requesting comment on the AWBI announcement have gone unanswered. In a letter issued Tuesday, officials with the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) stated they have become aware of several proposals in different states around the country seeking permission to establish dolphinariums. The letter goes on to say the group is strongly opposed to dolphinariums and urges officials in Indian states to “take necessary steps to ensure such facilities are not established.”According to India’s Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, anyone wishing to use animals for the purpose of entertainment must obtain a permit and be registered with the AWBI. The AWBI letter advises that they have not issued permits to anyone wishing to use dolphins or other cetaceans in an entertainment capacity. Therefore, according to AWBI, any importation or exhibition of performance cetaceans would be in direct violation of the cruelty act. They go on to say that they will not issue permits to anyone wishing to use cetaceans in any type of entertainment capacity in the future.AWBI vice-chairman, S. Chinny Krishna, told the New York Times Krishna went on to say that dolphinariums serve “no educational purpose” and are “purely for making money”.N. Venugopal, chairman of the Greater Cochin Development Authority, denies that dolphin parks are cruel, saying The Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations (FIAPO) praised the AWBI’s announcement, saying that animals used in dolphinariums are captured through cruel methods. FIAPO’s campaign manager, Puja Mitra, told The Hindu In 1998, Chennai’s Dolphin City brought in four dolphins to perform for visitors. All of the dolphins died within a few months due to inadequate care and unsuitable infrastructure.The announcement comes nearly a year after government officials in Maharashtra announced plans to allow Sea World to build an oceanarium in Konkan, a city 450 km south of Mumbai. In March of 2012, the Maharashtra government announced it would begin the process of acquiring land for a Sea World theme park within six months.In June of last year, Daily News India reported that land acquisition had not yet begun and that the project was expected to take 3 years to complete. It is believed that the AWBI’s announced refusal to issue legally required permits will halt the project.Two emails sent to SeaWorld’s Communications Department requesting comment on the AWBI announcement have gone unanswered. More about India, Seaworld, Sea world, Animal cruelty, cruelty to animal More news from India Seaworld Sea world Animal cruelty cruelty to animal Dolphins cetaceans dolphin parksTwo Wisconsin labs offering scientifically questionable tests agreed last week to pay $8.5 million to the federal government to settle allegations that they falsely billed Medicare.
Pharmasan Labs Inc. and NeuroScience Inc., allegedly used improper codes to bill the federal insurer for ineligible food-allergy tests for five years, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Madison, Wisconsin.
The settlement, which also includes the labs’ founders, Gottfried and Mieke Kellermann, stems from a 2013 whistleblower lawsuit by a former employee that the federal government joined last year.
The companies neither admitted or denied the allegations. Pharmasan also acknowledged in the settlement that the government could prove the bulk of its lab-test referrals came not from doctors, as is largely required under Medicare, but from ineligible health care providers.
Pharmasan offers diagnostic tests for allergies, Lyme disease, immune-related and other conditions; NeuroScience is a related corporation that bills Medicare for those tests. Since NeuroScience was incorporated in 2000, its website indicates the labs have conducted more than 600,000 tests that are available in 24 countries. The settlement includes a requirement for them to undergo an independent annual claims review.
A Lyme disease diagnostic test Pharmasan offers is prohibited from being used in New York State, which says the lab did not prove the test accurately diagnoses the tick-borne disease. New York is one of the only states that reviews diagnostic tests. NECIR wrote about that test in 2014.
Pharmasan and NeuroScience are dedicated to helping patients and “we are glad to resolve these issues with the government and be moving forward,” Gottfried Kellermann said in a statement.
The whistleblower, Richard Forrest, said “at the end of the day the truth came out.” Forrest will receive more than $1 million as his share of the whistleblower suit against the companies, according to the government.
Forrest’s lawyer, Mark Schlein, of Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman in Los Angeles, said the labs had a choice between litigating to uphold their innocence or settling, and decided to settle.
Some of the tests that Pharmasan offers are part of a class that do not have to prove they are accurate or safe to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has recently reiterated its resolve to more strictly regulate the sector.by
I have a bitter-sweet relationship with surprises. The anticipation is fun and exciting, but it is the same anticipation that kills me and turns me into an utter pain in the ass. So when Matt said Abe was sending me some cigars, I was excited as all get out. The only problem being that neither Matt nor Trevor would tell me what these special cigars were. So it was their fault that I was a pain in the ass for two days until I got two samples of the ultra-special, ultra-unique, ultra-unreleased My Father El Hijo(the son). Now if you have not heard of this very exclusive cigar, it is the third installment of the Smoke Inn 15th Anniversary/Microblend Series. Aside from not being released yet, what makes this smoke so unbelievably awesome is this:
1. Only 650 boxes of 15 boxed pressed cigars were made by the Garcia’s at My Fathers Cigars.
2. The El Hijo is wrapped in a limited harvest of 2009 Ecuadorian Habano leaf.
3. The El Hijo’s unique foot.
The El Hijo, which is 5.5×52 and has Nicaraguan binders and fillers, is unique in that the first 1/5 inch of the cigar is unwrapped. Yes, I said unwrapped, nothing but binder and filler. This brings an interesting touch to the cigar, which by itself is already classic. Before I get into the cigar, let me tell you about some specifics. The cigar is priced at $9.75 a stick and $146 for a box of 15, which considering how limited this cigar was in production, is a more than fair price. To celebrate the occasion, Abe will be hosting a National Release Party at the Smoke Inn, West Palm Beach store.
Now let’s get to the important part, the cigar. Like I said, the main aspect that makes this cigar unique is that the first 1/5 of an inch of the smoke is unwrapped, straight Nicaraguan binder and filler. This may attribute to the first third of the cigar having a strong spicy flavor with a small hint of sweetness. After the spicy/sweet flavor subsides, the last 2/3 of the cigar has a very nice smokey mesquite flavor that is strangely smooth for a My Father cigar.
Overall, the My Father El Hijo is a very smooth medium to full-bodied smoke that burns perfectly and I didn’t have to think about the draw at all, it was that effortless. The only knocks on this cigar were that it seemed to burn very quickly and the last third wasn’t as smooth as the first 2/3; but otherwise it’s a great cigar and I would definitely recommend getting out to the event on August 12 or pre-ordering it when it becomes available online July 6th. I predict the 650 boxes of El Hijo will go quickly.
The Mayor
AdvertisementsYou don't see that many point deductions in the UFC. There are more than enough fouls to go around, but actual penalties, at the end of the day, end up being pretty rare. That could be because of the nature of MMA's three round structure. Lose a point in a twelve, ten, or even six round fight and that's bad, but over three rounds? An MMA fighter who gets a point taken doesn't have a lot left to work with if they want to get a win.
Perhaps that's why UFC referee Marc Goddard felt such a strong desire to explain his actions via Facebook and get rid of what he called an "unsettling angst" after taking away a point from prelim fighter Marlon Vera during his bout with Davey Grant at UFC London on February 27th. After a somewhat lengthy explanation as to just what being a referee meant to him, Goddard got down to brass tacks on why and how he decided to take a point:
"I had a very interesting and action filled evening when working last night at UFC London - in particular the bout between Marlon Vera and Davey Grant. I start the fight in my normal fashion and true to form with my sole intention on my next word being'stop' exactly 5 minutes later. At a point in that first round you will hear me warn Vera for holding the fence, short concise and in normal fashion. Grant also communicated to me before my first intervention that his glove [fingers inside the cuff] was being held but I can only react to what I see. You will then see me stop the action when Vera was on his back and Grant stood in his guard for the same finger in cuff glove holding Grant was signifying to me earlier. Only this time I did see. I do not stand the fighter [Vera] up as that would be of detriment to the standing fighter who was not committing the foul - instead I issue my warning and allow the fight to continue.
"In the second round you will hear me interject again - as the same fingers in cuff process happened once more, this when I decided to stand the fighters at the same point anyway. So now that's three warning within one and half rounds [on top of my pleading in between rounds]. People remark upon my tone at times - please think of this. It's a fight, in an arena, with 16,000 people. It's not a doctors waiting room. When a fighter may not be taking note of your prior warnings your natural instinct may be to escalate your tone - its called authority, I'm a referee - not a mother. I'm there to be listened to and obeyed [ |
can’t find anywhere else. The bookstore holds around 1 million books in stock.” ― Philip Lewis, Front Page Editor
2. Taylor Books (Charleston, West Virginia)
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“Taylor Books is a beloved spot on a quaint street in West Virginia’s capital city that offers a good read, beautiful art, a solid cup of coffee and a quiet place to enjoy it all. Taylor doesn’t just have a great selection of books ― the store hosts live musicians, holds book signings with notable authors and even serves as a place for creative types, like creative writing and improv groups, to meet. I love that they make sure to feature authors, artists and publications based in and around West Virginia and work to promote other arts-related businesses in the community.” ― Paige Lavender, Senior Politics Editor
3. Literati (Ann Arbor, Michigan)
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”A great bookstore for a great college town, Literati sits right in the middle of Ann Arbor’s downtown shopping district. It’s the perfect place to spend an hour ― or two or three ― browsing the staff recommendations, which are reliably excellent.” ― Jonathan Cohn, Senior National Correspondent
4. The Strand (New York, New York)
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“I worked at The Strand when I first moved to New York City and it truly embodies so much about what makes this global city so amazing. Not only have numerous influential creatives worked here at some point in their careers, but the space itself is a defining part of the history of New York City. The last remaining staple of the historic ‘Book Row’ ― a massive area of 48 different bookstores dating back to the late 1800s ― The Strand is now the second-biggest used bookstore in the entire country. Go get lost in the literal miles of books while you discover some of the rich history of the store itself.” ― James Michael Nichols, Deputy Queer Voices Editor
5. Left Bank Books (St. Louis, Missouri)
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”When I was going to college in St. Louis, Left Bank Books was a short bike ride from my apartment. The shop has incredible new and used book selections, ingeniously themed reading groups, impressive author events, and just a generally inclusive vibe that makes it seem like a neighborhood spot for anyone and everyone.” ― Katherine Brooks, Senior Arts & Culture Editor
6. Old Tampa Book Company (Tampa, Florida)
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“Old Tampa Book Company is this little store in downtown that usually gets overlooked, but the second you step in it’s the best place you’ve ever been. All the shelves are filled to the brim and you can find so many out-of-print or unique editions of books. And the entire place just smells like books ― overwhelmingly so.” ― Doha Madani, Associate Trends Reporter
7. Women & Children First Bookstore (Chicago, Illinois)
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”Women & Children First is the kind of indie bookstore that belies an easy, convenient characterization. Sure, it’s a feminist bookstore with a name eerily similar to a certain Portlandia sketch. But it’s not some caricature. This place has a real heart and cares about their neighborhood and city, hosting regular community events spotlighting both emerging local and established international names. And their handwritten book recommendations throughout the store have never led me astray. It’s the real deal.” ― Joseph Erbentraut, Senior Reporter
8. Dickson Street Bookshop (Fayetteville, Arkansas)
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“Dickson Street Bookshop is located just a short, lovely walk from the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, so it’s a huge draw for college students and bibliophiles alike. Its towering, overstocked bookshelves wind in and out of rooms, almost as if they go on for miles. As an undergraduate, I needed a copy of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death Of A Salesman’ for a theater class I was taking that semester, and the shop owner knew exactly which room, which shelf and which precise stack of books was home to the one I needed, leading me right to it. I still have the tattered, out-of-print copy to this day.” ― Brittany Nims, RYOT Studio Editor
9. Powell’s Books (Portland, Oregon)
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“If there’s a list of great wonders of the literary world, Powell’s sits at the top. They call it ‘Powell City of Books’ for a reason ― it occupies a full city block and supposedly contains more than a million volumes.” ― Jonathan Cohn
10. Farley’s Bookshop (New Hope, Pennsylvania)
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”Farley’s is nestled on the Delaware River in the historic and queer enclave of New Hope, Pennsylvania. There’s always an angelic cat that greets you (and every good independent bookstore should have that). It feels like a quintessential Americana place that could’ve easily been in a scene in ‘Hocus Pocus’ or something.” ― Melissa Radzimski, Social Media Editor
11. The Book Barn (Niantic, Connecticut)
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“I never miss a chance to visit the Book Barn when I’m up in Connecticut. I could spend hours perusing the shop’s collection, which is actually spread out over four small locations in the coastal town of Niantic, which is worthy of exploring in its own right. Every visit is an adventure!” ― Curtis Wong, Senior Queer Voices Editor
12. The Last Bookstore (Los Angeles, California)
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”Part bookstore, part art collective and sculpture, this shop has a solid selection of indie new stuff plus an extensive user collection that is worth checking out. A beautiful place.” ― Robb Monn, Head of Engineering
13. Prairie Lights (Iowa City, Iowa)
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”It’s everything you could want in a bookstore. A staff that knows their stuff? Check. A kids section that feels like a secret hideaway? Check. Coffee, cookies, and booze upstairs? Check. A secondhand books section so you can splurge? CHECK.” ― Chloe Angyal, Senior Front Page Editor
14. The Children’s Bookstore (Baltimore, Maryland)
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“This little bookstore is tucked away on a side street in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, and it’s so great. The staff is super knowledgeable, and they have a great selection of books for all different ages. Back when Harry Potter books were still coming out, The Children’s Bookstore would host a huge celebration leading up to the midnight release. They’d close off the street and have tons of activities for all of the dressed-up wizards and witches. You could get your book there at midnight, or they had a delivery service that would drop books off to the houses in the neighborhood (starting at midnight). It’s a great bookstore and community.” ― Hollis Miller, Associate Voices Social Editor
15. Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, Washington)
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”I love reading staff recommendations, and this enormous bookstore had way more than I could skim in one visit. There’s a comfy coffee shop inside, so it’s the perfect zen stop, whether you’re working in the city or visiting from out of town. Grab a book, relax and people-watch.” ― Katherine Brooks
16. Books Galore (Erie, Pennsylvania)
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“Independently owned and operated, I’ve frequented the place since I was a kid and continued to do so until I moved to Louisiana last year. When I was a kid, I liked going there every week to get my favorite comics. As I got older, they were a great resource for old books ― especially rare and hard-to-find books. They are great people and always friendly. They also do a lot of things for kids in the community, such as hosting games, having folks dress up as superheroes and hosting a free comic book day.” ― David Lohr, Senior Crime Reporter
17. J. Michaels Books (Eugene, Oregon)
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“A cozy and colorful fixture of one of Americas most colorful small cities. The owner is usually behind the counter, obscured by his curated selection of new releases. His arrangements never fail to compel even this most casual of bookworms to purchase. On your way out, take a peek at first editions and antique copies of many of Americas greatest writers. My wife and I once drove a Penguin Books–branded Mini Cooper across America, visiting indie bookshops all along the way. There is none quite like J Michaels.” ― Isaac Schmidt, Software Engineer
18. Westsider Rare & Used Books Inc. (New York, New York)
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“If there were a car air freshener called ‘Used Bookstore’ they would go to Westsider Rare & Used Books Inc.” ― Marc Janks, Multimedia Platforms Manager
19. The Iliad Bookshop (North Hollywood, California)
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”Iliad Bookshop is a place you can get lost in ― and if you’re a book lover like me, you might suddenly discover that hours have elapsed while you were blissfully exploring that rabbit hole. They specialize in literature and the arts and have an impressive collection of rare books, in particular. If you somehow tire of the endless maze of books, you can take a break to play with the shop cats (yes, literal cats, not just cool people) or chat with the very friendly staff.” ― Antonia Blumberg, Religion Reporter
20. The Montague Bookmill (Montague, Massachusetts)
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“You know those bookstores where you can spend a whole afternoon? The Bookmill is like that, but more like days, or weeks ― I’d rent a room there if I could. The 1800s gristmill is home to thousands of used books, thoughtfully organized and sprawled out in room after room designed for wandering and hiding out among the shelves. If you somehow get bored of book buying, you can take a picturesque stroll by the Sawmill River or bring your finds to the Lady Killigrew Cafe, order a local beer and start reading.” ― Kate Abbey-Lambertz, National Reporter
21. Green Apple Books (San Francisco, California)
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“Green Apple is the kind of bookstore that reminds you what an otherworldly escape reading is and makes you wonder why you spend so much time watching Netflix. It’s sizable but divided up into smaller rooms and alcoves you’ll want to hole up in for hours. It was named Publisher’s Weekly bookstore of the year in 2014, but it’s remained a humble neighborhood spot exactly as I remember it as a little kid growing up around the corner.” ― Lydia O’Connor, Reporter
22. Maxwell’s House of Books (La Mesa, California)
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“Maxwell’s has a lot of rare academic and scholarly titles as well as other hard-to-find titles. The owners are happy to engage in deep conversations about the books. It’s in a cozy neighborhood in a San Diego suburb and I feel like everyone is stopping by to say, ‘Hi.’” ― David Moye, Reporter
23. Chamblin Book Mine (Jacksonville, Florida)
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“I used to get lost in this place when I was a nerdy high school kid in Jacksonville. The aisles go on forever, and it’s basically impossible to leave empty-handed. It’s a great place to sell your old books, too. Highly recommended.” ― Kate Palmer, Lifestyle Editorial Director
Check out Chamblin Book Mine here.
24. Book Culture (New York, New York)
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“This is everything a modern bookstore should be. It has something for everyone. Best Part: They have mystery books wrapped up so you can have a blind date with a book.” ― Marc Janks
25. Books and Books (Coral Gables, Florida)
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“Every author who’s done a tour knows about Books and Books, because it’s practically a South Florida institution. Worth visiting for the architecture alone, but it’s the reading that will keep you coming back.” ― Jonathan Cohn
26. William Caxton Ltd Books (Ellison Bay, Wisconsin)
”This is one of the finest book stores I’ve ever been to, made even more incredible due to its location, completely off the beaten path on the Wisconsin peninsula. The owner is a retired professor and collector of rare books. This is a place you go to find books you’ve never seen before.” ― Andy McDonald, Comedy Editor
27. Relay Bookhouse (Bethel, Connecticut)
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“It literally has tunnels of books from floor to ceiling — it’s like a maze. Books are piled up on the floor, you can hit dead ends and you can spend hours in it. I didn’t know bookstores like this still existed. Whenever I’m in the area I always stop in and walk around for a bit.” ― Samantha Tomaszewski, Associate Social Media Editor
28. Inquiring Minds Bookstore (Saugerties, New York)
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“In upstate New York, nestled in the quaint town of Saugerties, lies Inquiring Minds Bookstore. During a recent weekend stay in the area, I stumbled upon this cozy independent shop, filled to the brim with both new and used books. There’s a coffee shop inside, and you can get lost wandering around and browsing the journals, CDs and toys, which are also for sale. Inquiring Minds has a sister shop in New Paltz, New York.” ― Lauren Moraski, Entertainment Editorial Director
29. Skylight Books + Art Annex (Los Angeles, California)
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”The most solid new bookstore for fiction and art books. Great staff picks and great staff. I’ve found many gems here that I’d never have known existed.” ― Rob Monn, Head of Engineering
30. McNally Jackson (New York, New York)
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“This is my favorite bookstore in the city ― it’s really well-organized and I love all of the recommendations from the staff. They also have a great magazine section, and they even have a little cafe where you can grab a coffee and read your newest purchase.” ― Hollis Miller, Voices Associate Social Media Editor
31. Book Revue (Huntington, New York)
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“Growing up on Long Island surrounded by lacrosse bros and meatheads, Book Revue served as an oasis of art and literature. Big-name authors came to town for talks there. The 17,500-square-foot space is flanked by book shelves in nearly every possible space, a café with Korean candies and decent loose-leaf tea and a used book section where I bought my first W.H. Auden book for just $1. It’s always amazed me that, even as the record stores and other shops I loved folded, this place remained open. Thank God for that.” ― Alexander Kaufman, Business & Environment Reporter
“I usually force whichever family member I’m visiting on Long Island to make a stop at Book Revue, located in the picturesque, walkable downtown of Huntington. The store is expansive enough to easily kill an hour or two browsing, and they have a nice selection of inexpensive literary remainders — useful for anyone wishing to build up their classics library. With ample readings and events, they’re a good resource for the bookish who don’t want to travel all the way into Manhattan.” ― Jillian Capewell, Entertainment News Editor
32. Little City Books (Hoboken, New Jersey)
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”It’s a super-friendly atmosphere with welcoming staff, and carries a diverse range of novels and nonfiction. It’s also has a vast children’s section. It frequently holds readings and Q&As with authors and hosts a variety of book clubs focussing on different genres and writers.” ― Will Tooke, Producer
33. Main Street Books (Saint Helena, California)
“Tucked between pricey boutiques and wine shops, this tiny gem of a bookstore was a saving grace for me growing up in a small Napa Valley town when I was too young to enjoy the tasting rooms and vineyard tours the region is famous for. I’d spend hours in this little shop (roughly the size of a small bedroom), picking up dozens of used novels (better for my babysitting-fund budget) while always eyeing the new titles with envy. I still make a point of dropping in when I’m home for a visit, particularly to check out the latest additions to the well-curated cooking section or ask for a recommendation. And if they don’t have a book in the shop, the owner will happily order it for you. I’ll forever be grateful for when she pre-ordered Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix for me and let me pick it up before the store opened for the day.” ― Mollie Reilly, Deputy Politics Editor Check out Main Street here. 34. Prospero’s Bookstore (Kansas City, Missouri)
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“As a high school kid in Overland Park, Kansas, Prospero’s was an oasis. Its basement smells like centuries-old book pulp ― it’s where I found one of the strangest used Cold War history books I’ve ever read and will never get rid of. On the main floor, you can find more precariously stacked books, plus work from students at the Kansas City Art Institute, or see performances from local musicians and poets. It’s much more than a bookstore, as it should be.” ― Katherine Brooks Check out Prospero’s here. 35. Book Beat (Oak Park, Michigan)
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“A short drive outside of Detroit, Book Beat was one of my favorite destinations as a kid. From the inconspicuous storefront ― they’re located in an outdated suburban strip mall ― you’d never guess that inside it’s warm and lively, with thousands of books are crammed into every inch of available space, stacked up to the ceiling. Friendly staff members are always happy to help you locate a title in the piles, or recommend a book you didn’t know you wanted. They carry a wide range of subjects, but their children’s book collection is truly unbeatable.” ― Kate Abbey-Lambertz Check out Book Beat here.
36. Karma (Amagansett, New York)
”Karma (with locations in NYC and Amagansett) is both a gallery and a bookseller. They boast a beautiful collection of contemporary art books, many of which they publish themselves.” ― Willa Frej, Reporter
37. Faulkner House Books (New Orleans, Louisiana)
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”This teeny, tiny bookstore is housed in a building that was constructed in 1840. William Faulkner lived there in the early 20th century — hence the name — and wrote his first novel Soldiers Play. The space is as charming and mythic as any bookstore lover would hope, with low-slung chandeliers and books lining the walls, ‘Beauty and the Beast’-style. It has a great selection of New Orleans-centric books, from history to cookbooks, for people from out of town.” ― Priscilla Frank, Arts & Culture Writer
38. Book Thug Nation (Brooklyn, New York)
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“So intimate, so cozy and so friendly. I don’t know how they get by selling books for $2.50, but I try to always check out their selection first before I go anywhere else. And Book Thug gets new books every day, so there’s always something to discover.” ― Allison Fox, Lifestyle Trends Editor
39. Linden Tree Children’s Books (Los Altos, California)
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”You won’t find the children’s books tucked away in a corner here. It’s the entire store. Linden Tree has a friendly and helpful staff, great selection and plenty of in-store events.” ― Ed Mazza, Reporter
40. Half Price Books (Dallas, Texas)
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”Half Price Books might be a chain, but it’s family-owned, and, more importantly to some readers, it lives up to its name. Like any used bookstore, visiting comes with the wonder of discovery, a sensation absent from, say, shopping on Amazon. But the flagship store in Dallas is essentially a vast warehouse of books, and getting lost in its aisles is half the fun.” ― Maddie Crum, Books & Culture Writer
41. Haslam’s Book Store Inc (St. Petersburg, Florida)
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“Finding refuge in stacks of books from the humidity of Florida and losing track of time was a common occurrence for me at Haslam’s, a massive new and used bookstore established in 1933. I’d take short vacations to St. Petersburg while studying in university to visit friends and wander through the expansive bookshelves, read excerpts on the back of book covers and then flip through pages upon pages of poetry, fiction, memoirs and essays. The science collection in Haslam’s is astounding, and this bookstore helped nurture my love of science out of the classroom. It has an unassuming facade but, as with most good bookstores, once you step inside you are transported into another place and time, lost in your own thoughts, to a place just waiting to be explored.” ― Madeline Wahl, Associate Editor
42. Book Woman (Austin, Texas)
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“In its annual collection of book review and book reviewer data, VIDA has shown that gender parity still hasn’t been achieved when it comes to literature. Women are less likely to get reviewed in several major outlets than men, and they’re less likely to win awards, too. Which is why the concept of the simply named BookWoman is so great. The store showcases women writers, and particularly women writers working in Austin — and it hosts intersectional reading events, too.” ― Maddie Crum
43. Off the Beaten Path (Steamboat, Colorado)
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”I’ve approached the staff at Off the Beaten Path with as little info as: ‘I’m looking for a really good book. Like, really, really good.’ And I always walk out with something I can’t put down and that I insist pretty much every friend and family member read. The people who work here are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about books and will keep pulling titles until they find something you’re excited to sit down with. They support local authors, and the ‘staff picks’ are the best way to find out about little-known writers and remember why you should go back and read the classics from high school. And the coffee... OMG, amazing.” ― Eleanor Goldberg, Impact Editor
44. Housing Works Bookstore Cafe (New York, New York)
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“Housing Works, a smallish yet well-stocked two-story shop in Manhattan, is more than a bookstore. The organization takes seriously its role as an advocacy group for people with HIV/AIDS, and raises funds through events to that end. This alone makes it a worthwhile place to buy books, but the spot itself is charming, too, with winding stairways and high ceilings and timely author readings.” ― Maddie Crum
45. Stone Soup Books (Camden, Maine)
“Stone Soup is a tiny used bookstore that sits at the top of a creaking staircase in an almost comically narrow building in Camden, Maine’s downtown area. Inside, it feels like the kind of place where the protagonist of a children’s movie would find a long-lost book that unlocked a portal to some sort of fairy tale world. It’s packed with books, most of them well-loved, extremely affordable paperbacks, lining every available inch of wall space and occupying numerous other shelves and piles throughout the store. Every time I’ve been there, one of the owners has been there behind the desk reading, and is exactly the kind of of older gentleman you’d hope to presiding over a charming secondhand bookstore.” ― Hilary Hanson, Reporter
46. Parnassus Books (Nashville, Tennessee)
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“I stopped into Parnassus Books during a trip to Nashville a few years ago, and, like many of the city’s other small businesses I visited with friends, it felt like a place that really serves the local readers, both in terms of book recommendations and community space. Fun fact: The store is co-owned by author Ann Patchett.” ― Katherine Brooks
47. Source Booksellers (Detroit, Michigan)
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“Source Booksellers opened just a few years ago, but it’s thriving, with tons of readings and events ― probably because owner Janet Jones has been collecting and selling books since 1989. Her compact but extensively curated selection of nonfiction books ― with great titles on local subjects, history, culture, art and spirituality, are chosen with an eye toward educating people and enhancing their lives.” ― Kate Abbey-Lambertz
48. 2nd Edition Books (Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina)
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“An independent bookstore in an airport? Yup. You’ll find 2nd Edition in the terminal at Raleigh-Durham International, past security near the gates. They sell only previously used books, but they have a wide selection (and many are barely used). They’ll even ship to your destination if you want.” ― Jonathon Cohn
49. Books on the Square (Providence, Rhode Island)
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"As a college student in Providence, I had the opportunity to explore some great local spots, and Books on the Square was a true highlight. Located in Wayland Square, it’s welcoming neighborhood shop with a cozy atmosphere and loyal customer base. The staff is very friendly and they often host events and speakers." -- Caroline Bologna, Parents Editor
50. Politics & Prose (Washington, D.C.)
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”No roundup of indie bookstores would be complete without mentioning Politics & Prose, the D.C. institution that, beyond selling books, hosts open mics, nerdy trivia, teach-ins and conversations with politicians, authors, filmmakers and more. When I first visited D.C., I knew enough to add this shop to my itinerary, squeezing it in between tourist spots. And it was worth it.” ― Katherine Brooks
There are many other indie bookstores that we didn’t write about, but are excellent destinations you should probably check out. Including...
Myopic Books in Chicago, Illinois
Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi
Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Colorado
Bluestockings in New York, New York
City Lights Book in San Francisco, CaliforniaFlorida Gov. Rick Scott delayed a debate Wednesday night by refusing to come out on stage after seeing that his Democratic challenger, former Gov. Charlie Crist, had placed a small fan underneath his podium. The conflict arose over an agreement between the two that electronic devices would be banned from the stage. Republicans in the audience booed Crist for breaking the rules while he stood on stage alone for the first seven minutes of the debate. We look at video of the peculiar fight, in this Lip News clip with Mark Sovel and Elliot Hill.
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http://ift.tt/1qQBCOBHouse Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) (Screenshot)
(CNSNews.com) - The federal government collected record amounts of both individual income taxes and payroll taxes through the first ten months of fiscal 2017 (Oct. 1, 2016 through the end of July), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.
Through July, the federal government collected approximately $1,312,691,000,000 in individual income taxes.
At the same time, it collected $976,278,000,000 in Social Security and other payroll taxes.
Prior to this year, fiscal 2015 held the record for individual income tax collections through July. That year, the Treasury collected $1,309,431,860,000 (in constant 2017 dollars) in individual income taxes in the first ten months of the fiscal year.
Last year (fiscal 2016), individual income tax collections from October through July dropped to $1,293,490,000,000 (in constant 2017 dollars).
This year’s record of $1,312,691,000,000 in October-to-July individual income taxes is $3,259,140,000 more than the 2015’s previous record of $1,309,431,860,000.
Before this year’s record $976,278,000,000 in October-through-July payroll tax collections, fiscal 2016 held the record at $948,709,020,000 (in constant 2017 dollars)—or about $27,568,980,000 less than this year.
Overall federal tax collections in the first ten months of fiscal 2017 were $2,739,861,000,000. Yet that did not the record for October-through-July total federal tax collections. In the first ten months of fiscal 2015, the Treasury collected $2,741,079,280,000 (in constant 2017 dollars) in total taxes. That was $361,218,280,000 more than this year.
While the Treasury has been collecting record amounts of individual income taxes and payroll taxes this fiscal year, some other categories of federal tax revenues have declined since 2015.
For example, in the first ten months of fiscal 2015, the Treasury collected $272,904,380,000 (in constant 2017 dollars) in corporate income taxes. In the first ten months of fiscal 2017, the Treasury collected only $232,294,000,000 corporate income taxes.
In the first ten months of fiscal 2015, customs duties were $30,705,180,000 (in constant 2017 dollars). In the first ten months of fiscal 2017, they were only $28,427,000,000.
In the first ten months of fiscal 2015, excise taxes were $68,686,630,000 (in constant 2017 dollars). In the first ten months of fiscal 2017, they were only $65,187,000,000.
Even as it was collecting record individual income taxes and payroll taxes in the first ten months of fiscal 2017, the Treasury still ran a deficit of $566,022,000,000.
That is because while the overall federal tax collections for the period were $2,739,861,000,000, overall federal spending was $3,305,882,000,000.
(Historical tax revenues were put in constant 2017 dollars using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.)67% Say U.S. Should Steer Clear of Political Unrest in Arab Nations
Americans are wary of the current chaotic political situation in several Arab countries including Libya but strongly believe the United States should stay out of the picture.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 29% of American Adults think a change of government in any of these Arab countries will be good for the United States, while slightly more (33%) feel such a change will be bad for America. Twelve percent (12%) say it will have no impact, but one-in-four (26%) aren’t sure what to expect. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
However, as with the recent turmoil in Egypt, most Americans (67%) say the United States should leave the situation in the Arab countries alone. Just 17% say the United States should get more directly involved in the political situation there, but another 17% are not sure.
Americans are skeptical about the political changes that are likely to come from the growing - and, in Libya’s case, violent - protests. Thirty percent (30%) believe it is at least somewhat likely that most of these Arab countries will become free, democratic and peaceful over the next few years, but that includes just four percent (4%) who say it is Very Likely. Sixty-one percent (61%) view a democratic and peaceful outcome as unlikely, with 14% who say it is Not At All Likely.
Seventy-six percent (76%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe that it’s generally good for America when dictators in other countries are replaced with leaders selected in free and fair elections.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
The survey of 1,000 American Adults was conducted on February 21-22, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
ORWhat compels someone to place a missed-connection ad? Cynics might argue the act is the province of the pathetic: After all, in the movie Ghost World, Enid and Rebecca ruthlessly roast the reclusive Seymour when he posts an ad seeking a “striking redhead” he shared a fleeting moment with on an airport shuttle. But a more generous reading suggests an improbable belief in love, serendipity, and the power of connection.
That’s the premise behind the new romcom-core supergroup Who Is She?, comprising Lisa Prank’s Robin Edwards, Tacocat’s Bree McKenna, and Chastity Belt’s Julia Shapiro. It all started when Edwards and McKenna were living in adjoining bedrooms at the punk residence known affectionately as Spruce Haus. On a suggestion from a friend, the two decided to try using The Stranger’s “I Saw U” section as songwriting prompts and quickly found the source to be a fount of inspiration.
“It’s so romantic!” Edwards marvels. “I love how long-shot it is, too. And also, it just kind of fits into that idea that you could just fall in love with someone by seeing them and making eye contact with them for one minute. It’s really a wild, magical idea.” And not as far-fetched as you might expect: A friend of Edwards in Colorado got married thanks to a missed-connection ad, and McKenna offers that another friend of theirs went on three separate dates prompted by “I Saw U.”
Seattle Gossip by Who Is She?
What began as an idle off-tour project penning goofy jingles for their friends and covering Elliott Smith songs quickly grew into more. The duo enlisted their roommate Shapiro to play drums, and the result was their debut tape, Seattle Gossip (out October 6 on Father/Daughter Records), a series of light, comedic, jangly, twee ditties in the tradition of Cub or All Girl Summer Fun Band. “Cub is a Canadian treasure that doesn’t get talked about enough,” McKenna says of the underrated Vancouver indie-pop gem, whom they cite as a primary influence. “We’ve said before—what would the world be like if Cub was bigger than Nirvana?”
Before settling on Who Is She?, the band called itself Gutless, a reference to the timidity of most missed-connection authors who couldn’t gather the nerve to approach someone in the moment. Edwards empathizes, “It’s just so hard to approach people you have a crush on.” The track “Nervous Dufflebag Boy” describes a dreamy stranger spotted on public transit, never to be seen again, while “Blushin’ on the 44” documents more bus-based bashfulness.
Asked if they think this reticence is a uniquely Pacific Northwest quality, they demur. “I think a lot of people move here from other places, and I always hear that when you move anywhere, you have to put in your six months of awkward,” says McKenna. “And I think a lot of people want to blame the city on that, but I think it’s like anywhere.” Their song “Seattle Freeze” challenges the notion of the city’s supposed iciness with the chorus “It’s not Seattle, it’s you.” Both Edwards and McKenna praise the surprisingly warm welcome they received when they moved from their hometowns in southern California and Colorado.
And of course, Seattle has hosted no shortage of romantic comedies (Sleepless in Seattle, Singles, Say Anything, 10 Things I Hate About You)—a cherished topic for the band, who are vocal in their appreciation of the various roles of Bill Pullman (the “king of rom-coms”). “I like the genre because it’s such a beautiful fantasy,” Edwards says. The song “Romcom” is a loving sendup, skewering common tropes like supernatural secrets and conveniently forgotten fiancés.
One of their favorite conventions to poke fun at is time-travel romance: One song imagines John Titor, alleged time-traveler and subject of a ’90s Internet conspiracy, as an unlikely love interest, whose courtship from the future inadvertently causes unfortunate temporal troubles such as a civil war and the prevention of McKenna’s birth. (Sample lyric: “Don’t know if I have what it takes/To LDR through time and space.”)
“I really hope he hears the song,” says Edwards.
“Whatever timeline he might be in,” McKenna adds.
music@seattleweekly.comI 🌀 Storyboards & Nibs
Roy Marmelstein Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 28, 2016
Yesterday, NatashaTheRobot published a super insightful post about her love of storyboards, listing a multitude of reasons why storyboards and nibs are great.
I agree with most of the arguments — storyboard references make life easier, keeping things small and modular helps avoid many of the downfalls and IBDesignable/IBInspectable is seriously cool.
However, it’s still hard for me to 💖 storyboards & nibs, my feelings are a lot more 🌀 (i.e. mixed). Here’s why:
Can’t handle our scale
Earlier this month, I attended mobile@scale at Facebook’s HQ in London. It was a fascinating day of presentations from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Spotify and Soundcloud. They shared many of their experiences and best practices when working on apps at scale. Here’s a note I made:
The main reason was build times and merge conflicts.
Facebook and Google might be special cases, with thousands of classes and hundreds of engineers sharing the same codebase and yes, by keeping your storyboards small and modular, merge conflicts are a lot less likely in a small team.
However, if you are working for a start-up with significant scaling ambitions, relying heavily on storyboards is the same as placing a major technical debt on the company and forcing a significant future rewrite when the team grows.
Application flow
Storyboards are great for laying out the flow of the application but they force a very linear idea of what that flow is. Implementing more modern navigation concepts and deep linking is significantly harder with storyboards and can easily result in the much feared “storyboard spiderweb”.
Also, it severely restricts your ability to build non-generic gesture-driven user interfaces — think Snapchat or Facebook’s Paper.
Data Flow
You may lay out the flow of your application in the storyboard but what about the data flow?
Apple’s solution for this, a big if statement inside prepareForSegue:sender, is very error prone and restrictive. Custom initialisers simply don’t work with storyboard segues.
One of the Twitter replies to Natasha’s post suggested using dependency injection as an alternative, which seems like a novel approach and something worth looking into.
Chchchchanges
Storyboards are not built for resuability and Natasha recommended using nibs for reusable views. Still though, |
she says. "The people in the job are lovely, but it's soul-destroying. My mum understands but, as she sees it, I'm not trying hard enough. It doesn't feel that way to me."
The Hackney Picturehouse offers zero-hours contracts, which suit some – those, for instance, who have other projects – but not others. Since October last year its sister, the Ritzy in Brixton, the only unionised cinema in the Picturehouse chain (owned by Cineworld, £31m profits last year), has been negotiating to win the living wage. In April it began industrial action. On Wednesday the staff voted on management's latest offer. Operating profits for Picturehouse Cinemas Ltd rose 31% in 2013 to £1.3m. The wage bill for 252 staff in 2013 works out at £14,554 a head, a rise of 75p a week over the previous year. It is increasingly tough to unionise a workforce, especially in a casualised workplace. Chief steward for Bectu at the Ritzy is Nia Hughes, 32, a photography graduate, who has worked at the cinema part-time for five years. "The company said people just walk through the job, why should we pay more? We told them some stay 10 years. They have a right to dignity and respect at work."
The Ritzy now pays £7.53 an hour. Last week's offer raised it to £8, backdated to October 2013, rising to £9.10 in 2016. On Wednesday, 24 of the staff rejected the offer and 23 accepted. "We knew the offer would be divisive because it appeals to those who are in immediate need for money, and that's tough. But, essentially, the offer still puts us two years behind the living wage," Hughes says. "The management has held out for fear of contagion. If we win, that has to have an impact on staff in other cinemas." This week Bectu and management meet again. The management says: "We are close to finding a resolution".
Mary Locke, 59, has worked full time for the NHS in Birmingham for 21 years. She is a housekeeper on a ward with 31 patients, and a Unison shop steward. She shows me her pay slip. Her monthly basic take-home pay is £1,175.82. More than a third of non-medical NHS staff are paid less than £21,000 a year. NHS staff have not received an above-inflation pay rise since 2009. As a result Locke, in the last four years, is £1,807 worse off and will lose another £401 this year. "Fuel and food is a worry," she says. "My husband retired 14 years ago and has bad health, so I worry about the heating bills this winter to keep him warm. We have 18 months to run on the mortgage. It's eight years since we had a holiday. Things break, they need repair. People have had enough. They see we are going backwards. We have to do something."
The independent pay review body for the NHS recommended a 1% increase for all staff. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt announced in March an unconsolidated 1% increase for 40%, but not for the majority, including 70% of nurses and midwives.
For Locke that means that if, for instance, she works overtime on a Saturday the £58.82p she earns will not have the extra fiver that a consolidated 1% increase would have delivered. "We have hard clinical evidence that if NHS staff feel valued that results in a positive outcome for patients," says Christina McAnea, head of health at Unison. "Why isn't that part of any calculation?"
In November GMB and Paul Heaton, former lead singer with the Beautiful South, resume a tour of Next shops in which an asbo is presented to store managers for "failing to make work pay". The company says 30% of jobs are for 12 hours or fewer a week. It currently has 1,200 vacancies – 45% temporary posts, 55% permanent – with 30 applicants for every job advertised. When labour is in surplus it is hard for collective bargaining to make any headway. Pay is £6.70 an hour for an adult, plus an average 6% bonus every month. The company argues that a large number of people like 12-hour contracts, such as "mums fitting in childcare". In 2013, according to the High Pay Centre, Next chief executive Lord Wolfson received £4.6m while his staff typically took home £10,000 a year – 459 times less than their boss. The disparity would have been greater if Wolfson, for the second time, hadn't chosen to waive a bonus and share his £3.8m among the company's staff.
Huge income disparities and increased casualisation of the workforce also means higher costs for the taxpayer subsidising low wages. Research last year by Landman Economics showed that the cost to the exchequer of millions of workers paid less than the living wage – "wage dodging", as the GMB calls it – is £3.23bn a year in social security spending and lower tax receipts. In a paper published last month, academics Dr Lydia Hayes and Professor Tonia Novitz considered how the cake could be sliced more fairly. They say economic inequality was at its lowest when 58% of workers were in trade unions and 82% of wages were set by collective bargaining. By 2012, 26% of the workforce was in trade unions and only 23% covered by collective bargaining, while the gap between top earners and the lowest is higher than at any time since records began.
Among the recommendations Hayes and Novitz make is sectoral bargaining to set terms and conditions across particular industries, and the right for employees to join a union without repercussions. Other proposals from the High Pay Centre include worker representation on company boards, remuneration committees, a maximum pay ratio and a legally binding target for the reduction of inequality.
In Devon, Marcela Almond is at a loss. "I don't know where to go from here. Would we like a family? God, yes. But we can't afford to support ourselves at the moment, let alone a child. This just isn't working."The U.K. company rumored to be producing wafers for the laser diodes for the iPhone 8’s 3D tracking technology has seen its share price treble this year.
The lesser-known company IQE, based in Wales, has neither confirmed or denied its relationship with Apple, but has reported a “significant ramp” in demand for “VCSEL” laser components, which it says will be used for “mass market consumer applications.”
The 3D sensors are likely to be used by Apple for either facial recognition, augmented reality, or autofocus (or all three!) applications for the next-gen iPhone.
Apple has been ramping up its augmented reality efforts with the introduction of ARKit at WWDC back in June. While ARKit works well enough using the existing iPhone camera, the addition of a laser sensor means that depth measurement would be significantly improved. Apple’s own leaks have also seemingly confirmed the presence of facial recognition to unlock in the next-gen iPhone.
While Apple is expected to use a number of laser suppliers, it will reportedly buy its wafers from IQE. According to the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper:
“[IQE] has an 80pc market share in compound semiconductor wafers, which are faster and more efficient than the silicon wafers used in most sensors and microchips, and are especially suited to carrying light signals.”
The iPhone 8 is scheduled to make its debut next month, alongside the more affordable iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus. However, the iPhone 8’s actual shipping could be delayed several weeks due to challenges in the manufacturing process.This is the second in a two-part series examining the play of quarterback Kirk Cousins, who could become one of the NFL’s highest-paid players this offseason. The case for signing him to a long-term deal is here.
While Kirk Cousins has taken positive steps forward this season, the quarterback still has a lot to work on and improve if he is to become worthy of the contract he’s likely to seek. One of his biggest problems with the Washington Redskins in 2016 was missing receivers down the field. While he did a better job taking more deep shots in 2016 than he did in 2015, he still missed a number of opportunities down the field.
At times, it was simply overthrowing his receiver.
Here, against the Dallas Cowboys, Cousins has Jamison Crowder in the slot. Crowder runs a deep over route, crossing the middle of the field to the far seam.
Cousins reads Crowder the whole play, spotting him running behind the underneath zone coverage with plenty of room to run into.
Cousins pulls the trigger on what should be an easy throw. There’s no pressure in the pocket and no defender within five yards of Crowder. But Cousins overthrows him. Crowder tries to dive to get his hands to the ball, but it’s just out of reach.
That’s a throw Cousins can’t miss. It should have been an easy touchdown, but instead the drive stalls and Washington misses out on points. Washington went on to lose the game by four.
For the most part, Cousins spotted receivers down the field this season. But there were still times, even late on in the season, where he failed to see open receivers.
Here against the Carolina Panthers in Week 15, Washington aligns three receivers to the left on a four-verticals concept.
On the outside, the Panthers cornerback stays on top of Pierre Garcon’s route, while the deep safety works inside to Crowder’s deep-over route. Tight end Jordan Reed gets level with the alley defender and starts to run past him. But Cousins, feeling pressure, opts to throw to Garcon on the outside.
Garcon never gets past his defender, who stays on top of the route the whole time and reads the throw the whole way. Meanwhile, Reed is wide open up the seam for what would have been a touchdown.
Throwing down the field isn’t easy, but Cousins missed too many opportunities this year. The scheme run by Gruden and McVay had receivers running open consistently, but Cousins didn’t take advantage as often as he should have.
Washington set up this play earlier in the game. On the first third down of the game, DeSean Jackson motioned to the left and ran to the flat as part of a slant-flat combination with tight end Jordan Reed. Cousins missed Jackson in the flat, but the look was the key part of the play. Later in the game, they came back to the same look, showing Jackson motioning to the left in what looked to be a repeat of the same play from earlier. But instead, Jackson turned his flat route into an out-and-up route down the sideline.
The corner bites on the flat route, leaving Jackson space to turn up the field and down the sideline. Cousins gets pressured relatively quickly, but should still be able to put the throw well out in front of Jackson, who has the speed to run under it and score a touchdown.
However, the throw from Cousins is high and outside behind Jackson, making it nearly uncatchable. Jackson does his best to reach back for it, but fails to come up with the catch.
Missed opportunities like those cannot happen as often as they did this past season. Every quarterback misses throws; it happens. But Cousins missed too many, especially for someone who might become the highest-paid quarterback in the league.
The other problem Cousins had was the occasional rash decision. In years gone by, Cousins has been prone to multiple poor decisions per game. He cut down on the number of bad decisions this season, but he was still prone to them from time to time and they often led to ugly interceptions.
Back in Week 2, Washington finds itself in the red zone. Garcon runs a dig route in the back of the end zone.
Cousins feels pressure from his right, making him slide to his left. As he does that, he locks in on Garcon, who he knows should be able to split the safeties in the back of the end zone. However, three defenders all have eyes directly on Cousins and are ready to break on any throw he makes. With Cousins rolling to his left and looking to throw back across his body, he has to know where the safety is on the opposite side.
Cousins throws the ball while slightly falling away, causing the throw to lack velocity. That gives Barry Church, the back side safety, time to work across the jump the route. He even got there too early and had to reach behind him to make the interception in the end zone. It prevented a touchdown when the Redskins led, 23-20. Instead of falling behind by 10, Dallas drove the field for the winning touchdown.
Cousins ended the season in devastating fashion. Needing to beat the Giants to secure a place in the playoffs, Cousins had a chance to lead his team down the field in the two-minute drill, needing just a field goal to take the lead.
Washington runs a basic route concept, with the slot receiver running a go route to clear out space for the dig route from the outside.
As Garcon breaks inside on the dig route, Cousins feels pressure from his right and is forced to pull the ball down and slide to his left.
That movement disrupts the timing of the throw to Garcon. But instead of moving on to another target or attempting to scramble, Cousins attempts to force the ball to Garcon.
Throwing late over the middle is never advisable, but Cousins throw also lacks velocity because of the pressure disrupting his footwork. Those factors all add up and result in the cornerback covering Garcon being able to recover and undercut the route, intercepting the pass and effectively ending Washington’s season.
There couldn’t have been a worse way to end a season, especially considering the contract situation. With the way the team has been built, with heavy investments in offense, it was the situation Washington preferred to be in. Instead of trusting a poor defense to hold a lead, the high-powered offense had a chance to go and win or tie the game — they were down, 13-10 — and take the team into the playoffs. But in the clutch moment, Cousins made a crushing mistake. Washington will have to decide if that’s something Cousins can learn from and move forward, or if that’s just who he is.
With the number of changes to the coaching staff and potentially to the roster, Washington’s 2017 team could be drastically different from its 2016 team. While Cousins has been productive, he’s had a fantastic supporting cast. Both Garcon and Jackson are free agents. Jackson appears likely to leave, perhaps going back to Philadelphia, or possibly to Los Angeles, his home town, to team up with Sean McVay again. Garcon has stated publicly he’d like to be back, but he’s one of the top wide receivers set to hit the market and should receive plenty of good offers, meaning it’s no guarantee he’s back.
Washington still has Reed, a star tight end, slot receiver Jamison Crowder and 2016 first-round pick Josh Doctson. However, Reed has yet to play a 16-game season because of various injuries while Doctson hardly played during his rookie season because of mysterious Achilles’ tendon injuries. With that many potential changes, on top of the loss of McVay and with Gruden taking over the play-calling duties, the continuity factor isn’t quite as big as it was this time last year. Can Cousins maintain a high level of production with fewer weapons and changes to the coaching staff?
Gruden is also entering a key period of his contract. He’ll likely find himself on the hot seat this year and if Washington fails to make the playoffs and moves on from Gruden, does it still want to be tied to his quarterback long term? Any new head coach would have to be fine with working with Cousins and not able to pick his own guy at the most important position in the sport. Washington could tag Cousins and then not be tied to him long term in case of this scenario, but then risk letting him walk for nothing next year.
If a hypothetical deal from the 49ers involved a package including the second overall pick to reunite Cousins with Kyle Shanahan, then Washington would have to seriously consider it. They proved this year that despite the offense being very good, it couldn’t carry a woefully poor defense. Having the chance to land an elite defensive talent at the top of the draft, like Alabama’s Jonathan Allen or Texas A&M’s Myles Garrett, along with still having the 17th overall pick would go a long way to help rebuilding the defense and thus a better overall team long term.
Cousins may prefer this route as well. Sure, a long term contract in Washington would guarantee him some security and a great deal of money. But if Washington opts to move on from Gruden next offseason, Cousins has to start over again with a new coach. Going to San Francisco to team up with Shanahan, who he’s already familiar with, could be a more enticing prospect because in theory Shanahan should have more job security as a new head coach.
Mark Bullock is The Insider’s Outsider, sharing his Redskins impressions without the benefit of access to the team. For more, click here.
More from The Post:
Allen: Goal is to sign Cousins long term | Cousins open to a return
Standout D-linemen and safeties in Mobile | 10 to watch at Senior Bowl
Wide receiver Josh Doctson’s recovery continues at a slow pace
More: Redskins | Coaching hire news | Photos | Super Bowl & NFL news
Follow: @MikeJonesWaPo | @lizclarketweet | @MasterTesPears are one of the world’s favorite fruits and have been so for thousands of years. Here are some interesting facts about pears that you may not have known.
There are over 3000 varieties of pears grown around the world. Pears are native to Asia and Europe. The first pear tree was planted in the North America in 1620 in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The Chinese considered the pear, which they call “li,” to be a symbol of immortality. The destruction of a pear tree symbolized tragic or untimely death. Before tobacco was introduced in Europe, pear leaves were smoked. The pear was sacred to two goddesses in Greek mythology – Hera and Aphrodite. It was also sacred to the corresponding Roman goddesses, Juno and Venus, as well as to Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruitfulness. Towns with an abundance of pear trees often included the word Perry in the name of the town.
7. Pears were used as a natural remedy against nausea in ancient Greece.
8. The word pyriform means “pear-shaped.”
9. Pears are often recommended for weaning babies because they are low in acid and aren’t too harsh on a baby’s digestive system.
10.Pears are considered by some to be hypoallergenic because pear allergy is rare. However, people who are allergic to Alder or Birch pollen may be allergic to pears as well.
11. The Bartlett is the most popular variety of pear in the United States.
12. Most pears (about 95%) sold in the U.S. are grown on the west coast, in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California.
13. Pear wood is used to make furniture, musical instruments, and wood carvings. It is also used to make wooden kitchen utensils because it doesn’t impart any color or odor to the food and because it is tough enough to withstand repeated trips through the dishwasher without splintering or warping. Architect’s rulers are made from pear wood because it doesn’t warp.
And don’t forget to like our Facebook page!The recently installed Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), has no intention of finding any compromise on network neutrality. If he can't override the new rules, he will work to defund their enforcement. And if that doesn't work, he will continue railing against a "government takeover of the Internet" in speeches until something gets done.
Boehner gave his first speech outside of Washington DC as Speaker of the House yesterday, appearing at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville Tennessee. The speech moved quickly from a discussion of that morning's sermon text (“No man can serve two masters”) to a discussion of God's love of humility to an assertion that America was founded on said humility and that this in turn led to the freedoms that Americans enjoy.
Those freedoms are now “under attack by power structure in Washington populated with regulators who have never set foot inside a radio station or television studio." That's right—net neutrality is Boehner's top bogeyman, reminding us just how seriously Republicans take the issue.
The Congressional fight over net neutrality looks set to be a brutal one. From the speech:
The last thing we need, in my view, is the FCC serving as Internet traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over local broadcasters who have been serving their communities with free content for decades. At the end of the last Congress, some members of Congress sought a compromise on net neutrality that would give Washington temporary control of the Internet while we sort this all out. As far as I'm concerned, there is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms. So our new majority in the House is committed to using every tool at our disposal to fight a government takeover of the Internet We're also going to do what we can to see that no taxpayer dollars are used to fund these net neutrality rules.
In the audience was Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the member of Congress who has already introduced legislation to strip the FCC of any net neutrality powers.
Last December, Blackburn compared the FCC to “vampires” who want nothing more than to leap onto the backs of unsuspecting American businesses and sink their fangs deep into the sweet, sweet lifeblood.
Among her charges, Blackburn claimed that the FCC was “effectively nationalizing the Web” with its new rules. Fortunately, the Republicans were wielding the garlic and a wooden stake.
“Industry and creative content providers who were coerced into this deal by an over zealous FCC Chairman should take heart," she wrote. "Like the breaking of dawn, the new Congress will prove a swift antidote to the federal bloodsucker you found at your throat this Christmas."
With Boehner and Blackburn leading the charge on net neutrality, possibilities for any sort of compromise agreement appear remote. The real battle will take place in the Senate, where Democrats maintain a majority, but are not all united behind network neutrality, despite President Obama's campaign promise to support the principle.The Scottish government has announced a moratorium on all planning consents for unconventional oil and gas extraction, including fracking.
Welcomed by campaigners as “a very big nail in the coffin for the unconventional gas and fracking industry in Scotland”, energy minister Fergus Ewing told the Scottish parliament on Wednesday afternoon that the moratorium would allow time for the government to launch a full public consultation on the controversial drilling technique, and to commission a full public health impact assessment.
Westminster MPs on Monday defeated an attempt to impose a UK-wide moratorium but the coalition government had to accept several Labour proposals to tighten regulation of shale developments.
“Given the importance of this work it would be inappropriate to allow any planning consents in the meantime,” Ewing told the Holyrood chamber, to applause. “I am therefore announcing a moratorium for the granting of planning consents on all unconventional oil and gas extraction including fracking.” He said that the Scottish government would also be working to further strengthen planning guidance and strong environmental regulation.
Acknowledging that local communities would bear the brunt of any developments, Ewing said that a public consultation “will allow everyone with a view to feed it in to government”.
He added that the government would take evidence from all interested parties, including chemical giant Ineos which owns Grangemouth oil and gas refinery and has acquired 729 square miles of fracking exploration licences around the central belt.
Dr Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, described the announcement as a “huge victory for the communities, individuals and groups who have been campaigning to stop this dirty industry in Scotland”.
He added that he believed any serious examination of the mounting evidence would inevitably lead to a ban.
“The Scottish government has acted decisively today to protect communities across the country and the environment from this unnecessary industry.
“While we are calling for an outright ban, a halt on the industry while a full examination of health and environmental impacts is carried out is very welcome. Scotland joins France, Ireland, the Netherlands and New York State in a long list of countries and regions which have acted to stop the unconventional gas industry. We are convinced that a proper examination of the mounting evidence of health and environmental concerns must lead to a full ban.”
Asked in the Holyrood chamber by Scottish Green MSP Alison Johnstone why he would not impose an outright ban on fracking, Ewing reiterated that the Scottish government wanted “a national debate which is characterised by examining the evidence”. He said that the moratorium would apply until process of evidence gathering and consultation has been concluded, and that the public consultation was likely to be launched within the next two months.
WWF Scotland director Lang Banks also welcomed the Scottish government’s decision to impose the UK’s first moratorium on onshore unconventional oil and gas, but cautioned that it did not fully shut the door on new fossil fuel extraction.
“There is overwhelming public opinion in favour of cleaner forms of energy and a sufficient body of evidence why unconventional oil and gas are neither good for people or the planet. While this rightly puts a hold on fracking for now, we hope the final decision will be to rule it out completely.”
The Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy wrote to first minister Nicola Sturgeon on Monday, urging her to adopt his party’s triple lock proposal on fracking, which includes a local referendum before final planning approval is given. The SNP in turn criticised Scottish Labour MPs for failing to support Monday’s amendment to the infrastructure bill calling for a UK-wide moratorium, which the majority of SNP MPs voted for.
Ken Cronin, chief executive of Ukoog, the trade body that represents the sector, said that industry welcomed the consultation. “We recognise that the general public have concerns about the issues around fracking and welcome this opportunity to present the facts to the Scottish people. Many independent reports, including the independent panel set up by the Scottish government, have commented that a robust regulatory process is substantially in place. Scotland needs to produce its own oil and gas for both economic and energy security reasons.”
Public opposition to fracking in Scotland, which gained a high profile during last summer’s independence referendum campaign, has grown in momentum over the past six months with local opposition groups forming in particular around the central belt where Ineos was concentrating its activities. An online poll by Usurv of public opinion on fracking across the UK found that Scots were most likely to oppose the practice, with 54% saying they were against it, and less than 8% happy for it to happen elsewhere.
Full control over fracking is due to be devolved to Scotland after May’s general election, following recommendations of last November’s Smith commission. On Tuesday, the Welsh first minister Carwyn Jones said that he believed that fracking licensing should also be devolved to Wales, and that the Welsh parliament should consider a moratorium on fracking.Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF
If there’s anything Star Wars fans know about Gareth Edwards, it’s that he’s a very hands-on director. A recent demonstration shows how Industrial Light and Magic found a way to bring Edwards’ physical camerawork to the digital stage for Rogue One, using virtual reality.
BBC Click shared a visit to ILM London to get a behind-the-scenes peek at Rogue One’s digital prowess, in the wake of its Visual Effects Oscar nomination. During the interview, computer graphics supervisor Steve Ellis discussed how much ILM admired Edwards’ ability to get physical with his camerawork on set, and revealed that the visual effects advisor wanted him to be able to do that digitally.
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So, they created what Ellis called a real-time virtual reality system, which was basically an iPad hooked up to an HTC Vive virtual reality controller. They’d pull up a digital scene for him, like the Star Destroyer’s scary reveal at the newly constructed Death Star. Then, using Steam VR tracking, Edwards would physically move the screen around, pinpointing what angle he’d want the shot to begin at and where he would want it to end up. The VFX artists would map out the scene’s progression to match.
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“He would walk around and decide where he wanted the shots to start and end,” Ellis said. “This was how Gareth was filming, moving around and finding interesting framing.”
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This kind of filmmaking isn’t new. Peter Jackson used a form of augmented reality to direct VFX shots for Lord of the Rings, and a lot of advancements in simulcam tech were developed for James Cameron’s Avatar. However, Rogue One’s VR work is something else entirely... mainly because it’s so accessible. Thanks to the advancements in virtual reality, ILM was able to rig a basic tablet to a consumer-grade VR device and digitally direct a multi-million dollar picture. Director Jon Favreau said he’ll be using similar VR tech for digital site scouting and shot planning for the live-action The Lion King movie.
It’s kind of incredible how VR you could purchase at Best Buy helped make the movie such a success. Rogue One’s final battles are some of the most dynamic scenes in Star Wars history, digital or physical. Edwards may have been using a fake camera, but the movie magic was entirely real.
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[YouTube]We're open-sourcing OpenAI Baselines, our internal effort to reproduce reinforcement learning algorithms with performance on par with published results. We'll release the algorithms over upcoming months; today's release includes DQN and three of its variants.
Reinforcement learning results are tricky to reproduce: performance is very noisy, algorithms have many moving parts which allow for subtle bugs, and many papers don't report all the required tricks. By releasing known-good implementations (and best practices for creating them), we’d like to ensure that apparent RL advances never are due to comparison with buggy or untuned versions of existing algorithms.
This post contains some best practices we use for correct RL algorithm implementations, as well as the details of our first release: DQN and three of its variants, algorithms developed by DeepMind.
Best Practices
Compare to a random baseline: in the video below, an agent is taking random actions in the game H.E.R.O. If you saw this behavior in early stages of training, it'd be really easy to trick yourself into believing that the agent is learning. So you should always verify your agent outperforms a random one.
Be wary of non-breaking bugs: when we looked through a sample of ten popular reinforcement learning algorithm reimplementations we noticed that six had subtle bugs found by a community member and confirmed by the author. These ranged from mild bugs that ignored gradients on some examples or implemented causal convolutions incorrectly to serious ones that reported scores higher than the true result.
See the world as your agent does: like most deep learning approaches, for DQN we tend to convert images of our environments to grayscale to reduce the computation required during training. This can create its own bugs: when we ran our DQN algorithm on Seaquest we noticed that our implementation was performing poorly. When we inspected the environment we discovered this was because our post-processed images contained no fish, as this picture shows.
When transforming the screen images into greyscale we had incorrectly calibrated our coefficients for the green color values, which led to the fish disappearing. After we noticed the bug we tweaked the color values and our algorithm was able to see the fish again.
To debug issues like this in the future, Gym now contains a play function, which lets a researcher easily see the same observations as the AI agent would.
Fix bugs, then hyperparameters: After debugging, we started to calibrate our hyperparameters. We ultimately found that setting the annealing schedule for epsilon, a hyperparameter which controlled the exploration rate, had a huge impact on performance. Our final implementation decreases epsilon to 0.1 over the first million steps and then down to 0.01 over the next 24 million steps. If our implementation contained bugs, then it's likely we would come up with different hyperparameter settings to try to deal with faults we hadn't yet diagnosed.
Double check your interpretations of papers: In the DQN Nature paper the authors write: "We also found it helpful to clip the error term from the update [...] to be between -1 and 1.". There are two ways to interpret this statement — clip the objective, or clip the multiplicative term when computing gradient. The former seems more natural, but it causes the gradient to be zero on transitions with high error, which leads to suboptimal performance, as found in one DQN implementation. The latter is correct and has a simple mathematical interpretation — Huber Loss. You can spot bugs like these by checking that the gradients appear as you expect — this can be easily done within TensorFlow by using
compute_gradients.
The majority of bugs in this post were spotted by going over the code multiple times and thinking through what could go wrong with each line. Each bug seems obvious in hindsight, but even experienced researchers tend to underestimate how many passes over the code it can take to find all the bugs in an implementation.
Deep Q-Learning
We use Python 3 and TensorFlow. This release includes:
DQN : A reinforcement learning algorithm that combines Q-Learning with deep neural networks to let RL work for complex, high-dimensional environments, like video games, or robotics.
: A reinforcement learning algorithm that combines Q-Learning with deep neural networks to let RL work for complex, high-dimensional environments, like video games, or robotics. Double Q Learning : Corrects the stock DQN algorithm’s tendency to sometimes overestimate the values tied to specific actions.
: Corrects the stock DQN algorithm’s tendency to sometimes overestimate the values tied to specific actions. Prioritized Replay : Extends DQN’s experience replay function by learning to replay memories where the real reward significantly diverges from the expected reward, letting the agent adjust itself in response to developing incorrect assumptions.
: Extends DQN’s experience replay function by learning to replay memories where the real reward significantly diverges from the expected reward, letting the agent adjust itself in response to developing incorrect assumptions. Dueling DQN: Splits the neural network into two — one learns to provide an estimate of the value at every timestep, and the other calculates potential advantages of each action, and the two are combined for a single action-advantage Q function.
To get started, run the following:
pip install baselines # Train model and save the results to cartpole_model.pkl python -m baselines.deepq.experiments.train_cartpole # Load the model saved in cartpole_model.pkl and visualize the learned policy python -m baselines.deepq.experiments.enjoy_cartpole
We've also provided trained agents, which you can obtain by running:
python -m baselines.deepq.experiments.atari.download_model --blob model-atari-prior-duel-breakout-1 --model-dir /tmp/models python -m baselines.deepq.experiments.atari.enjoy --model-dir /tmp/models/model-atari-prior-duel-breakout-1 --env Breakout --dueling
Benchmarks
We've included an iPython notebook showing the performance of our DQN implementations on Atari games. You can compare the performance of our various algorithms such as Dueling Double Q learning with Prioritized Replay (yellow), Double Q learning with Prioritized Replay (blue), Dueling Double Q learning (green) and Double Q learning (red).
AI is an empirical science, where the ability to do more experiments directly correlates with progress. With Baselines, researchers can spend less time implementing pre-existing algorithms and more time designing new ones. If you'd like to help us refine, extend, and develop AI algorithms then join us at OpenAI.A lethargic cat can sometimes be a difficult thing to spot, since they’re naturally less energetic than dogs. Lethargy can be a sign of serious problems, so it is best to take note of such behaviors. Is the cat less apt to jump to his favorite spots? Does he avoid contact, or hide in unusual spaces? These can all be sick cat symptoms, in some cases of serious disorders or life threatening illness.
A lethargic cat after vaccination is a fairly common side effect of cat vaccinations—in addition to vomiting, fever, or sneezing. Although an owner should still keep a close eye on their lethargic cat for several weeks, any side effects should pass naturally.
Of more concern is a cat not eating. In this case, a lethargic cat is lethargic because of lower blood sugar levels. General weakness, or trembling follows cat loss of appetite, and the reasons a cat stops eating are many. It could be it dislikes a change in diet, there are environmental stress factors affecting the cat, or there could be an injury or illness of the teeth or mouth.
In other cases, it may be an internal illness or disorder that is causing the cat to avoid food and thus weaken it. Feline leukemia, kidney or liver disorders, pancreatitis, or anemia can weaken the cat and deter it from eating. When a lethargic cat refuses to eat or drink, this is of serious concern and should be addressed by a vet immediately.
The best way to prevent more serious illnesses from affecting your cat is to watch its normal behavior, and respond to drastic changes by seeking medical attention.Food is good. Wine is better. Food and wine are best.
But which food and wine go best together?
In this post we’ll cover the different types of wines and which foods pair best with each.
Popular Varietals
White Wine Pairings
Chardonnay: A full-bodied white wine, Chardonnay grows best in the Burgundy region of France (its original home), California and Australia. The taste differs on location: French Chardonnays tend to be citrusy, while California Chardonnays carry strong vanilla notes due to aging in oak barrels.
Pairs with: poultry, fish (notably shellfish and halibut), mild, creamy cheese and any dishes with rich, butter or cream based sauces.
Sauvignon Blanc: Lighter than Chardonnay, this white wine hails from the Bordeaux region of France. Like Chardonnay, however, this varietal’s flavor varies widely based on location. French versions have strong herbal notes (eucalyptus is common) while New Zealand varieties have tropical flavors (e.g. melon and/or mango).
Pairs with: lower fat meats (oysters, clams, flaky white fish, chicken breasts, veal); herbal Sauvignon Blancs also pair well with bell peppers, olives, spinach and other leafy greens.
Riesling: Originally from the Rhine region of Germany, Riesling is a highly acidic wine and can be anywhere from bone dry to super sweet. It is seldom aged in oak.
Pairs with: lighter Rieslings go well light raw or lightly cooked fish; more full bodied Rieslings pair nicely with |
business to conclude here.
At one level, with or without immediate charter approval, any successor regulator to the Press Complaints Commission will need to be able to demonstrate its manifest independence from the biggest beasts in the newspaper industry (including, of course, the Mail). The chairman and board of a convincing "Independent" Press Standards Organisation can't be placemen and women with vested interests to serve. That's still the impression as matters currently rest, though. David Cameron, let alone many MPs, won't sit silently by if the stitch marks are painfully obvious. Independence needs fixing.
But there is something even more troublesome lurking here, between the genteel language of correct discussion and the hyperbole of the blog. British opinion, scanning right across Fleet Street, is invited to wax incandescent about a reporter at a memorial drinks party or snapped photograph out of place. Quite right, and quite important. But, if you care about real privacy, expressed in the impenetrable encryption language of America's National Security Agency or Cheltenham's GCHQ, then the revelations from the Guardian, the Washington Post, Der Spiegel and the New York Times – the Edward Snowden revelations – simply dwarf such familiar little intrusions.
Most of our press has walked by on the other side. The Mail has snarled, not supported. And there's a grim, growing sense in which Leveson and any concomitant, lawyer-infested regulation in time-warp Britain is as frail as the latest master computer program – and politicians' understanding of it. That's nuts.A high-ranking Justice Department official believes Special Counsel Robert Mueller has granted a complete get-out-of-jail-free-card deal for disgraced FBI Director James Comey: A coveted immunity deal in exchange for cooperating as a key witness.
“The immunity is a done deal,” a Justice Department source said. “Mueller can do whatever he wants. We (Justice) have no say but after many years working criminal cases I know Comey has been given immunity. You can tell by the way he is acting now and the fact that Mueller has kept us in the dark about his investigation.”
Special Counsel spokesman Peter Carr at Justice would not comment when asked to detail the immunity arrangement between Comey and Mueller.
“As this is an ongoing investigation, we will decline to comment,” Carr told True Pundit.
As Special Counsel, by law Mueller is permitted to strike immunity agreements without having to get approval for the Attorney General of anyone at Justice. Also he is not obligated as Special Counsel to inform Justice about who is under immunity.
It’s no secret Comey and Mueller are close friends, having worked together at Justice for years alongside Eric Holder. Comey has described Mueller, who also served as FBI director, as his one-time mentor. If someone in Congress cared enough to do something about it, there are no shortages of conflicts of interests at play here in what is supposed to be an impartial investigation. In fact, it’s somewhat staggering.
But what are friends for? Folks outside of D.C. are getting another unwelcome crash course into corruption.
#Comey's leak got Mueller appointed special counsel. Comey will work behind scenes w/ him to steer investigation. Be warned. I know both. — Thomas Paine (@Thomas1774Paine) June 9, 2017
A complete review of this case illustrates that by striking an immunity deal Comey has essentially used the Washington D.C. system and his connections to insulate himself from any felony criminal charges, including whether he participated in the illegal unmasking of Trump or any other Americans during the election based on FISA court-ordered wiretaps or whether he played a role covering up crimes committed by Hillary Clinton.
A refresher. First, Comey himself leaked at least one memo that actually sparked the Justice Department to appoint a Special Counsel. Then, from a pool of countless candidates to serve as Special Counsel, Mueller — a close friend and long-time mentor of Comey — just happened to get picked.Then, an immunity deal is agreed on which allowed Comey to speak carefree at his Senate hearings last week and beyond.
Comey’s likely deal insulates him against prosecution for his role in:
Leaking other government documents to third parties including the media
Inconsistencies in testimony that rise to the level or perjury
Any role he played in the illegal surveillance or wiretapping of Trump during the election
Any other crimes Comey may have committed during his tenure as FBI director, including his role in quashing the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
His role in unmasking Trump, Trump insiders and other Americans from FISA warrant intelligence
Any violations of FBI employment ethics that would nullify pension benefits.Cleveland fans aren’t being quiet about the chase for history. (David Richard/USA TODAY Sports)
CLEVELAND — The Streak, now 21 games old and growing, is a living, breathing thing, making history, claiming new victims, sucking in all the oxygen in baseball. By now, it very likely has its own Twitter feed. It is gazed upon with astonishment from all corners of the country and celebrated in all corners of Cleveland, save for a roughly 60-foot-by-60-foot square of lush, carpeted, cherrywood-paneled room in the bowels of Progressive Field where the Cleveland Indians make their home for 81 games each year.
With a 5-3 victory Wednesday afternoon over the Detroit Tigers, the Indians have the longest winning streak in American League history and the longest in baseball in 82 years. Their 21st straight win pushed them past the 2002 Oakland A’s, who won 20 straight, and tied them with the 1935 Chicago Cubs for the longest in the sport’s modern era (not counting the 26 straight wins, interrupted by a tie, of the 1916 New York Giants).
Win No. 21 — spelled out, it looks like this: WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW — came courtesy of 5 2/3 innings of effective pitching from Indians starter Mike Clevinger, who sports a 4-0 record and 0.38 ERA over the course of the streak; 3 1/3 spotless innings from a quartet of relievers out of their superb bullpen; and timely home runs from Jay Bruce and Roberto Perez, the former an August trade acquisition, the latter a backup catcher batting.219.
As closer Cody Allen collected the final outs, a crowd of 29,346, day-drunk on wins, stood and roared its approval. On Thursday, the Indians will host the Kansas City Royals with a chance to stand alone with 22 straight wins.
The last time the Indians lost a game, on Aug. 23, Hurricane Harvey was still churning off the Gulf of Mexico and was two days from making landfall in Texas. The cover of Sports Illustrated on newsstands that week was asking whether the 2017 Los Angeles Dodgers were the best team ever. Indians outfielder Greg Allen was still nine days away from making his big league debut; nearly two weeks into his career, he has yet to know what it feels like to lose in the majors.
[The Nationals should forget about catching the Dodgers and plan for the postseason]
“They’re enjoying themselves,” Indians Manager Terry Francona said of his players. “And they should. It’s pretty special.”
But that is about as close as anyone wearing an Indians uniform will get to acknowledging what the rest of baseball is obsessing over: a streak that is remarkable not just for its length but for the sheer daily dominance it puts on display, perhaps shown most explicitly in the plus-104 run-differential the Indians have managed during its course. They have a 1.57 team ERA and a.939 team OPS during the streak, and their bullpen hasn’t allowed a run in nine days.
The daily game of reporters trying to bait the Indians into talking about The Streak in breathless, astonished sound bites has become almost comical. It’s as if the Indians have imposed an internal fine system whereupon a player or staff member is docked every time they utter the word “streak.”
“I feel like we’re just showing up on the field to play,” Clevinger said. “It doesn’t feel like we’re going after something, other than that same goal to finish October on top.”
When someone asked Bruce whether the team’s accomplishment has sunk in, he fired back: “Absolutely not. We’re so focused. Everyone talks about the streak” — oops, that’s a fine! — “and being consumed with it, but what consumes us is the daily schedule and the game we have to get ready for … Our focus tends to stay so right where we are and then move to the next, and then move to the next.
“We don’t have time to worry about what happened in the past and we definitely don’t have time to worry about what could happen in the future.”
On Wednesday, when Clevinger put the Indians in a 1-0 hole in the top of the first, it was the first time they had trailed since Saturday. But by the time the inning was over, they led 3-1, thanks to Bruce’s three-run homer in the bottom half, which kept alive one of the most jaw-dropping stats from the streak: In 189 innings during these past 21 games, the Indians have still trailed at the end of only four.
“I don’t think there was a second that I doubted we were going to score some runs,” Clevinger said, “or string together some hits. I wasn’t just wishing we were going to score. I kind of knew that we were going to score, and what was I going to do to keep [Detroit’s run total] where it is.”
[Indians’ win streak is even more amazing than it seems]
Everyone knew the 2017 Indians had the chance to be significantly better than the team that pushed the Cubs all the way to the 10th inning of Game 7 of the World Series 11 months ago before falling. That team had to make do in October without its Nos. 2 and 3 starting pitchers, Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar, as well as No. 3 hitter Michael Brantley — whom Francona has called “the heart and soul of the team” — and had not yet signed (in December) free agent slugger Edwin Encarnacion or traded (last month) for outfielder Bruce, who have held down the fourth and fifth spots in the lineup since their arrivals.
At times, as when Trevor Bauer sliced up his hand while repairing a drone on an off-day, the Indians’ postseason rotation seemed to consist of ace Corey Kluber and whichever other pitchers were able to raise their arms above their heads on a given day.
But this year, Kluber not only is the favorite to win the AL Cy Young Award, but Bauer and Carrasco are a combined 31-14, and Clevinger has pitched himself into the postseason rotation.
One major league scout in attendance this week, asked for his assessment of the Indians on Wednesday, chuckled and said, “They’re unbelievable. I mean, I don’t see a weakness. They can beat you in so many different ways.”
Equally scary is the fact the Indians are playing at about 85 percent their full capacity these days. All 21 wins of the streak have been achieved without the services of their primary leadoff and No. 3 hitters, Jason Kipnis and Brantley, as well as lefty Andrew Miller, the ace of their bullpen. All are working themselves back from injuries, with Miller set to rejoin the team this week, just in time to get back up to speed for the postseason.
A 21-game winning streak, of course, gets you nothing besides those 21 wins. The only other team since 1900 to win 21 straight, the ’35 Cubs, lost in the World Series. The last team to win 20 straight, the 2002 Oakland A’s, flamed out in the Division Series, while the Anaheim Angels, a wild-card team that finished four games behind Oakland in the AL West, went on to win the World Series. Meantime, Manager John McGraw’s 1916 Giants went 86-66 and finished fourth in the eight-team National League.
Of all the people to ask which streak should count as the record — the ’35 Cubs’ 21 straight, or the ’16 Giants’ run of 26 wins and a tie across 27 games — Francona was perhaps the least likely to give an informed opinion. And yet, someone tried Wednesday afternoon.
“I wasn’t there,” Francona, 58, deadpanned. “I have given that zero thought, I promise you.”
In the media, in the stands and in other corners of the game, The Streak may be a thing to gaze upon and admire, but to the Indians it is not one big creature, but 21 tiny ones, each representing a day when they showed up to work, did their jobs well and forgot about it, because there would be another game tomorrow.The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by the owners of a guest house after they had been found guilty of discrimination against a gay couple who wanted to stay in a double room.
The court rejected a legal challenge by Peter and Hazelmary Bull who turned away civil partners Martin Hall and Steven Preddy, from their Chymorvah Hotel near Penzance in 2008. The Bulls' claimed they had a policy of not allowing unmarried couples of whatever sex to share double bed rooms, but NSS council member Ray Newton said that he had shared such a room with his (opposite sex) partner at the hotel – even though they aren't married. There was never any question asked about their marital status, even though they signed the register with different surnames.
The Bulls would have been prepared to have accommodated the same sex couple in a twin bedded room, and helped with the finding of alternative accommodation and contributing the additional cost.
Judges had already twice ruled the Bulls broke equality laws in the running of their business. In February, the Court of Appeal upheld a ruling against the Bulls made by Bristol County Court in early 2011. It stated that the Bulls' behaviour amounted to direct discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and awarded a total of £3,600 damages to Mr Hall and Mr Preddy.
With the support of the Christian Institute, the Bulls then took the case to the Supreme Court where on Wednesday 27 November five justices ruled against them.
Lady Hale, deputy president of the Supreme Court, said: "Sexual orientation is a core component of a person's identity which requires fulfilment through relationships with others of the same orientation."
The deputy legal director at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Wendy Hewitt, added: "The courts have been very clear throughout this long-running case that same-sex couples should not be subjected to discrimination when accessing services. This is what Parliament intended when it approved the 2007 Sexual Orientation Regulations and then passed the Equality Act 2010, well aware that gay men and lesbians have long suffered discrimination when seeking to stay away from home as a couple."
The Bulls and supporters claim homosexual rights have trumped their religious rights. The judgement could not have refuted that more emphatically: "If Mr Preddy and Mr Hall ran a hotel which denied a double room to Mr and Mrs Bull, whether on the ground of their Christian beliefs or on the ground of their sexual orientation, they would find themselves in the same situation that Mr and Mrs Bull find themselves today."
The Bulls also believe that they should be able to discriminate because this was their "home". The court clearly believed instead that the private hotel was covered by the equality legislation which refers to "accommodation in a hotel, boarding house or similar establishment". The only possible grounds for exemption relate to "religious organisations, as opposed to individuals." The Bulls had considered exploiting that option, prior to closing down their establishment, which followed a downturn in business partly connected to their admissions policy.
The Supreme Court relied in this respect on a key judgement of the Grand Chamber in Bayatyan v Armenia: "Freedom of thought, conscience and religion... is, in its religious dimension, one of the most vital elements that go to make up the identity of believers and their conception of life, but it is also a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, sceptics and the unconcerned.... That freedom entails, inter alia, freedom to hold or not to hold religious beliefs and to practise or not to practise a religion."
The case was decided on the basis that Messrs Hall and Preddy's civil partnership is practically "indistinguishable from the status of marriage", and therefore the Bulls could not discriminate against them while accepting opposite sex married couples. On the other hand, in the words of the judgment: "They are also free to continue to deny double-bedded rooms to same sex and unmarried couples, provided that they also deny them to married couples."
See also: Turning away a gay couple doesn't make you a Christian martyrOumar Ballo put himself on the radar of NBA teams, colleges and international scouts with a dominant performance earlier this month in the FIBA Under-16 African Championship held in Vacoas-Phoenix, Mauritius, a tiny island nation in the Indian Ocean.
The 6-foot-10, 238-pound 15-year-old posted 25.7 points and 22.8 rebounds per-40 minutes on 68 percent shooting from the field, helping Mali cruise to an 8-0 record and first-place finish that secured the emerging West African basketball powerhouse a spot at the FIBA Under-17 World Championship in 2018 in Argentina.
The level of competition at the event was admittedly fairly weak, with traditional African talent hotspots Nigeria, Senegal, South Sudan, Angola and Cameroon all declining to send representatives to the event for reasons such as internal federation politics, a lack of resources and an inability to gather their most talented prospects already playing in the U.S. or Europe. Still, Ballo's performance -- and especially his potential -- playing up a year on the competition is notable. Editor's Picks Scouting potential 2019 No. 1 pick R.J. Barrett, more U19 prospects Canada's R.J. Barrett put up one of the best individual performances ever at the FIBA youth level during this month's Under-19 World Cup. Jonathan Givony gives his scouting report on the 17-year-old forward and more standout prospects in Cairo.
How a 7-foot farmer became Iceland's rare NBA prospect Not even four years removed from herding sheep and driving snowmobiles, Tryggvi Hlinason is now the future of Icelandic basketball.
Scouting best draft prospects at U20 European Championship How did the most noteworthy NBA draft prospects do at the FIBA under-20 European Championship in Crete? Mike Schmitz reports on multiple international and college players with pro intrigue. 2 Related
With a 6-5 mother and 6-8 father, Ballo grew up playing soccer in Koulikoro. He didn't pick up a basketball until he decided he was too tall to keep kicking a ball. The switch to hoops came at the urging of his mother and brother, Drissa, who is 6-10, 260 pounds and as a 15-year-old moved to France, where he still plays professionally.
Ballo started training with coach Mohamed Diarra in Koulikoro at age 11, leading to an invite to the Canterbury International Basketball Academy (CIBA) in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands of Spain shortly after. CIBA stands out among others for its association with Canterbury, a private British school where most of the classes are conducted in English. The goal is for students (the majority of whom are not athletes) to continue their studies at universities in Europe or the U.S.
"Life was hard at first in Spain," Ballo said. "Leaving my family behind at that age was difficult. I didn't speak any English or Spanish. But I want to be a professional basketball player, so I had to do it. I had to be focused. I practiced three times per day at Canterbury, while being a full-time student. I played three to four games per week, against older players, which helped me a lot."
Ballo has been with CIBA for two seasons, winning MVP of the Under-16 Spanish Championship in May after helping his relatively new team finish in third place alongside traditional powerhouses like Barcelona, Real Madrid, Joventut, Malaga and Estudiantes, with Ballo ranking first in rebounding and second in scoring.
He stands out first and foremost because of his height, massive frame, huge hands and 7-foot-5 wingspan that allows him to dominate the interior against other players his age, despite never having lifted weights seriously. He patterns his game after Shaquille O'Neal and it's easy to see why with his ability to move opponents around with brute force and his willingness to take (and dish out) contact inside the paint.
"Every single day people ask me how did I get so big like that?" Ballo said. "How can I only be 15 years old? The answer is my parents. Look at my brother Drissa. He is a beast." Courtesy of Canterbury Academy
Ballo is more than just a wrecking ball in the post, though, as he has exceptionally soft and reliable hands, allowing him to catch almost anything thrown his way and also emerge as a force on the backboards. In the 30 games in our database, Ballo has grabbed an outrageous 23.5 rebounds per-40 minutes, nearly 10 of which come on the offensive glass.
Highly mobile, coordinated and fluid, with good balance and a solid feel for the game, Ballo can pass the ball much more effectively than your typically raw 15-year-old. He sees both sides of the floor and showed a soft touch finishing off the glass or throwing in turnaround jumpers. His footwork and shooting mechanics are promising, a testament to the skill work on fundamentals that has been instilled in him over the past two years at CIBA, even if that hasn't quite translated to the free throw line yet, where he made just 52 percent of his attempts at the U16 African Championship.
With that said, Ballo has quite a bit of work to do on his intensity level and polish. He can get away with being bigger and stronger than his opponents, and will look somewhat lackadaisical at times with the way he runs the floor, boxes out or puts a body on opponents defensively, which makes sense considering the circumstances. As players in his age group catch up physically and the competition stiffens, he won't be able to get by operating at half speed. While he's fluid and nimble, he's not a freakish athlete who can compensate with overwhelming quickness and explosiveness. He'll have to play hard all the time.
Cynics will look at Ballo's chiseled frame for a 15-year-old and wonder if he's truly the age his passport lists. FIBA Africa has some experience with fake documentation, unfortunately, and has made it mandatory for all players competing in the U16 Championship to succumb to an "age test." While far from foolproof, these X-rays conducted on players' wrists indicate whether the bone has fused, which would suggest they are no longer growing and thus not likely to be 16 or younger. Mali has a better reputation than many countries in West Africa for the stringency and accuracy of its bureaucratic documents, something that was put to the test when Ballo moved to Spain at age 13.
Ballo confirmed that he conducted the bone test prior to the Championship.
"Everyone did it," he said. "So why not me?
"Every single day people ask me how did I get so big like that? How can I only be 15 years old? The answer is my parents. Look at my brother Drissa. He is a beast." NBA 2017 Free-Agency Coverage We've got you covered with the latest news, analysis and buzz. Full coverage • Latest buzz | Every deal | Free agents
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Ballo's future plans, both according to him and his coach at CIBA, Santi Lopez, point heavily toward the NCAA once he graduates high school in 2020.
"I want to pass from high school to college to the NBA," Ballo said. "I want to be a pro."
"He must go to college," Lopez said. "He must be ready for that. You never know your future, if you have a bad injury, you need academics in your pocket. That's the first goal for him."
Soumaila Samake blazed the NBA trail for basketball players as a 7-footer from Mali and the No. 36 pick in the 2000 draft. It took 16 years until Mali had its second draft selection, when Cheick Diallo was selected by New Orleans with the No. 33 pick.
Can Oumar Ballo follow in their footsteps? Only time will tell. He'll have to keep working, gain experience and make the right decisions for his development.
Next summer's FIBA U17 World Championship could be his coming-out party for college coaches and NBA scouts, especially if joined by good friend and fellow highly touted Malian big man N'Faly Dante, the No. 20 recruit in the 2020 high school class, according to ESPN.
Lopez thinks very highly of Ballo but feels it's too early to speak with him about the NBA.
"Too many people are on him right now," he said. "Everyone is talking to him about being professional and going to the NBA. It doesn't help a 15-year-old boy. I prefer to speak with him about academics, improving, doing his best, in order to have a good future. And then we can see. Now he needs to work.
"He has the potential to do it. He may still be growing. His body is immature. He's still a baby. We have facilities, coaches, good players around, and a great private school. He has everything he needs to get there."A group of at least 10 Alberta Progressive Conservative MLAs gathered Sunday night, ahead of a caucus meeting, to express their dissatisfaction with Premier Alison Redford’s leadership and consider sitting as independents.
“We didn’t have a vote, but I’ll tell you there were some significant concerns that were brought up,” Edmonton-Riverview MLA Steve Young said after the closed meeting, held at a downtown office building.
The gathering came at the end of a tumultuous week for Redford in which one of her MLAs left caucus and a Tory riding association president publicly called for her resignation.
“We shouldn’t have to be surprised when we’re talking about the elephant in the room,” Young said. “And we had a group of MLAs talking about that: the elephant in the room.”
Other MLAs who attended the two-hour, closed-door meeting included Moe Amery, Neil Brown, Ken Lemke, Jacquie Fenske, Mary Anne Jablonski, Matt Jeneroux, Cathy Olesen, Janice Sarich and David Xiao.
Few fielded questions as they left. Jablonski said the group was “talking about policy.” Lemke merely referred to the event as a “potluck supper.”
None of those asked would say whether they still support Redford in her capacity as premier.
Young said the group discussed the controversies surrounding Redford, as well as her recent meeting with PC party executives in Calgary.
He said when the group dispersed, everyone was still a member of the Conservative caucus — but that quitting caucus to sit as independents was “certainly an option” for him and his colleagues.
Young also made no predictions as to what would happen at Monday morning’s caucus meeting.
“I don’t know. It will be interesting,” he said. “But I’m hoping that people will actually speak out and express their concerns.”
Turbulent political week
Last week, Redford, facing mounting pressure from both the opposition and members of her own caucus, said she had personally repaid the controversial $45,000 cost of her trip to South Africa for Nelson Mandela’s memorial.
But the move did not pacify Calgary-Foothills MLA Len Webber, who announced the next day he had quit the Conservative caucus to sit as an independent. Webber called Redford’s “forced” apology to the public for her trip expenses the “final straw.”
Red Deer-North MLA Mary Anne Jablonski leaves a secret meeting of PC MLAs Sunday night. The group had gathered to discuss Premier Redford's leadership. (Rick Bremness/CBC News)
“She is just really not a nice lady — I can be honest with you there,” he said. “I cannot work for an individual who treats people poorly, who treats our taxpaying dollars poorly.”
Webber said Redford’s disrespectful attitude towards him and his colleagues had grown intolerable.
“I have seen the abuse firsthand, not only to me but to others as well — fits of rage, temper tantrums. It’s just something that I cannot support. It’s just something that I cannot be a part of any longer.”
Amid rumours that as many as 20 MLAs would follow Webber’s lead, PC party executives met with Redford on Saturday in Calgary. The discussion, according to those in attendance, turned “brutal” at times, ending with the executives presenting Redford with a work plan. There were no immediate details about what that plan will entail.
Redford said she heard “lots of perspectives” at the meeting on how she should lead the party, but no one had asked her to resign.
Only a day earlier, Steve Robson, president of the Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview PC riding association, said Redford has endangered the party’s chances of winning the next election.
“Her leadership has slammed the door from all the people that got the party to where it is,” he said. “I don’t like what I see going forward for the PCs’ chance with Alison as the leader.”
'There’s clearly a problem'
Redford’s caucus will gather Monday morning, after a cabinet meeting. Young said he welcomes the opportunity to address the premier.
Fort Saskatchewan-Vegreville MLA Jacquie Fenske would not say whether she supports Redford as leader of the Progressive Conservative party. (Rick Bremness/CBC News)
“I have some concerns about some of the decisions and practices that have been happening,” he said. “And I think it’s only fair to say it to her directly.
"There’s clearly a problem. Many of us are going to disagree on how to define that problem, but there is a problem. And we need to move forward and deal with that problem, one way or another.”
Young said he hopes other MLAs will join him in airing their concerns.
“I have taken some grief from speaking out to the media on my position on certain issues,” he said. “And I intend to do that, without holding back.
"And if there are consequences, so be it. And I think many of my colleagues are seeing the same thing.”MUMBAI: The BJP-led state government's grand plans for the bhoomipujan ceremony of the Rs 3,600 crore Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial to be built on a rocky outcrop in the Arabian Sea are part of a concerted effort to pacify the Maratha community. The community, which has Shivaji as its icon, has held protest marches across the state to demand reservations.The BJP has pulled out all stops to win over the community: it will determinedly publicize the inauguration function in all districts of the state and has urged people to turn up in large numbers in Mumbai to participate in the foundation stone-laying ceremony on Saturday.The party has invited the descendants of Chhatrapati Shivaji, Udayanraje Bhosale and Sambhaji Raje Chhatrapati, for Saturday's event. They will be taken in a hovercraft along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief minister Devendra Fadnavis to the site off the coast where the memorial is to come up and whe re Modi will do the bhoomipujan.“Previous governments only made announcements, but we are fulfilling the dream of every person in the state. All the required permis sions have been received, and the first phase of the project will be completed by 2019,“ said Vinod Tawde, minister for culture who is overseeing arrangements for Saturday's event. That day, the entire city will be decked up so that it resembles the culture and grandeur of the Maratha kingdom. For this, the state has roped in Bollywood set designer Nitin Chandrakant Desai. According to the presentation made by the state government to mediapersons on Thursday, a large tent has been erected for dignitaries to sit at Girgaum Chowpatty.To recreate the atmosphere of `Shivshahi,' volunteers dressed as footsoldiers of Shivaji will be stationed at various points across Marine Drive, and cultural performances will be held at five spots between Marine Drive and Worli Seaface.To showcase the naval strength of Marathas, over 15 boats will be lined up in the Arabian Sea, with saffron flags. At the MMRDA grounds where Modi will address a rally, four stages are to be constructed, and all royal families from the state have been invited for the programme.“The event has been planned as a befitting tribute to the legend that Shivaji Maharaj was,“ said Tawde.Fadnavis had urged people from all 36 districts of the state to come to the city with water from various rivers and soil from forts for the stone-laying ceremony. He will host a special ceremony on Friday evening to felicitate people coming from across the state.Calls on Russia to restrain Syrian ally increase after Turkey says postmortems confirm uses of chemical weapons
Vladimir Putin has doubled down on his support for the Syrian government despite the release of postmortem results by Turkey that confirmed chemical weapons were used in an attack that killed at least 72 people in north Syria.
The Russian president attacked “groundless accusations” that Damascus was responsible for the assault, and called for a “detailed and unbiased investigation” into the deaths, a Kremlin statement said.
Russia’s defence ministry has argued that Syrian planes were destroying chemical weapons, not deploying them, and said the airstrikes targeted a rebel storage depot for toxins. That claim has been widely dismissed as implausible by experts.
'The dead were wherever you looked': inside Syrian town after chemical attack Read more
As firm evidence of chemical weapons use mounted – along with calls for Russia to restrain the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad – Putin’s spokesman attempted to put some distance between the two allies.
“Unconditional support is not possible in this current world,” Dmitry Peskov told Associated Press, adding that Russia could not control the Syrian leader.
But Peskov also offered implicit support to the Damascus regime by repeating the argument that the chemical weapons that killed so many had belonged to rebels. Asked for proof, he said Russia’s military presence in Syria mean t it had “more wide information” about what was “going on there”.
The UK defence secretary, Michael Fallon, was among those calling on Moscow to restrain Damascus, saying the “appalling” attack had to be “laid clearly at the door of the [Assad ] regime and its supporters”.
He told reporters: “[The UK is] consulting urgently with allies now to see how we can get Russia, which supports the Syrian regime, to put proper pressure on President Assad to stop these attacks once and for all.”
Western nations have been frustrated by the UN’s failure to respond to the attack – devastating even by the standards of a brutal civil war – because Russia has deployed its veto in the UN security council to protect Assad’s government from censure.
Britain, France and the US have asked the security council to hold a vote later on Thursday on a resolution demanding an investigation of the suspected chemical attack in Syria, diplomats said.
Russia had objected to previous drafts, and it was unclear whether they would support the la test draft, which was slightly revised after negotiations over the past two days.
Syria chemical weapons attack: what we know about deadly air raid Read more
Turkey on Thursday said the first conclusive evidence of the use of chemical weapons had been found in three victims of the Tuesday, who had died in Turkish hospitals after being brought from Syria for treatment.
The Turkish justice minister, Bekir Bozdağ, announced that the results of the autopsies confirmed that chemical weapons had been used, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
The postmortems were conducted by officials from the World Health Organization in Adana, southern Turkey, along with officials from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Bozdağ said.
Later Turkey’s health ministry said 31 people injured in the attack who had been taken across the border showed signs of being exposed to the nerve agent sarin.
“Evidence was detected in patients which leads one to think they were exposed to a chemical substance [sarin],” the ministry said in a statement.
The medical results from Turkey came as the Syrian foreign minister denied his government used chemical weapons in the attack. He also denied Syria had ever used them, even though reports from UN investigators have confirmed previous chemical attacks by both the Syrian government and Islamic State forces.
Speaking to reporters in Damascus, Walid al-Muallem said: “The Syrian Arab Army has never used chemical weapons and will not use chemical weapons against Syrians and even against terrorists.”
He also cast doubt on the prospect of a fact-finding mission into the attack, claiming Damascus would need assurances that it would be impartial.
The attack killed 72 people, including 27 children, and injured 546 others, according to Unicef, making it one of the worst atrocities of the six-year war.
The postmortem results add to mounting evidence that the attack involved deliberate use of chemical weapons by a Syrian warplane. Aid agencies, including Médecins Sans Frontières and medics in Turkey, said patients showed clear symptoms of exposure to sarin.
But Muallem denounced the “chorus” of accusations against Syria, which he said was launched by countries known for their hostility towards Damascus.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump accused Assad’s government of going “beyond a red line” by conducting the attack which he said was an “affront to humanity”.
But when asked whether he would consider military intervention to remove Assad, the US president replied: “I’m not saying I’m doing anything one way or another, but I’m certainly not going to be telling you … Militarily, I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters shout slogans against Russia near its consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, after a chemical attack killed scores of people including children in Idlib, Syria, on Tuesday. Photograph: Sedat Suna/EPA
The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, has warned Russia it “cannot escape responsibility” for the attack.
Displaying pictures of children killed in the attack at the UN in New York, she suggested that if the UN fails to respond to the atrocities the US may act to stop further chemical attacks by the Assad regime.
Syria chemical attack has changed my |
. (2004) found that smoking menthol cigarettes inhibited the metabolism of nicotine in smokers by ~10% compared to non-menthol cigarettes. A third potential mechanism is that menthol may interact with nicotinic receptors. For example, menthol has been shown to inhibit the α4β2 (Hans et al., 2012) and α7 (Ashoor et al., 2013) nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. The behavioral consequence of this interaction has not yet been investigated.
It has been suggested that the sensory properties of menthol can serve as a conditioned reinforcer for nicotine. For example, Rose and Behm (2004) reported that the sensory attributes of menthol have a major influence on smoking reward. Ahijevych and Garrett (2010) also proposed that menthol may serve as a conditioned stimulus for nicotine. Our data are mostly in agreement with this hypothesis. We observed that when menthol was used as a contingent cue for nicotine, it increased the amount of the operant response to obtain nicotine compared to the vehicle cue and the menthol-saline controls (Figures 1A, 8). Furthermore, rats yoked to the menthol-nicotine masters, despite receiving the same amount of nicotine infusions, exhibited significantly less operant responses (Figures 1B,C). The requirement of contingent delivery of nicotine and a menthol cue supports the hypothesis that menthol functions as a conditioned cue for nicotine. This hypothesis also predicts that menthol will reinstate extinguished nicotine-seeking behavior, which is shown in Figure 9. In fact, menthol increased the number of active licks by ~5-fold throughout the five consecutive reinstatement tests in nicotine rats but had no effect on the number of licks in saline rats. Together, our data support the hypothesis that orally delivered menthol is a conditioned reinforcer for i.v. nicotine.
We analyzed the licking behavior of rats that received i.v. saline infusions with different olfactogustatory cues and found that the ratio of licks on the two spouts was highly correlated with the size of the lick clusters on the active spout (Figure 6), which is a reliable indicator of the affective value of oral stimuli and is not affected by satiety (de Araujo et al., 2006). Our data suggested that the lick ratio is a considerably more sensitive measure than the lick cluster size because it has a much wider dynamic range (Figure 6). Although we do not have a clear explanation as to why rats lick the inactive spout (attempting to wash away the bad taste?), interpreting the lick ratio as an indicator of the affective value is in agreement with the general sensory properties of the cues that we provided. For example, the saccharin/glucose solution is highly appetitive and has the highest lick ratio, whereas menthol is slightly aversive (Figure 1D) and induced more licks on the inactive spout only for the first few sessions, potentially because of habituation to its minor bitter taste (Green and Schullery, 2003). Furthermore, Figure 1F indicates that the vehicle (i.e., Tween 80) has an potential odor or taste that was appetitive, especially after repeated exposure. Consequently, similar to the other appetitive olfactogustatory cues (Figure 2), the vehicle failed to support nicotine IVSA (Figure 1E).
A cooling sensation is the main sensory component of menthol. The cooling sensation induced by either WS-23 (0.01%, Figure 4B) or cold water (~11°C, Figure 4D) as the cue supported nicotine IVSA with a strong preference for the active spout. These data indicated that similar to the audiovisual cue (Figure 7), the cooling sensation was also associated with the positive affective effect induced by nicotine. Slightly fewer infusions were obtained with the cold water cue compared to the menthol or WS-23 cues, potentially because the temperature of the water was not optimal or the stimulation did not last long enough. Olfactogustatory cues, however, were associated with the negative affective value induced by nicotine and did not support nicotine IVSA (Figures 2B,D). This result is consistent with previous findings that conditioned taste aversion is established between olfactogustatory cues and self-administered amphetamine (Wise et al., 1976) or nicotine (Chen et al., 2011), as well as the large body of literature on nicotine-induced conditioned taste aversion (Kumar et al., 1983). The differential association of cues with either positive or negative affective values induced by abused drugs in the same animal has previously been reported (Verendeev and Riley, 2011). Increasing the concentration of WS-23 produced a detectable odor (Figure 3), which resulted in a greater number of inactive licks (Figure 4C). Adding olfactogustatory components (i.e., saccharin and Kool-Aid®) to 0.01% WS-23 produced the same behavioral profile as 0.03% WS-23 (Figure 5). These data indicated that the increased number of inactive licks was caused by a nicotine contingent olfactogustatory cue. Rats that self-administered nicotine with the menthol cue exhibited the same behavioral profile (Figures 1B, 9) as these groups. This similarity indicated that the effect of menthol can be understood by its cooling and olfactogustatory effects: while the cooling sensation was associated with the positive affective effect of nicotine and supported nicotine IVSA, olfactogustatory stimulation, however, was associated with the negative affective effects of nicotine.
One puzzling aspect of the operant behavior of the menthol-nicotine group was that an increasing number of nicotine infusions was obtained despite the neutral or negative affective values (Figure 1B, 9). Furthermore, note that rats obtained similar amounts of stable nicotine intake when cooling sensations or audiovisual cues were present, regardless of the olfactogustatory cues used (Figure 8). Although these data seemingly suggested that the aversive properties of menthol (such as its bitter taste) conditioned with the aversive effect of nicotine to facilitate the licking behavior, a more likely mechanism is that the cooling sensation of menthol, which is appetitive, became a conditioned reinforcer for the reinforcing effect of nicotine. As discussed above, nicotine induces both reinforcing and aversive effects. The overall behavioral response induced by nicotine is greatly affected by its contingent cues. Positive cues associated with the reinforcing effects of nicotine, such as the cooling sensation, were not only required for the self-administration behavior but were also sufficient to drive the drug-taking behavior in the presence of cues that were associated with the negative effect of nicotine. This can be observed in the groups that exhibited sustained nicotine intake but not a preference for the active spout (e.g., menthol, 0.03% WS-23, and the composite cues), which can be understood as “wanting” nicotine but not “liking” it. There data are in agreement with clinical studies showing that nicotine is a substance with a strong addiction liability despite producing a minimal euphoric experience and is aversive during initial exposures (de Araujo et al., 2006).
Although nicotine IVSA has conventionally been studied using levers or nose poke holes as the manipulanda, Levin et al. (2010) and we (Chen et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2013) have shown that licking also supports operant nicotine IVSA. Overall, the menthol groups obtained ~10 infusions/3 h, which is lower than 10–15 infusions/1–2 h reported for the lever press method (Shaham et al., 1997; Kenny and Markou, 2006; Levin et al., 2011). However, the rats used in the short access lever press models were usually trained on food rewards, and some remained food-deprived during nicotine IVSA. Food deprivation is known to enhance drug reward (Carroll and Lac, 1993; Cabeza de Vaca and Carr, 1998). In contrast, rats obtained ~30–40 nicotine infusions (30 μg/kg) when they were trained 23 h/d without food deprivation (Valentine et al., 1997; O'Dell et al., 2006; Cohen et al., 2013). Considering that the majority of those infusions were obtained during the dark phase of the diurnal cycle, the rate of ~8–10 infusions per 3 h was almost identical to the data presented here. Therefore, the number of nicotine infusions obtained in our study is well within the expected range. Furthermore, the strong reinstatement of drug-seeking behavior (Figure 9) in the menthol-nicotine but not menthol-saline rats indicated that this amount of nicotine intake has significant behavioral consequences.
An extinction burst is characterized by a significant increase in operant response in animals undergoing initial extinction training. Extinction bursts have been observed for most abused drugs, including cocaine (Soria et al., 2008), heroin (Shalev et al., 2001), and ethanol (Lyness and Smith, 1992), and are thought to underlie the drug craving experienced by addicts during early withdrawal. Two reports have examined extinction bursts in nicotine IVSA in rats; neither found evidence of an extinction burst at the session level, although some rats showed an extinction burst during the peak response (Harris et al., 2007) or during the first 5 min of extinction (Pushparaj et al., 2012). In contrast, we found that the number of operant licks exhibited by the menthol-nicotine group increased six-fold compared with that in the last IVSA session. This drastic increase in response remained for the next two extinction sessions. In contrast, no extinction burst was found in the menthol-saline group (Figure 9). Furthermore, the number of licks on the previous active spout was ~2-fold greater than that on the inactive spout in the menthol-nicotine group during the first 2 days of extinction. The gradual reduction in the number of inactive licks is likely due to the removal of aversive stimuli. The different response patterns on the two spouts suggested that the association between the cooling sensation and the reinforcing effect of nicotine was considerably stronger than the association between the olfactogustatory stimuli and the aversive effect of nicotine. In addition to supporting the hypothesis that menthol is a conditioned reinforcer for nicotine, these results also suggested that smokers of menthol cigarettes are likely to experience a stronger craving for nicotine during withdrawal, which could result in lower smoking cessation rates (Okuyemi et al., 2007).
Menthol also induced strong drug-seeking behavior after extinction training in the menthol-nicotine rats (Figure 9). These rats emitted 5 − 7× more licks on the active spout compared with the last few IVSA sessions; no significant change in licking was observed in the menthol-saline rats. The elevated response remained stable throughout the five reinstatement sessions despite nicotine not being delivered. These results further strengthened the hypothesis that menthol gained reinforcing properties through its contingent presentations with nicotine during IVSA, thus becoming a conditioned reinforcer. These results are consistent with previous clinical studies that reported that menthol smokers had worse cessation outcomes than non-menthol smokers (Harris et al., 2004; Pletcher et al., 2006) and that menthol is likely a risk factor for relapse (Reitzel et al., 2013).
In summary, our data support the hypothesis that menthol contingently delivered with nicotine acquires reinforcing properties via a conditioning process. This effect is most likely attributable to the cooling sensation of menthol. We exclusively used female adolescent rats in this study. Whether the effect of menthol on nicotine self-administration differs based on the age and sex of the animals will be investigated in the future.
Author Contributions
Tengfei Wang contributed to the design of the experiments, collected data, conducted the initial data analysis, and drafted the first version of the manuscript; Bin Wang contributed to experimental design, data collection and data interpretation; and Hao Chen conceived the project, contributed to the design of the experiments, analyzed and interpreted the data, and revised the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Funding
Funding was provided by an NIDA grant (DA-026894) and by the University of Tennessee Health Science Center awarded to Hao Chen.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
We thank Ms. Qin Jiang for her excellent technical assistance. We thank The Ingredient House (Pinehurst, NC) for providing the WS-23 compound.
Supplementary Material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://www.frontiersin.org/journal/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00437/abstract
References
Center for Disease Control and Prevention (2013). Notes from the field: electronic cigarette use among middle and high school students - United States, 2011-2012. MMWR Morb. Mortal. Wkly. Rep. 62, 729–730. Pubmed Abstract | Pubmed Full Text | Google ScholarThe past couple years, and the next few years are offering up one last major wave of relocation. The Rams moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles, the Chargers are moving from San Diego to Los Angeles this offseason, and the Raiders are set to move from Oakland to Las Vegas in the next couple years. Relocation will happen again at some point, but after the Raiders move, expansion seems more likely than relocation.
The decisions to relocate is going to be pricey for the three teams moving, but a cash infusion for the rest of the NFL. ESPN’s Darren Rovell is reporting that the 29 NFL teams not moving will each receive a gross total of $55.2 million over the next 11 years. Each team will pay taxes on it like normal revenue, but they will not have to share the money with the players as part of the revenue sharing pot.
The Rams and Chargers are each paying $645 million over the next ten years, while the Raiders are paying $378 million over ten years beginning in the year they move to Las Vegas. The Rams and Chargers relocation fee will be split among the other 30 teams, including the Raiders. The Raiders relocation fee will go to the other 31 teams, including the Rams and Chargers.
That comes out to roughly $5 million per year for the next 11 years for each team that is simply added to the bottom line of revenue. I realize I’ve harped on this a bit, but maybe the 49ers could use that to subsidize cutting the price of soda, beer, and hot dogs?0 Flares Filament.io 0 Flares ×
Big John is a Big Hypocrite when it comes to Obamacare funds.
While John Cornyn cosponsored Ted Cruz's amendment to defund the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, and voted thirty times to repeal the law that institutes a wide range of common sense health insurance reforms, he was writing the government in support of a grant application that would be funded by Obamacare.
An article in The Nation recently published a collection of letters from Republicans seeking Obamacare grant money despite their opposition to the program.
Cornyn, the Republican whip, wrote to the Centers for Disease Control to recommend a grant for Houston and Harris County. Fellow Republican Michael McCaul also wrote a letter of support for the application, stating that the effort was a “crucial initiative to achieve a healthier Houston/Harris County.” Former Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison also wrote many letters of support for various grant-seeking entities.
View the letters from Cornyn, McCaul, and Hutchison seeking Obamacare grant funds here.
One might credit Cornyn for trying to take advantage of available funds to help his constituents. But really, it's deeply hypocritical for Cornyn to request money that he is simultaneously voting to be taken away. Republicans have made a cottage industry of opposition to Obamacare in part to stay in the good graces of the GOP primary electorate, who apparently never had a pre-existing condition or a gap in coverage and thus need none of the important consumer reforms in the Affordable Care Act. In reality, that opposition looks more and more like a political ploy and an effort to harm President Obama rather than promote any actual solutions to the healthcare challenges facing America.
Maybe someone should tell Ted Cruz's faithful crazies that Cornyn is apparently only paying lip service to his opposition to Obamacare. I guess the money just talks louder than the GOP messaging blast faxes, eh Big John?Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images Uber can't call its safety checks "industry-leading" any more.
On Thursday, Uber agreed to pay $28.5 million to 25 million riders to settle a class-action case surrounding its safety practices advertisements.
After expected lawyer's fees, that will leave riders with a whopping 82 cents each.
As part of the settlement, Uber must refrain from using certain superlatives like "industry-leading" or "best in class" when describing its background checks.
Plaintiffs in two separate lawsuits argued that the company misled its customers about its safety practices in its consumer advertising when it said it was "safer than a taxi" or had "industry-leading" background checks.
Uber does perform background checks for all of its drivers, but it does not fingerprint its drivers like other transportation services, including some taxi companies. While the company initially described its background checks as "industry-leading," it's since backed away from that language and endeavors to be more precise as part of the proposal.
The settlement won't have any bearing on how Uber conducts its safety checks, as the lawsuit only covered its advertising.
Uber also agreed to rename its "Safe Rides Fee," which charged anywhere from $1 to as high as $4.50 in some places, to a "Booking Fee." Uber had originally started charging a $1 Safe Rides Fee in April 2014 as a way to recoup the cost of its background checks and 24/7 support. The money from the booking fee will be used for both safety and operations costs.
Uber isn't the only one to face this change. Its rival, Lyft, also quietly re-named its "Trust and Safety Fee" to "Trust and Service Fee" after being sued in San Diego Superior Court for a similar reason.
The settlement is the conclusion of two cases, Philliben vs. Uber Technologies Inc. and Mena vs. Uber Technologies Inc, which were filed in December 2014 and January 2015 respectively. The combined plaintiffs plan to file the settlement agreement in U.S. California Northern District court on Thursday. In the proposed settlement, Uber admits no wrongdoing in its advertising practices.
The judge still needs to approve the proposed settlement, which will likely happen in mid-March.In London, pronouncing the names of the city’s central tourist spots ”Lie-cester Square,” “Glaw-ces-ter Road” or “Hole-born” is likely to earn you sideways glances and tut-tuts of derision.
It’s hard enough to blend in while traveling, and one of the most awkward ways to stick out is to mispronounce local place names. A new patent awarded to Google on Feb. 3 could help travelers get the hang of local pronunciations before they even board their plane.
The patent details how Google could determine the most common pronunciation of a place name from audio clips submitted by locals, then offer that pronunciation when someone searches for the place on Google Maps. This function could be handy, as Google says in the patent, “when traveling in a foreign country.”
US Patent and Trademark Office
The place name used in the patent filing is a great example of why this technology would be so useful. Worcester is the name of a city in the UK, and also of one in South Africa and ten places in the US—and it is pronounced slightly differently in each country.
Google already has a similar audio function available via Google Translate, although the current computer-generated pronunciation of “Worcester” is unlikely to sound right, no matter which Worcester in the world you hail from. The patent suggests that in its proposed system—unlike Google Translate—actual humans would provide the audio clips, which would allow for local subtleties to shine through.
Google’s proposed system would process all the pronunciation suggestions it receives from locals to determine which sounds were most common, and then overlay an audio file of the prototypical pronunciation on that location of a map for a user to click on.
A representative for Google told Quartz that the patent doesn’t necessarily mean that Google will be adding this functionality to its maps anytime soon: “Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t.”
But in our estimation, this would actually be a useful feature (unlike many patents, which are filed just for the sake of claiming them). It would certainly help restore the confidence of anyone who has ever suffered through an awkward pronunciation situation.Wall Street banks have spent the past five years recovering from massive wounds they inflicted on themselves and the country at large. The banks bet they could build a housing doomsday machine, feed it criminally flawed mortgages, and have the story end with fat bonuses and smiles, rather than recession and grief. Now Wall Street is at it again, with bankers dusting off their doomsday machine. If they get their way, the housing market will become even more susceptible to catastrophic meltdown than it was before the 2008 crash.
During the housing boom, Wall Street banks made piles of money selling allegedly safe mortgage instruments called residential mortgage-backed securities. This business was hugely lucrative — so good, in fact, that banks poisoned the mortgages they sold their customers just to keep business flowing.
These mortgage instruments have all but disappeared over the last five years. But now JP Morgan is trying to open the spigot to these easy profits again by resuming sales of mortgage-backed bonds. The bank is also trying to rewrite the rulebook that accompanies these once-ubiquitous investments to reduce its financial liabilty if the bonds again go sour. It looks like the only lesson JP Morgan learned concerned the importance of protecting oneself from one’s own terrible decisions.
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Big banks brought down the economy by pushing worthless home mortgages onto investors. They pooled mortgages together into bonds and then sold slices of the bonds to investors. These securities were supposed to be stable investments; the bonds would only sour in the event that huge chunks of mortgages across the country defaulted.
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Wall Street’s thirst for easy fees meant the banks didn’t care what kind of doomed loans they stuffed into these bonds. The mortgages inside these bonds wound up being the worst loans the housing bubble produced, precisely because Wall Street never intended to keep them. Banks sold subprime trash downstream, to their customers, and got paid handsomely for the effort.
In theory, bonds are important for housing finance because they let private banks compete with government-backed mortgage companies. In practice, the mortgage-bond machine allowed big banks to make enormous profits without assuming any risk. One would think the solution for driving private dollars into the mortgage market would lie in giving the banks the incentive to traffic in good loans, not bad ones. Instead, JP Morgan’s attempt to restart the mortgage-bond machine weakens the few remaining incentives for honest behavior.
When banks sell a mortgage bond, they file a booklet with regulators detailing how the bond works and what’s in it. They also assure investors that the bond’s contents meet certain quality benchmarks. They sell mortgages under warranty, and if investors discover they’ve bought bad loans, they can make their bankers buy the loans back.
These warranties were routinely made during the housing boom, but they’ve become a flashpoint since the crash. Scores of burned investors, including the federal government, have sued for false guarantees and breached warranties in bubble-era mortgage bonds. JP Morgan has bought back $6 billion worth of warrantied loans over the past four years, and the bank is in court fighting to avoid paying billions more.
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The $616 million mortgage bond JP Morgan is currently shopping makes an end-run around these commonplace assurances: It wants to put a short expiration date on the guarantees investors receive. That shouldn’t be a problem in this particular case, since JP Morgan is currently shopping high-quality, fully documented loans. The danger is that JP Morgan writes new rules for residential mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street, and a system that encourages banks to pass risk to their customers loses the modicum of consumer protection it still enjoys.
A lawsuit the federal government filed against JP Morgan in late 2011 alleged the bank consistently overstated the quality of the loans it packaged into mortgage bonds; that it inflated home values to make mortgages seem safer than they were; and that JP Morgan and its brokers didn’t adhere to their own underwriting standards. Federal lawsuits against other Wall Street banks made similar claims. Post-crisis investigations have revealed that outside auditors told banks that they were handling bad mortgages, but the banks stuffed them into bonds and sold them off anyway. The banks did all this while knowing they would have to own any mortgage fraud that investors discovered. Just imagine what they’ll be tempted to pull once they let themselves off that hook.
Paul McMorrow is an associate editor at CommonWealth Magazine. His column appears regularly in the Globe.“I think about my music all day, every day.”
Italian producer Lorenzo Senni is excited and talkative as we chat over Skype. He’s in Sweden, at Stockholm’s legendary EMS Elektronmusikstudion, trying to cram “five years into 10 days.” Senni has been given the opportunity to work with the studio’s vintage Buchla modular system, and has only a short time to not only learn how to use the gargantuan instrument but also to record material for his new piece entitled ‘AAT’ – Advanced Abstract Trance.
In the last few years, Senni has built up a solid reputation by deconstructing and re-contextualizing a genre that’s been the butt of jokes for far too long. By stripping away the fat from the well-worn trance framework and concentrating on just a few elements – the epic build-ups and gorgeous arpeggios, for a start – Senni managed to offer a fresh take on the perennially popular sound, and gathered more than a few followers in the process. His Mego debut Quantum Jelly was an unexpected collection of experiments that played with our nostalgia and challenged our musical prejudices, and its follow-up Superimpositions was even better, as Senni honed and developed his ideas still further, crafting the sketches into fully-formed landscapes.
He’s taken a break from the intense modular synth session to open up about his process, and to talk to me about what drives an artist who went from releasing records from noise demigod Florian Hecker on his own Presto!? imprint to stripping the percussion from ‘90s trance bangers.
How did you start making music?
I started as a guitarist. I started to play guitar, like everyone, going to lessons once a week. I was probably 11 or 12 when I started – I wanted to have a band, so you decide your role. You don’t know who’s the drummer or who’s the guitarist, you chose randomly back then. So I started to play guitar in punk and hardcore bands, and when I was 13, 14 my most significant experience was in a band from my home city Cesene. It’s very close to Rimini – Rimini is where Italo-disco is from.
It was significant because there was a scene, quite an important scene, of punk and hardcore bands, mostly straight-edge. I started to play with one of these bands [Out Of Bounds], they released records on Good Life [they were members of Sentence and Awaken Demons], a label from Belgium, and were touring. They were older than me – I’d just started playing some concerts as a tour guitarist, and was more often in the studio. I was the only one not into the straight-edge idea. For me, I can easily say that it was a fashion thing – rules on how to dress, rules on not drinking. I was not really into the ideal but was really into the music. So I was playing with this band but I already started to get a bit weird. My best friends, they were all gabber and hardcore warriors, because in Italy at that time it was quite popular, especially in my region.
“My friends were using a lot of drugs and were dressed like proper gabber warriors with motorcycle armor.”
Was this in the ’90s?
Yeah, around ’97, ’98. I was playing with this band and rehearsing with them, and then would come back to my best friends listening to gabber. I was hanging out with them during the weekend – they were using a lot of drugs and were dressed like proper gabber warriors with motorcycle armor. This was the beginning of being caught between two very different situations. I was also the weird one going out with them, when we went out we looked different – I was not officially listening to their music, but obviously I know all of that stuff, that’s why now I’m doing what I’m doing.
When I was around 17 I started to play drums and that was a big change in my life. It was a bit of a strange period for me anyway, not understanding anything about life, who I am, and I learned a lot of discipline thanks to my jazz teacher. Everyone was suggesting go to this guy, even if you want to play what you want. He was really important. I played drums until I was 23, and was studying a lot, five or six hours a day, always thinking “I have to study, I have to study”. This also saved my life.
At this point had you stopped playing punk/hardcore?
Yeah, there was not really a cut-off. I wanted to play different stuff, and there were no drummers available to play. I started listening to more experimental, more crazy music in the field of rock, Mogwai etc, all those bands that introduce you to a new sound but very smoothly. Then in my twenties I started a band [the now defunct Le Harmacy] with two twins, and was listening to noise like Black Dice – I remember Beaches and Canyons as a very important record.
I was playing drums but very free – technically I was good and I was studying a lot. We played around Italy and had a split with this band Talibam! [released in 2008 on MT5 tapes] then we played a couple of shows around Europe, but I was already thinking about Aphex Twin and early Alva Noto and Raster Noton, Mego and Ryoji Ikeda. I was very interested in this stuff. We split because there’s always someone who puts a lot of energy in, and someone else who’s just doing it because everyone else is doing it. I was putting a lot of energy in, so in the end we finished the band. I started to become more interested in software and what these people – Mego, computer music people – were using.
What kind of software were you using?
Max/MSP, and a couple of years later SuperCollider. Basically I was putting all the energy I had put into the drums into software, spending many hours working on it. No one was interested in this type of music – really, it was me in my bedroom.
Simon Scott [of Slowdive, who runs the Keshhhhhh label] was interested.
When he wrote to me – I was obviously a big fan of Slowdive – I was like “fucking hell.” It was through MySpace, he wrote to me on MySpace and he wanted to release this. He was saying “let’s do a CDR” but I wanted to have a real CD. So I said, “I’ll pay the difference between CDR and CD.” That’s why it’s a co-production between Presto!? and Kesh – it was because I wanted to have a real CD. That was Early Works, and it was funny because everyone in Italy said, “It’s a bit pretentious – Early Works already?” I was fighting with everyone, like it will be early works even in 10 years – it’s just objectively my early works. I always wanted to have fun with the name of the record though, because I was taking it very seriously. But all my influences – for example my biggest influence was all the Mego guys – these guys had a certain amount of irony to their presentation. They were like totally into what they were doing but just, you know, not too much drama.
Their work is quite self aware, certainly. Is this something you had in mind running Presto!?
Yeah, always. It’s not as if I’ve written down a statement, but I always keep this in mind. Even though I’ve been involved with some very good people, I keep this in mind. Keep an open door and fresh air passing by each release – not to be too closed in one genre, but to be open.
From 17 until I was 28, every summer I worked in this factory, a brutal job – lifting 25kg bags, just putting them on shelves all day. But this was good for my brain, and I was getting money of course. I started Presto!? with the money, and I bought some instruments. So it started as pure passion, I could say, “I have this money, I want to press the first record releases and see what happens.” The first release was John Hudak. I liked his work and we started to chat, and it was amazing because he was showing me all the process, he sent me the album after one week. And so I got really enthusiastic and now I’m addicted to releasing music.
I was very bad at the business side. The worst was when I contacted Florian Hecker. It took one afternoon to write the email, six hours. He replied, “Let’s do it, I have this project.” In my mind I thought, everything he’s proposing, I’ll say yes – and he proposed a double 10”, the most expensive format ever, with pink fluorescent pantone, green fluorescent pantone, high gloss, different pantones on the labels. It was so expensive. I said, “Yeah sure, let’s do it.” It cost me a fortune and was very slow to make the money back.
You’ve got to learn at some point.
I’m not learning. I learned that I needed to ask one guy to help me. So if he’s saying “you’re crazy,” maybe I should think about it.
What happened between Dunno in 2010 and 2012’s Quantum Jelly?
Already with Dunno I was looking back to my friends and that kind of music. I was thinking, “I know a lot of this music, and let’s ask them if they still have the records.” But I was more interested in techno in their record collections, not trance. There is a track on Dunno – ‘In High Places’ – it’s the longest one, it already uses the pulsar synthesis and is already looking towards Quantum Jelly. At that time I was chatting with Roc [Jiménez de Cisneros, of EVOL] a bit, he was doing his rave-oriented music. I released a cassette by him, so we were already in contact.
So I started looking at these things, and after I got the records from my friends, Roc was playing me this ravey stuff to me saying, ‘do you know these tracks?’ We were sharing things and I went through YouTube and bought compilations on Discogs, like for one Euro, and then I started being interested in trance. The first approach to Quantum Jelly I did was start to cut out the build-ups from these trance tracks. That was the part I was finding interesting. I was feeling like it’s all the same – especially if they’re not big hits, the others are all the same – but the build-up is interesting, it’s more personal and the musician can express themselves there even if it’s functional, because it has to bring you from the breakdown again to the kick. It’s functional but there’s freedom in how to reach it. The musical counterpoint – find an interesting way to use this couple of minutes. So I cut out all of this and put it in a folder and start collecting. Then I played a couple of shows putting together these build-ups, one to the other. One would loop maybe 10 times and then the other, like a display. Roc invited me to play in Barcelona at this festival called Supersymmetria, a very small festival with eight acts. Florian was there, Phil Niblock, and I played that stuff. I got a very bad review in The Wire of that show. It was very bad.
That’s something to be proud of.
You know what, I’m very proud, because it was Lisa Blanning doing that review. After a while I met her in Berlin and I said, “you are the girl that reviewed my concert very badly,” and she said “yeah.” We started talking – this was when I’d just released Quantum Jelly – and she was open to try and understand what had been happening in Barcelona. Because she was thinking that I was thinking “wow, trance is great.” It’s a different thing. In the end she wrote a piece about me for FADER.
With Quantum Jelly some people really liked it and some people didn’t really understand it, Superimpositions was kind of an explanation of Quantum Jelly.
I thought with Quantum Jelly you were finding your feet, where with Superimpositions you had it nailed.
Yeah I think that’s exactly right. Because with Quantum Jelly I tried to put this approach and this interest and the build-ups in context, and tried to transpose this idea in relation to the music I like and the interest I have. It was just a matter of trying things. I got the Roland JP8000 [synthesizer] because if I had to approach trance music I had to have that synthesizer. If I think now I’m quite proud of being very naive and saying “let’s try this trance synthesizer.”
I think that’s a good thing.
Yeah, let’s go straight to the point, I need the best way to make it happen. And I was playing around with that but I was thinking “this is trance, I’m doing trance now,” so in my mind I had to dry it up. There was a lot of decoration and useful bits in this build-up so I wanted to really focus what you hear and what could be.
One of the first moves was just to put all the envelopes down, and then open them just a bit because long notes were too dramatic. Then slowly, slowly trying to make it more musical. And with Superimpositions, the technique was already clear to me, so I had to just make a step forward – I can make another five Quantum Jellys, it’s just a matter of following this recipe. With Superimpositions the idea was to try to open my mind in a different way, [using] the Quantum Jelly approach but looking to other musical styles, being more open to having |
on Christmas, or their ideal way that Christmas should be marketed, Liberty Counsel is encouraging its members to call American Eagle at 888-232-4535 or to email the company.
We encourage you to do the same! If the holiday spirit moves you, send thanks to American Eagle for being inclusive to all beliefs and nonbelievers this holiday season!
▪ Dick’s Sporting Goods
With only a sprinkling of “holiday” references in their seasonal marketing approach and no reference to Christmas, Dick’s Sporting Goods has landed on the Liberty Counsel’s Naughty List for a second year in a row. The organization expressed dissatisfaction with the store’s usage of “generic Christmas colors”.
FFRF, however, commends the store’s refusal to tailor its marketing solely to practitioners of Christianity. To express appreciation to Dick’s Sporting Goods for staying inclusive during the holidays, call the store at 1-877-846-9997, email them or live chat with a customer service representative.
▪ Gap, Inc.
Gap is back on Liberty Counsel’s “Naughty List” for making “no references to ‘Christmas’ or any biblical elements within products associations and advertisements.” According to the evangelical group, this marketing indicates that Gap is a foe of Christmas.
The group asks that Christians politely encourage Gap to rebuild the bridge it has burned with Christmas by calling (800) 427-7895. However, at FFRF we salute Gap for spreading holiday joy to all religious and nonreligious communities with its seasonal marketing. If the season moves you, call the company to say thank you!
▪ J. Crew Outfitters
J. Crew Outfitters has let down the Liberty Counsel for using the include term “holiday” instead of just “Christmas” and for leaving out any biblical elements within product associations and advertisements.
Far from snubbing the holiday season however, J. Crew has a festive “gift-guide” tab on its online page. Furthermore, the store’s reference to “holiday” over “Christmas” promotes warm inclusiveness. Call 800-562-0258 if you would like to thank J. Crew for its reasonable seasonal marketing.
▪ The Limited
The Liberty Counsel has found a streak of heathen spite in The Limited’s vague reference to “Christmas,” specifically in its holiday products and ads.
FFRF tips our hat to The Limited’s nonspecific expression of the holiday season so that customers of all faiths or no faith feel welcome! Call The Limited at 1-877-583-1963 or else contact them on their store website by filling out the contact form or click the “Live Chat” option on the right side of their site’s contact page if you would like to thank them for their festive and unprejudiced winter marketing approach!
The Liberty Counsel has marked Old Navy as a naughty dissenter of Christian-aimed marketing for the holiday season because of the store’s lack of “Christmas” references in their merchandise and advertisements.
“Old Navy displays a disappointing aversion to using the term ‘Christmas’ and anything more than generic winter symbolism,” writes the organization. FFRF, however, approves of the store’s secular business approach.
Call Old Navy at 1-800-653-6289 if you want to say thank you for their inclusive marketing to non-Christians this holiday season.
▪ RadioShack
The Liberty Counsel has found RadioShack’s lack of reference to Jesus, nativity, or biblical elements in products or advertising appalling enough to punish the store with a spot on their “Naughty List.” In reality, RadioShack is exemplifying the smart business strategy of marketing to a variety of faiths during the holidays.
If you would like to applaud the store’s effort to keep the holiday season inclusive, call 800-843-7422 to thank RadioShack for not equating Christmas with Christ.
▪ T.J. Maxx
T.J. Maxx has let down the Liberty Counsel yet another year with its lack of references to “Christmas” in its marketing strategy. “‘Christmas’ is not found at T.J. Maxx, just gifts,” laments the Liberty Counsel.
However, T.J. Maxx has captured the essence of the holiday season of giving and connecting with people of all backgrounds and beliefs in its marketing tactic.
▪ Starbucks
Although it didn’t earn a spot on the “Naughty List,” Starbucks and the canvas of its paper cups have come to represent ground zero for the fictitious “War on Christmas.” Last year’s cheery but plain red cup incited outrage by Christian Right organizations that claimed the company was sending an anti-Christian message. The company disputed accusations, noting that the blank paper cup “welcomes all stories.”
This year, Starbucks is marketing 13 festively decorated red and white cups that it chose from a crowd-sourced selection of customer designs on Instagram. The coffee chain will be standing by its plain red cup as well to uphold its welcoming and open-minded holiday philosophy.
Next time you’re hitting up Starbucks for a cup of Joe, thank a barista for keeping the holiday season inclusive.
The Liberty Counsel lists 26 retailers on their “Nice” list who they feel are marketing and capitalizing on Christmas the way that the Christian Christ intended. The full list of these businesses can be viewed online.
Here are a few that have gone to needless lengths to “keep Christ in Christmas”:
A.C. Moore Arts & Crafts
Best Buy
Bronner’s CHRISTmas WONDERLAND
CVS Pharmacy
Hallmark
Kmart
Neiman Marcus
Staples
Kohl’s
Feel free to tactfully let these stores know that you would like to see a little less Christ and a little more seasonal inclusion in their holiday merchandise. It isn’t an attack on Christmas to exclude biblical elements in the promotion of the holiday season. It’s inclusive and, with 23 percent of Americans practicing no religion, it’s good business.
These lists may also benefit you as a practical guide for deciding where to give your business this holiday season based on which retailers have products that reflect your values, beliefs or lack of beliefs.
May your holiday season be filled with less Christ and more reason!
P.S.
To complement the War on Christmas, another bogus Yuletide war has broken out just in time for December. On Nov. 29, Kellogg’s pulled its ads from Breitbart, the alt-right news platform that has promoted a potpourri of hateful bigotries. Kellogg’s made its decision on the grounds that the news outlet did not align with the company’s values, to which Breitbart responded by calling the move “an escalation of war.” FFRF would like to offer a special thanks to the Kellogg’s brand for pulling its ads from Breitbart and spreading the spirit of kindness, inclusiveness and reason this season.
FFRF is a national nonprofit dedicated to keeping state and church separate and educating about nontheism. For more information and a copy of our paper, Freethought Today, please click here.Later today, the Design Museum will announce its pick for Design of the Year 2014. Since "design" applies to pretty much any object created by humankind, it's a pretty tough to whittle down an entire year's worth of buildings, electronics, apps, and objects to a single winner. Here are the seven finalists they'll be choosing from.
The Car
As our brethren at Jalopnik can attest, Volkswagen's super-efficient XL1 is "like driving the future." More specifically, it's like driving in a future where gas is far more expensive than it is today, and carmakers have had to adapt. Except in Volkswagen's case, it designers set out to build that car 15 years ago.
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Image: Jalopnik.
The result is the XL1, an incredibly futuristic-looking vehicle with even more futuristic fuel efficiency: 235 miles per gallon.
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The Building
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Baku, in Azerbaijan, is a post-Soviet city that's undergone a massive transformation over the past decade—thanks to its rich supply of oil and gas. That includes massive new buildings, like the the Heydar Aliyev Centre designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid and her lead designer, Patrik Schumacher.
The center—which is named after the former Soviet leader of Azerbaijan—is intended to be a sinuous, organic counterpoint to the "rigid and often monumental Soviet architecture" that defines Baku.
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The App
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Peek, which stands for Portable Eye Examination Kit, doesn't seem like a shoo-in at first glance. Until you hear the numbers. "285 million people worldwide are visually impaired," explain the three doctors behind the app. "And 80% of blindness is avoidable."
PEEK allows doctors in the developing world to deliver eye exams without any extra materials—it's inexpensive, portable, and it works.
And most importantly, it has the power to make a huge difference in millions of peoples' lives.
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The Fashion
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Prada's Spring/Summer collection of 2014 was a monster hit: Full of weird and compelling details like massive op-art prints and "teddy bear-fur coats" according to Vogue, which had this to say about the collection:
Miuccia Prada can singlehandedly turn the fashion mood with utter conviction - and for next summer we'll all gladly swathe ourselves in teddy bear fur coats, wear dresses with jewelled bras over the top, and pull sports socks up to our knees, without a qualm.
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Images: AP Photo/Luca Bruno
The Art
Great design can apply to art, too, which is why the jury nominated a project called Drone Shadows. In it, James Bridle outlines a perfectly to-scale outline of a drone in cities and countries all over the world—from Brazil to the UK—to give bystanders an idea of what it's like to live somewhere where actual unmanned military vehicles are constantly casting shadows.
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The Chairs
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Do you remember the chairs your grade school used? Odds are you do—most of these chairs become iconic for their sheer ubiquity, and sometimes their horrible (or brilliant) designs.
To create a new classic, Konstantin Grcic interviewed everyone involved, from janitors to kids to insurance companies, and came up with a design that would suit all of their requirements: The Pro chair, a family of school seats that are designed to facilitate "healthier sitting."
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What exactly does that mean? Grcic's team explains:
First, the round seat is similar to that of a stool so that it does not prescribe a forward sitting position. Second, the slim backrest gives the torso room to move sideways. The third and most decisive design element is the backrest's distinctive S-shape. Its lower curve allows for freedom of movement and takes strain away from the lower back and pelvis.
The Musical Instrument
It's hard to explain the brilliance of Roli's Seaboard Grand, a unique digital keyboard, until you see it in action. Rather than hard keys, the board has rubberized ones that let you wheedle unusual sounds and effects out of each note. It's almost like a synthesizer and a keyboard rolled into one—and it's a totally unique and novel instrument.
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So, what say you? Which of these deserves the title of best-designed object of 2014, if any? Let us know in the comments.Cookie Monster: Setting a bad example? Photograph: Richard Termine/AP
Thrillingly, the early episodes of Sesame Street have just been released on DVD, but be warned - those shows are dangerous! Slapped across the front of the case is the message, "These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child." And looking at the wobbly sets and be-stringed puppets, they probably are better suited to sentimental adults than kids raised on Pixar. But this sticker is an expression of concern.
It's not the psychedelic nature of the programme in its 70s incarnation that worries, but the behaviour it might encourage. Children dancing in the street! Grown men reading storybooks to kids - for no apparent reason!
Cookie Monster is the number one problem, not because he is a monster, but because he eats cookies (encourages obesity), and when his addiction takes a special stranglehold, the plate (might hurt). His alter ego, Alistair Cookie, used to smoke a pipe before eating it, which, Sesame Street producer Carol-Lynn Parente explained to the New York Times, "modelled the wrong behaviour", and so Alistair was, tragically, dropped, and he now probably munches down on pipes in bitterness in illegal pipe dens.
The clearly depressed Oscar the Grouch is another problem: "We might not be able to create a character like Oscar today," said Parente, which is possibly one of the most depressing sentences I have read in my life.
For those of us reared on Sesame Street, the degree to which the show is embedded in our psyche is hard to overstate. My favourite segment was the 1979 one when the Muppet band the Beetles, suitably mop-topped, if a little fuzzier of face than the originals, sang their poignant ballad Letter B (sample lyric: "When I find I can't remember/What comes after A and before C/ My mother always whispers, 'Letter B'," and yes, I am quoting from memory). But 30 years on, the perils here are overwhelming: their hair is in their eyes! They're playing electrical instruments! And, my God, one is playing the drums without any protective clothing! Frankly, it's astonishing I managed to grow up unscathed.On November 26 the team of Bitcoin Gold published a critical warning on the official website of the coin stating that the link on the Download page of Windows Wallet and the file downloads on the Github release page were providing a suspicious file of unknown origin for about four and a half days.
Hello everyone please take the time to read our latest blog asap it's extremely important. https://t.co/0LCONevyLg #safety #BTG — Bitcoin Gold [BTG] (@bitcoingold) 26 ноября 2017 г.
As it was stated in the warning the users should presume that the files were created with malicious intent in an attempt to steal cryptocurrencies and/or user information. The file does not trigger antivirus or anti-malware software, but it does not mean that the file is safe.
If the file was used, the computer on which it was used should be addressed with extreme caution; the file should be deleted, the machine should be thoroughly checked for malware and viruses (or wiped clean), and any cryptocurrencies with wallets accessible on that machine should be moved to new wallet addresses immediately.
Bitcoin Gold Team
Relevant pages and links:
Project Github Repository
Project Download Page
It is reported that the source code was not changed and the users who downloaded the source code to compile it themselves should be unaffected, but they are recommended to make sure if their local repository matches the current Github repo and be extremely cautious.I posted the following tweets to Twitter conversation regarding the telcos wanting to prioritize access on the Internet and the FCC’s deliberation. I got a response from FCC Chief Information Officer David A. Bray. I thought the discourse made for an interesting read for those interested.
Of course
this isn’t an end all be all conversation on the issue and neither I nor David Bray have the power to decide. Ideally, together we all have that power by letting the FCC know what side of the issue we stand on. Senator Al Franken called this fight “the free-speech issue of our time“. He’s not the only one weighing in either, Netflix, Amazon.com, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian among others.
It may even be a moot point because unless the ISP’s are classified as common carriers the FCC may not be able to do anything at all because the courts already ruled in favor of the telcos.
“Sure, the proposal may ask if so-called fast lanes should be banned outright, but Wheeler is already well aware of the answer: Unless ISPs start being classified as common carriers (i.e. services that are legally required to cater to all), the FCC doesn’t have the legal authority to do so even if they wanted to. It’s like asking if we should have world peace; the answer’s obvious, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.” – gizmodo.com The FCC Thinks We’re All Idiots
It still doesn’t sit well with me that FCC chairman Tom Wheeler was a lobbyist for the cable companies previously. Even worse, he was appointed by President Obama to head the FCC even though Candidate Obama promised to protect Net Neutrality. Hopefully, letters, comments, and phone calls to the FCC directly and even creative protest methods will get the word to them that Net Neutrality needs to be protected.
Our conversation went like this.Story highlights Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that the US election system is rigged
One of his supporters -- Iowa Rep. Steve King -- defended that claim Monday
(CNN) Iowa Rep. Steve King on Monday defended Donald Trump's repeated claim that the electoral system is rigged.
"I do think it's a good idea for the American voters to take a look at the system that we have," the Iowa Republican and Trump supporter told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day." "There is significant evidence out there that there is voter fraud."
While King agreed with Trump's claim of significant vote fraud, which lacks evidence, he also said it shouldn't be the candidate's chief talking point.
"I think there is truth to some of the things that he lays out on this, I just don't think it's that constructive to make it the campaign issue," King said.
Read MoreSAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco 49ers had just piled up a franchise-record 621 yards Sunday, 20 more than their combined total through three games last season.
They pounded the Buffalo Bills by a 45-3 count, bringing their two-week scoring differential to 79-3.
They had become the first team in NFL history to reach 300 yards rushing (311) and 300 yards passing (310) in the same game.
They had produced a 300-yard passer (Alex Smith), a 100-yard rusher (Frank Gore) and two 100-yard receivers (Michael Crabtree and Vernon Davis) in a single 49ers game for the first time since John Brodie (323), C.R. Roberts (107), Aaron Thomas (131) and R.C. Owens (107) did it against Chicago back in 1961.
Amid all this history, the 49ers' left tackle and center sat on the stools before their lockers at Candlestick Park and griped about how penalties wiped out a 21-yard pass to Davis, a 41-yarder to Crabtree and a 14-yard run -- all on drives that failed to produce points for the NFC West co-leaders.
"We could've had 700," left tackle Joe Staley said.
"Yeah, it still should have been more," center Jonathan Goodwin said.
"We didn't run that many plays [63]," Staley said.
"We didn't want to let those opportunities get away," Goodwin said.
Across the locker room, Davis, the tight end, drew a blank when asked which team was next on the 49ers' schedule.
"Next week, uh, it's a long game... who do we have next week?" Davis said.
Oh, the 49ers only have on their schedule in Week 6 the team that kept them from the Super Bowl last season.
"We do have the Giants -- you're right," Davis said. "It's a long game, as you can see.... They're a good team. They beat us last year and knocked us out of the Super Bowl, so we gotta come strong."
The Giants aren't going to recognize the offense San Francisco put on the field Sunday, the one that amassed more yardage in one game than the all-time great 49ers teams featuring Joe Montana, Steve Young, Jerry Rice and Roger Craig ever did.
"The best offensive performance I've ever been a part of, as far as 11 guys," Smith said.
The Giants will recognize their former teammate, receiver Mario Manningham, as the player shaking Bills cornerback Aaron Williams to get ridiculously open for a 10-yard scoring pass Sunday. But they'll be struck by how much progress the 49ers have made at wideout.
In January, when the Giants scored a 20-17 overtime victory at Candlestick Park, Crabtree's single 3-yard catch accounted for all of San Francisco's production from the wide receiver position.
"We've got athletes, we've got playmakers," Crabtree said. "We just gotta use them, gotta create that identity. We can't talk about it. We've just got to do it."
Crabtree, Manningham and fellow receiver Kyle Williams caught scoring passes against the Bills. Smith completed 12 of 14 passes to them for 189 yards. Randy Moss appeared long enough to make a leaping grab for an 11-yard gain, as if to remind the Giants on film that the receiver with more career touchdown receptions than any player other than Rice can be a factor, too.
Crabtree, Williams and Brett Swain were the only receivers to appear for the 49ers in that championship defeat. Ted Ginn Jr., whose injury absence the 49ers lamented in that game, wasn't even targeted Sunday. He returned three punts against the Bills and will handle those duties against the Giants.
"We're so much better, so much better," Davis said. "We've got receivers all over the place. Kyle Williams, Manningham, Crabtree, Randy Moss. I mean, we're loaded. That is the unique thing about it. We've got all these guys that contribute. They are playing at a high level."
The only concern Sunday centered around the light wrap Smith wore on his right middle finger. The quarterback said he injured the finger while throwing for Davis on a second-and-10 play with 11:26 remaining and the 49ers ahead 31-3. Smith stayed in the game for two more plays, gaining 8 yards on one scramble and 17 on another. He underwent X-rays afterward and sounded unconcerned.
Smith played perhaps his finest game as a pro. He completed 18 of 24 passes for 303 yards with three touchdowns, no turnovers and no sacks. His NFL passer rating (156.2) marked a career high. Smith has posted four of the five highest single-game ratings of his career since coach Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Greg Roman arrived before last season. His accuracy stood out during a deep sideline pass to Davis. His feel for the game and anticipation jumped out on the scoring pass to Williams, a back-shoulder throw that wasn't called that way in the huddle.
"Alex was really on the money all day," Harbaugh said. "It was a little windy out there, but he was just putting it in, pin-pointing it."
Roman sported an angry eye after the game, but not from anything the Bills did to him. He cited a lack of sleep and perhaps thinking too hard.
"But they told me I'm going to live," Roman said, "so I'll be all right."
Cosmetics aside, Roman has the look of a coach at the peak of his powers. Nearly everything the 49ers have tried over the past two weeks has made the opponent appear wholly unprepared to cope. Running plays for backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick. End-around runs for wide receivers. Powerful runs outside the tackles, where the 49ers had outgained every NFL team by at least 83 yards before Sunday.
The checklist this time called for the 49ers to finally connect on deep strikes. The team hadn't completed a pass longer than 30 yards before Sunday. Smith had connected on 15 of them last season. He found Davis for 53 yards, 33 of them before the catch, on a play-action strike Sunday. He found Williams for a 43-yard touchdown on a pass traveling 28 yards past the line of scrimmage. There was a 28-yard pass Crabtree caught in the end zone and a 10-yard throw Crabtree turned into a 36-yard gain.
"We really wanted to take some shots," Roman said, noting that he thought getting a lead would force the Bills to take chances on defense, opening up additional opportunities down the field.
The 49ers converted seven times on 11 third-down chances. That was up from a 1-for-13 showing on third down against the Giants in the playoffs last season.
The Bills aren't the Giants, of course, but these 49ers aren't the ones from last season, either. Their defense appears similarly equipped, having allowed 349 yards over the past two games. But their offensive line is turning into a dominant unit. Right tackle Anthony Davis helped hold the Bills' Mario Williams to two tackles and two quarterback hits.
Smith, under duress on six of his 12 third-down drop backs against the Giants in that playoff game, had nothing to worry about Sunday. The Bills had to respect the 49ers' multifaceted ground game, which has produced 556 yards over the past two games.
Bring on the Giants.
"Played them twice last year, a lot of baggage, a lot of history," Smith said. "A little unfinished business, I guess."First see the quick video below by Mike Wolf, UX / Design Lead on OpenBazaar and OB1Company, so right now requesting Steem and SBD would not be a random act, but they are actively asking crypto communities their thoughts, and it only takes a second to pop a comment on YouTube or tweet your interest. If you are reading this, you are on this platform and probably have Steem already, it wouldn't suck if it's value were to rise, and I don't only mean in a financial way, but in a usefulness way.
The Crypto Collectibles store was originally started with Dogecoin in mind years ago on a platform called Moolah, which had an unfortunate history it ended up. Crypto Collectibles moved onto Etsy and finally found the best home on OpenBazaar (viewable in a web browser through Duosear.ch). While there is items listed on Peerhub for Steem, the larger market and decentralized nature of OpenBazaar itself lends itself to be what could be a beautiful companion piece for Steem and Steemit both us users as well as for the value of the currencies themself. Having personally bought some art from OpenBazaar directly from my Steemit.com wallet page was awesome. This is a plea to get Steem and SBD directly supported into the OpenBazaar platform for users to both sell and buy and receive their payments or pay for their goods in Steem and SBD. Be vocal.
This post is inspired by a post from /r/Dogecoin where their community is making a similar plea. Respect to the Dogecoin community, may the coin that started as a joke live on as long as cryptocurrencies exist. Image credit is a mixture of an image from this post and this post with added text.
ALSO ON STEEMIT
* EPLS Tutorial: How To Spend or Cash Out Steem from Steemit
* This Elephant Sculpture Art was Bought With STEEM
* Copper Age Classic Comic Book - Cloak and Dagger from 1995Hyung-Jin Kim, The Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea is making final preparations to conduct its fourth nuclear test, South Korea's defence minister said Thursday, but he added that it could be a bluff.
Defence Minister Kim Kwan-jin told South Korean journalists that North Korea is able to detonate a nuclear device at any moment, though he didn't elaborate on what the final step of its preparations would be, according to ministry officials.
Kim also said that although North Korea is ready to conduct a nuclear test, it may not intend to set off the device soon, and instead is trying to trick outside observers into believing a test is imminent, the officials said, requesting anonymity under department rules.
North Korea has threatened in recent weeks to conduct a nuclear test to protest what it calls U.S. and South Korean hostility and international condemnation over its rocket and missile tests earlier this year. South Korea has warned North Korea would face serious consequences if the test is made.
Pyongyang has called for the resumption of long-dormant international aid-for-disarmament talks, but Washington and Seoul say the North must first move toward disarmament. North Korea says it needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against U.S. military threats.
Many North Korea watchers had suspected a nuclear test would occur when President Barack Obama visited Seoul last month, but nothing happened. Analysts remain divided over whether North Korea will go ahead with a test soon.
A fourth test would mark another defiant response to U.S.-led international pressures on Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear weapons program. North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013.
Western experts believe North Korea has a handful of rudimentary bombs, though it's not yet believed to be capable of producing warheads small enough to mount on a long-range missile that could threaten the U.S. Another nuclear test could put the North a step closer to that goal.
Recent months have seen animosities flare up on the Korean Peninsula with Pyongyang conducting a barrage of rocket and missile tests and resuming fierce rhetoric against Seoul and Washington. Before then, the North had been gradually dialing down its threats and seeking improved ties with South Korea in what foreign analysts said was an attempt to lure investment and aid.
On Thursday, Seoul's Defence Ministry announced that a joint investigation by South Korea and the U.S. concluded that three drones found in the South in March and April were flown by North Korea on military surveillance missions. A ministry statement called the drone flights a military provocation and said South Korea will react strongly. North Korea has denied it sent such drones and accused South Korea of plotting a fabrication.
South Korean defence officials said the drones are considered crude and low-tech but that it's the first time North Korean drones have been found crashed in South Korea.
The two Koreas are divided along the world's most heavily armed border since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 American troops are deployed in South Korea as buttress against potential North Korean aggression.
A year ago, Pyongyang made a torrent of threats to launch nuclear strikes against Seoul and Washington in protest of UN sanctions that were toughened following its third bomb test.1 of 1 2 of 1
Vancouver city council has approved more funding to help deal with drug overdoses.
A total of $370,000 has been earmarked for harm reduction measures and support for first responders following a charged debate Wednesday (February 6).
The tense deliberations started in the morning, and resumed in the afternoon, which saw accusations of “bullying” and worse.
In the afternoon, councillor Melissa De Genova asked why big drug dealers seem to be getting away with murder by distributing opioids laced with the deadly fentanyl.
She wanted to know what law enforcement actions are being done to go after major sources of fentanyl.
Referring to the nine people who died of overdose in Vancouver on December 15 last year, De Genova said that if the same number of people were murdered by one person, the city would have gone hunting for the killer.
The statement by De Genova, who belongs with the opposition Non-Partisan Association, triggered a response from councillor Andrea Reimer of the administration Vision Vancouver party.
Reimer said that if nine people were indeed killed by a single person, “that person was an elected official”.
Reimer was obviously referring to the opposition by the NPA against the additional 0.5 percent property tax incorporated in the 2017 city budget to deal with the overdose problem.
“Each elected official,” according to Reimer, is “culpable” for deaths from the overdoses because of inaction.
This prompted De Genova to raise a point-of-order against Reimer’s characterization, saying it was “so offensive”.
“I believe that councillor Reimer just called me a murderer,” De Genova said.
The NPA councillor was cut off by Reimer’s Vision colleague and councillor Heather Deal, who was chairing the meeting.
“You weren’t named” Deal told De Genova, ruling out the NPA councillor’s point-of-order.
That wasn’t the end.
NPA councillor George Affleck said that he was "very concerned" about what Reimer has said about politicians who vote based on their belief and philosophy.
According to Affleck, he found Reimer’s statement about politicians being culpable for deaths as “bullying”.
“They’re very threatening to me,” Affleck said.
Reimer defended her action when it was her turn again to speak.
“I spoke only to factual issues,” Reimer said.
Affleck wasn’t done. When his turn came again, Affleck said that Reimer’s statement was “unbelievably disrespectful”.
According to Affleck, that was the "most inappropriate thing" he has heard in his political life.
Reimer insisted that politicians are “culpable” by failing to act, and that their actions “lead to people’s deaths”.
Reimer had at one point during the debate became very emotional and teared up.
Drug overdoses claimed the lives of 215 people in Vancouver in 2016.Getty Images
Texans rookie center Nick Martin recently had ankle surgery that could keep him out for the entire season and he may not be the only prospective starter missing from the offensive line when Houston starts the regular season.
Ian Rapoport of NFL Media reports that left tackle Duane Brown is not expected to be ready to play in Week One because of the torn quadriceps he suffered in the team’s final regular season game last year. Brown is on the physically unable to perform list and the Texans may leave him there when it comes time to make the cut to 53 players in a little more than a week.
That would leave Brown ineligible to play or practice with the team during the first six weeks of the season. The Texans play games in each of those weeks, so Brown’s absence would be a significant one. Chris Clark is listed as the next man up at left tackle on Houston’s depth chart.
If Brown does miss the start of the regular season, the Texans will be left with just a few returning starters from last year’s offense as they try to make another playoff push.Canelo Alvarez could be ending the year by making a formal entrance into the middleweight division in a title fight against Billy Joe Saunders, as RingTV.com reports. The fight is being targeted for December at a full 160lbs for Saunder's WBO belt.
Meanwhile, Saunders just might also land himself on the September 17th Canelo-Liam Smith card where he'd be making his 2016 debut while setting up a December fight against Canelo. Eric Gomez of Golden Boy Promotions admits a late 2016 fight against Saunders would help Canelo's preparation for a late 2017 fight against Gennady Golovkin, but at this point that feels oh-so-far away.
For now, Golden Boy and Frank Warren (who promotes Saunders) have be in talks for weeks, with Warren said to be encouraged with how things are progressing. His fighter Saunders is most recently coming off a majority decision win over Andy Lee last December where he won the WBO middleweight title.Transgender students in New York won't lose any protections created under Obama-era regulations, despite the Trump administration's roll-back of the policy Wednesday night, a spokesperson for the state’s attorney general said.
“If President Trump withdraws Obama administration’s guidance, transgender students will still be protected by Title IX and its implementing regulations, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex,” said Amy Spitalnick, a spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (D). “Additionally, our state law protections are independent from federal law — for example, the Dignity of All Students Act.”
“The Attorney General will continue to ensure that Title IX and New York’s own civil rights protections are enforced, because we know that policies that ensure equality for transgender New Yorkers promote safe and inclusive schools, workplaces, and communities — benefiting everyone,” the statement concludes.
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On Wednesday night, the Trump administration rolled back regulations created by his predecessor to protect transgender students across the country.
The guidelines allow for children at public schools to use bathrooms and other facilities based on their gender identities.
Citing the need to consider the legal issues of the regulations, the Department of Justice and Department of Education released new guidance withdrawing the policies on Wednesday evening.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
A bike rider has become the latest victim of a gang of 'cut-throats' who string deadly wires at neck height across woodland cycle tracks.
Darren Gibson, 49, suffered a broken collarbone when he was sent flying off his bike when he hit a tripwire stretched across a path through the woods near East Brighton Golf Club.
Earlier this month Sussex Police said they were investigating reports that at least two bike riders had been hurt after hitting tripwires across paths at Coldean Woods on the other side of Brighton.
Dad-of-two Darren, of De Montfort Road, Brighton, said he was injured as he rode through woods near the golf course at 1pm Saturday.
He said there was no way he could have seen the wire before he rode into it.
(Image: Wessex New Agency)
"Sadly, even if you were going slowly you wouldn't have seen it.
"You're talking about a thin wire, there's nothing else to see - that's the worrying thing.
"We had gone up by the racecourse then cycled along the top and down by the golf course, where there's a path which goes to Rottingdean.
"It's quite a steep, wide path and normally you can go quite fast.
"I was with my brother and a friend and I was going very fast and suddenly felt my foot being dragged.
"I knew that there was something trying to hold me back but there was no way I could hold back because I was going too fast.
"I knew I was coming off so I went into a roll as I went over the handlebars and landing on my shoulder.
"There was a very large fence post with wire attached which had been dragged from one side of the path to the other so the wire was about two feet in the air.
"I've broken my collarbone, I've got bruised ribs, and my shoulder joints have been smashed about.
"A physiotherapist did some work and he reckons I shouldn't have any long term damage but it will be five to six weeks before I do any weight bearing stuff.
"The police are clearly very concerned as they've rung me several times.
"There's no way that post could have been there on its own.
"I'm not saying it's definitely malicious. It could have been kids.
"But in the light of the other incidents you begin to wonder. I'll probably never know.
"I'm not going to stop cycling but it does mean that when you going down path you can't just be careful because there's just no way you're ever going to see it, even if you're going slowly.
"I don't know how I'm going to feel about it until I go out |
reducing competition, "but it does not serve citizens, it does not create jobs."
The Roanoke Times wrote that Byron has received $36,100 in campaign donations from Verizon since 1998. "Other donation totals include $15,000 from the Virginia Cable Telecommunications Association, $9,250 from AT&T, $3,500 from CenturyLink and $3,000 from Comcast," the newspaper said. Those numbers come from the Virginia Public Access Project.
Byron told the newspaper that she is "tweaking" the bill but does not expect major changes. Republicans have the majority in both chambers of the Virginia legislature.
“I just think government needs to be very cautious about investing taxpayer dollars in these networks that they not only have to be able to manage, but they also have to maintain them,” Byron told The Roanoke Times. "Maintaining this type of stuff is much better done by private business.”
The Federal Communications Commission in 2015 voted to preempt similar laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that restricted growth of municipal broadband. But the states sued and a federal appeals court overturned the FCC decision, letting states continue to impose restrictions on municipal Internet projects.8 Little-Known Benefits Of Going Braless Every Woman Should Know
Perk #1: Bras Have Zero Effect On ‘Perkiness’
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
A lot of women feel that they have to wear a bra, because otherwise their ‘girls’ will start to sag and lose their perkiness.
In fact, a long-running French study has proven that bras most likely have the opposite effect, causing breasts to lose their shape over time.
According to the study, that’s because the “support” of the bra weakens the muscles in the chest, making the breasts droop and reinforces the idea that a bra is necessary in a never-ending cycle.
Perk #2: Your Circulation Will Get A Boost
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
We don’t normally think about our bras causing health symptoms, but you might be surprised by the impact on your cardiovascular wellness.
After all, when you think about it, what is a bra if not a giant rubber band squeezing around your chest?
All that tightness and squeezing can slow and impede your circulation by compressing your major blood vessels.
Establishing a bra-free routine will help the blood flow freely, and might boost your energy and overall health as a result!
Perk #3: Your Sleep Cycle Will Thank You
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
If you have a hard time getting to sleep at night, your bra may be to blame.
For one thing, it used to be common practice to wear your bra at night, which inevitably led to discomfort and difficulty sleeping.
For another, even if you don’t wear a bra at night, they might still be wreaking havoc from afar by impacting your circadian rhythms, as demonstrated by this study, and keeping you from getting a full night’s sleep.
If you ask us, getting a full night’s sleep is well worth ditching bras for good!
Perk #4: Your Breast Health Will Improve
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
That same French study about breast ‘perkiness’ also makes sure to state that bras are not actually dangerous to your health in most cases.
The exception is bras that don’t fit well, which can cause rib pain, shortness of breath, and other medical complaints, according to Cosmo.
Going sans-brassiere may also improve the health of your skin and muscles as blood flow improves, muscle tone tightens, and sweat and dirt are no longer trapped against the skin by material that doesn’t breathe.
Perk #5: You’ll Be Comfy
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
There’s a rush of relief that comes with taking off your bra at the end of a long day.
And the relief of stripping down is about twice as sweet if the bra in question happens to be lacy, itchy, or just a hair too tight.
Now, imagine feeling that level of comfort and freedom all day, every day.
If you ask us, that alone is a blissful enough reason to change your relationship with the bra!
Perk #6: You Might Gain A Cup Size
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
Lots of us reach for a push-up bra when we want to look more buxom. It seems like the easiest way to create instant cleavage and a bigger chest.
In fact, the best way to build up your cup size long-term might just be ditching the cups entirely.
That’s because letting your breasts hang naturally forces the pectoral muscles to work and resist gravity.
Though the breasts themselves won’t actually grow, the firmed-up muscles will help to boost your chest and make it appear fuller overall.
Perk #7: You Can Save Money For Another Time
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
Bras do not come cheap, even when you manage to snag one on sale.
Often, the process of tracking down the right bra in the right size leaves you so worn out that you’re willing to buy it at any price, which leads to lots of women forking over an arm and a leg for any bra that fits.
Why not save the $58 (double that if you buy it in black, too) and spend it on something that you really want or need?
Cutting down on your bra purchases will certainly save you a pretty penny in the long run!
Perk #8: It Will Enhance Your Shape
Tayra Lucero for LittleThings
While you don’t have to skip the bra absolutely all of the time, establishing the habit of going all natural has a great effect overall on your breast shape.
If you want your breasts to appear fuller, rounder, and perkier, ditching the bra can have a huge long-term effect.
Don’t expect to see results right away, but letting your ‘girls’ go free is essentially an effort-free fitness regime.
Your chest muscles will strengthen over time and help to round you out for your ideal shape!
What do you think? Would you ever give up your bras? Let us know in the comments below, and don’t forget to SHARE so friends can weigh in, too!The lawyer acting for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over the US criminal investigation into his publication of hundreds of thousands of state secrets has called on the Department of Justice to make a formal statement that it will not prosecute him, in the wake of off-the-record reports that the department is minded not to press charges.
Barry Pollack responded sharply to anonymous officials who told the Washington Post that the US government was unlikely to prosecute Assange because to do so would raise the issue of prosecuting news organisations and journalists involved in the WikiLeaks disclosures. Pollack said that the Justice Department had failed to respond to WikiLeaks’ inquiries about the status of the investigation, which has been led by the eastern district of Virginia, where a grand jury has been impaneled.
“Mr Assange would welcome a formal unequivocal statement from the Department of Justice that it has not brought charges against him and will not do so in the future. Unfortunately, to date, the Department of Justice has not been willing to make such a statement,” Pollack said.
The Washington Post report is the latest in a flurry of unattributed articles suggesting that the Justice Department is unlikely to take up formal charges against Assange. The paper said that the justice officials had concluded that they had a “New York Times problem” – that is, if they went after Assange they would also have to prosecute journalists from the New York Times, the Guardian and others who worked on the WikiLeaks revelations.
In 2010, WikiLeaks shared with the Guardian and other international news organisations access to the massive trove of US state secrets leaked by the American soldier Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley. WikiLeaks has consistently argued that it is a journalistic organisation, and thus shielded by the same first amendment protections as any other news outlet.
The Justice Department declined on Tuesday to comment on whether or not it would prosecute Assange.
The drip-drip of anonymous indications from the department of justice that Assange will not be prosecuted, combined with the refusal to make public its intentions, has caused anger and frustration in the WikiLeaks camp which sees it as a form of games-playing on the part of the Obama administration. WikiLeaks used its Twitter feed – often used by Assange as a channel for his personal opinions – to vent a sceptical response to the story, pointing out that the US government under Obama has an aggressive record on pursuing official leaks.
Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in military custody as the source of the WikiLeaks disclosures. She is one of eight individuals charged under the Espionage Act in recent years, the latest being Edward Snowden of the National Security Agency leaks.
Other observers, however, reserved their scepticism for Assange, who has been ensconced for more than a year in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where he has been granted diplomatic asylum. He is wanted for questioning in Sweden in regard to sexual assault allegations.
Assange has said he is resisting extradition to Sweden for fear of being sent in turn to the US to face criminal prosecution over WikiLeaks. Were the US to confirm publicly that it will not press charges, Assange’s critics believe that would undermine his self-defence.
Philip Crowley, the former US State Department spokesperson who resigned from the post in protest at the treatment of Chelsea Manning in a US marine jail, struck that note in a tweet: “With a US indictment not plausible, Julian Assange’s new narrative is information should be free, and rent too.”After months of keeping everything they can about Game of Thrones Season 6 quiet, the insiders are starting to spill.
As we who watched the filming process are *very* aware, the production spent an inordinate amount of time on a field in Northern Ireland over in Saintfield, where a massive battle sequence was filmed. The production, which generally doesn’t stay anywhere very long when it comes to outdoor filming, was parked there for nearly 13 weeks over the course of the late summer and early fall. Now, for the first time, the producers are opening up to Entertainment Weekly about what they were filming. Writer Byran Cogman says:
It’s definitely the biggest action sequence yet. We’ve always wanted to get to a place – story-wise and budget-wise and time-wise and resource-wise – where we would be able to do a proper battle, with one army on one side, one army on another side.
Part of the reason the show has never quite been able to do a proper battle is because of its commitment to not including a lot of CGI in fight scenes (unless, you know, White Walkers are involved.) That means that, in order to film a full-on battle, the producers need the cast, the manpower, and the money for practical effects, which is no small task. Showrunner Dan Weiss discusses this logistical nightmare:
We wondered, ‘Why don’t you see more fully fleshed-out battles in movies and TV?’ Then you get into the nitty-gritty of what it takes to actually shoot these things in a way that isn’t just helter-skelter chaos but actually gives you a sense of battle geography and the ebb and flow, and you realize why.
As those who paid attention to the spoilers knew, Miguel Sapochnik, who is directing episodes 9 and 10, was on hand. Sapochnik directed last season’s “Hardhome,” which was a big part of the reason he was chosen to tackle this episode. Quoth showrunner David Benioff:
Miguel did such a fantastic job with ‘Hardhome’ we thought we should bring him back – this time with horse. Horses are not easy, at all. And certainly in terms of numbers – number of extras, number of stuntmen, number of shooting days – it’s the biggest we’ve done.
EW refuses to give any details on which armies are fighting or what characters are involved, although we have some idea.I consider myself a practitioner of a dying art form that is slowly disappearing from society. Long before it was an internet acronym or a text message abbreviation, this unique skill was passed down to me as a man who was raised by a single mother in a house with three other sisters.
I honestly believe I have an better understanding of women than most men. And when I see other men inject themselves into arguments about feminism, women’s issues and how we live in a sexist society, I cringe, because as a man I know I have no place in the discussion. I know this because I am an avid student of the lost art of shutting the f—k up.
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My studies began under the tutelage of my grandmother, who taught me the first lesson of the ancient art when I was just a toddler learning to speak. In a room filled with elders who knew and understood much more than I did, she passed down the pearl of wisdom that instructed me to “be quiet when grown folks is talking.” It was only a scant few years later when my uncle Junior, putting his hand on my shoulder as I interrupted while he showed me how to prime and crank a lawn mower, suggested that if I “be quiet, I might actually learn something.”
Thus began my STFU education.
A few days ago, in Houston’s 3rd Ward, a group of protesters decided to picket the local NAACP headquarters. To be fair, when I refer to them as a “group of protesters,” I am using the term very loosely, because describing them as a motley crew of gun-toting, Confederate-flag-waving racists lacking both IQ points and (and this is just an educated guess) teeth—while accurate—could be misconstrued as an insult.
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There are some people who will immediately take issue with me calling them toothless, racist dummies. Yet the fact that this collection of rabble-rousers brought semi-automatic weapons to the premises of an organization founded on nonviolence to protest an entirely different organization that has no connection to it except that both are advocates of African-American issues speaks to their ignorance.
They chose to bring along an offensive symbol and paramilitary weapons to the NAACP to protest Black Lives Matter because—you know … black people. Picketing the Houston NAACP in response to a perceived Black Lives Matter offense in Dallas only exists in the mind of a racist who thinks all black people, and things, are alike. It’s like going to a Mexican restaurant to protest illegal immigration.
I will admit that I didn’t do an official tooth count, but I have seen the pictures, and from my long history of protest experience, a large percentage of people who fly the rebel flag in public places seem to be lackadaisical when it comes to dentistry.
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"We came out here to protest against the NAACP and their failure in speaking out against the atrocities that organizations like Black Lives Matter and other pro-black organizations have caused the attack and killing of white police officers, the burning down of cities and things of that nature. … If they're going to be a civil rights organization and defend their people, they also need to hold their people accountable.”
They call themselves, "White Lives Matter."
This group of white activists is indicative of a large slice of Donald Trump-supporting, Stars and Bars flag-wavers who believe Black Lives Matter to be racist. They think that the movement to address state violence against people of color is inherently anti-white. Even though Black Lives Matter protested against the black officers who killed Freddie Gray. Even though the movement began during the turmoil around a Hispanic man’s lynching of Trayvon Martin. Black Lives Matter is not anti-white. It isn’t even anti-cop. It is anti-people-who-shoot-black-people-and-use-the-protection-of-the-state-to-get-away-with-it.
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And yet the affirmation that black lives have value is always shouted down by people who want to remind you that white lives matter. They love to retort that blue lives matter.
As if—since Emmett Till—America hasn’t reminded black people that white lives matter with boots to the face and nooses around necks.
As if the white fright that believes Muslims are streaming over the border to eradicate Christmas and radicalize people into erasing the precious white lives hasn’t fueled a carrot-colored wannabe dictator to within inches of the presidency.
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As if this country isn’t so concerned with white lives that it is more willing to pay for a mythical wall between Mexico and the U.S. than body cameras on the chests of cops.
As if the evil people who kill innocent police officers get away with back pay, desk jobs and pension plans.
As if bomb-carrying robot drones and SWAT teams don’t immediately hunt down the snuffers-out of “blue lives.”
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As if the existence of the Confederate flag isn’t a staunch enough reminder that the bloodiest war in American history was because the policy of this country was “F—k black lives,” and the bottom half of this country was willing to “burn down cities and things of that nature … ” to keep it that way.
White Lives Matter doesn't matter.
Ultimately, White Lives Matter is like me injecting myself into the feminist argument. Their privilege has led them to believe they have a right to an opinion, when in truth, they are too stupid to even insert themselves into a discussion. Having a nuanced discussion about the politics, policy and history of race in America with someone waving the flag whose only current-day context is “Damn, I wish you were still slaves” is useless.
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Almost as useless as me, with my then-700-day-old grasp of the English language, trying to interrupt an adult conversation. Unlike the white people who feel the need to throw the caveat-filled grenades of “What about black-on-black crime?” and "Why do they resist?” I learned the valuable lesson early in life that not every opinion is a legitimate one. I eventually grasped the notion that there are some situations and some conversations where my voice is not only unneeded but is invalid.
Unlike White Lives Matter, I know when to shut the f—k up.X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.
In 1900, some divers found the wreck of a Roman vessel off the Greek island of Antikythera. Among the other treasures remanded to the Greek government was an unassuming corroded lump. Some time later, the lump fell apart, revealing a damaged machine of unknown purpose, with some large gears and many smaller cogs, plus a few engraved words in Greek. Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device – researcher Derek J. de Solla Price laid the groundwork by establishing initial tooth counts and suggesting that the device followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world.
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The full function and beauty of the Antikythera device remained hidden until recent studies subjected it to more advanced imaging techniques. First, it was photographed using a technique that exposed the surfaces to varying lighting patterns. This created different levels of contrast that allowed the researchers to read far more of the inscribed Greek text than was previously possible. Then, x-ray imaging was used to create full 3-D computer models of the mechanism, which revealed for the first time some of the more complex and detailed gear interactions. The Greek National Archaeological Museum's discovery of some boxes filled with 82 additional mechanism fragments added new information as well.
The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.
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Using nothing but an ingenious system of gears, the mechanism could be used to predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, and even accounted for leap years. It could also predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and has a gear train that turns a black and white stone to show the moon's phase on a given date. It is possible that it could also show the astronomical positions of the planets known to the ancients: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The Antikythera mechanism wasn't just a scientific tool – it also had a social purpose. The Greeks held major athletic competitions (such as the Olympics) every two or four years. A small dial within the Metonic dial showed the dates of these important events.
The true genius of the mechanism goes beyond even the complex calculations and craftsmanship of a mechanical calendar. For example, the ancients didn't know that the moon has an elliptical orbit, so they didn't know why it sometimes slowed or sped up as it moved through the zodiac. The mechanism's creator used epicyclic gears, also known as planetary gears, with a "pin-and-slot" mechanism that mimicked this apparent shifting in the moon's movement. This use of epicyclic gears is far ahead of what anyone suspected ancient technology was capable of. Scientific American has a two-part video about the mechanism and the imaging techniques used in the research.
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The mystery of who built the Antikythera mechanism remains. It has been linked to renowned ancient inventor Archimedes by the writings of Cicero, but this particular device was built after Archimedes' death. Still, the engraved words revealed by the new photos pinpoint the device's origin to Corinth, or possibly Corinthian colonies. Sicily was such a colony, and the Sicilian city of Syracuse was Archimedes' headquarters. The researchers theorize that the Antikythera mechanism is based on an Archimedian design, and might even have been built by a workshop carrying on his technological tradition. But if the design has been "industrialized" in such a way, why have we never found another one like it? Mysteries remain.
The complexity of the mechanism shows that ancient humans were capable of intellectual and engineering feats that boggle our modern minds (and it puts the lie to all those "ancient astronaut" theories). The upheavals of war and natural disasters over 2,000 years have probably caused us to lose many more works and wonders that will never be found.
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Decoding an Ancient Computer: Greek Technology Tracked the Heavens [Scientific American].President Barack Obama announced a proposal Thursday to provide two years of free community-college tuition to American students who maintain good grades.
“Put simply, what I’d like to do is to see the first two years of community college free for everyone who’s willing to work for it,” Obama said in a video filmed Wednesday aboard Air Force One and posted to Facebook. He made the announcement as part of his pre–State of the Union tour and will formally lay out the proposal Friday in a speech in Tennessee.
The White House estimated it would save the average community-college student $3,800 annually and said it could benefit 9 million if fully realized.
White House domestic-policy director Cecilia Muñoz said the proposal is a federal-state partnership, with federal funding covering 75% of the tuitions and participating states will be expected to pick up the rest of the tab. Muñoz said legislation would be needed to approve the plan and repeatedly declined to say how much it would cost, saying more details about the funding source would come in the President’s budget for the next fiscal year due next month.
“This is a moment that is equivalent to the moment when we made high school universal,” Muñoz added.
The proposal would undoubtedly face opposition from the new Republican-controlled Congress. Muñoz did not say how the President hoped to pass the legislation through Congress, adding the White House had yet to run it by lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
In a statement, Cory Fritz, a spokesman for Speaker of the House John Boehner, said, “With no details or information on the cost, this seems more like a talking point than a plan.”
Read next: Why Defending Social Security Needs to Be Next on Obama’s To-Do List
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Contact us at editors@time.com.Canada and Australia feature the most attractive destinations in the Economist Intelligence Unit's ranking of cities' liveability worldwide (see full report). Cities with the best scores benefit from relatively low crime rates, little threat from instability or terrorism and well-developed infrastructures. Vancouver comes out on top, as it has done in previous surveys, with an index rating of just 1.3%.
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Economic, political and social instability tends to foster hardship. This is highlighted in particular in Harare, which ranks as the least attractive destination of those surveyed owing to ongoing economic and political uncertainty in Zimbabwe. The threat of terrorism or conflict plays a large part in the rankings of cities that score poorly for liveability, as other indicators such as infrastructure and recreational availability often suffer where violence occurs.
While liveability considers factors of recreational and cultural availability, the "big city buzz" can also hamper scores. From this perspective, global centres such as New York, Tokyo, London and Paris have become victims of their own success. Financial opportunities and a strong cultural offering can attract visitors on a scale that can exacerbate congestion and crime levels. This has also been compounded by the targeting of terror attacks on large centres such as London and New York. Despite this, most major centres do not present any significant challenges to liveability.
Over one-half of the cities surveyed (66) fall into the top bracket of liveability, where there are few, if any, challenges to the quality of living. Most of these are based in Western Europe and North America. Latin America and Eastern Europe are experiencing improvements as infrastructure and related stability improves. These regions have three locations each in the top tier of liveability, but no city in either the Middle East or Africa falls into the top bracket.
The Economist Intelligence Unit's Liveability Index quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual's lifestyle in any given location, and allows for direct comparison between locations. There are five categories in the index: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure. Across the survey a combination of quantitative and qualitative data is used to give an overall Quality of Life Index rating.Trump Calls For 'Total And Complete Shutdown Of Muslims Entering' U.S.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Mic Smith/AP Mic Smith/AP
Donald Trump made a drastic call on Monday for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
Trump's call comes one day after President Obama's address from the Oval Office in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, Calif., shootings that were carried out by an apparently self-radicalized married couple. The male shooter was an American citizen, born in the United States. His wife was born in Pakistan but was in the U.S. legally on a visa for fiancees.
At a rally in Mount Pleasant, S.C., Monday evening, Trump read the statement to loud cheers from the crowd. He repeated claims that Muslims around the world believe violence against Americans is justified and that they believe American Muslims should be allowed to live under sharia law.
Trump also addressed how people can be radicalized online, suggesting "maybe in certain areas closing that Internet up in some way." He also repeated calls for surveillance on mosques in the U.S. "Yes, we have to look at mosques, and we have to respect mosques," he said. "Because something is happening in there. Man, there's anger, and we have to know about it."
His appearance was interrupted by protesters several times, including when he was explaining his latest proposal on keeping Muslims from entering the country. At that point, Trump referred to the person interrupting his rally by saying, "That's alright. He sounds like he's very exhausted."
Trump, the wealthy real estate magnate who remains atop the GOP presidential field, has faced backlash for previous statements against Muslims and, before that, Hispanics. Following terrorist attacks in Paris, Trump endorsed the idea of a database to register Muslims in the U.S., saying he would "strongly consider" shutting down some mosques.
Pointing to polling data from the Pew Research Center and the right-leaning Center for Security Policy, Trump argued that Muslims' "great hatred" of America had reached such a peak that drastic measures should be taken. But the data — or their validity — aren't what's important.
"Without looking at the various polling data," Trump said in a statement, "it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life."
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski clarified that the ban would apply to "everyone," including tourists, according to ABC.
The polling Trump uses — or interprets — to substantiate his argument is also suspect. The June 2015 Center for Security Policy poll is an online survey — a method seen as less reliable than live-caller surveys. Respondents were also given limited or leading choices for their responses.
A 2011 Pew survey, which Trump appears to be referencing, surveyed Muslims in seven Muslim-majority countries — Muslims in the U.S. were not surveyed. The word "hate" was never used — 68 percent of Muslims surveyed described Westerners as "selfish," 66 percent called them "violent" and 57 percent said "arrogant."
Muslim groups immediately sounded the alarm following Trump's sweeping call.
"One has to wonder what Donald Trump will say next as he ramps up his anti-Muslim bigotry," Council on American-Islamic Relations communications director Ibrahim Hooper told the Washington Post. "Where is there left for him to go? Are we talking internment camps? Are we talking the final solution to the Muslim question? I feel like I'm back in the 1930s."
One of Trump's rivals, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, was quick to condemn the statement. "This is kind of thing people say when they have no experience & no idea what they're talking about," Christie said, according to WNYC's Matt Katz.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Trump was "unhinged."
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted that "every candidate for president needs to do the right thing and condemn" Trump's statement.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio followed suit on Twitter.
The chairs of the state Republican parties in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina all pushed back on Trump's proposal.
Democratic presidential candidates also weighed in.
While referring to the idea as "at least, in part, an unconstitutional position," conservative commentator Erick Erickson described the move by Trump as "brilliant politics for the here and now."
He added, "it is really brilliant politics for Trump right now in the Republican primary and the reactions from the other candidates prove it. All the people attacking Trump on his immigration proposals now attacking him on this have done themselves no favors within the primary process."Bardstown, KY (May 18, 2015) – The Mahalo Spirits Group – the branding, sales and marketing powerhouse behind the success of Angel’s Envy Bourbon and Papa’s Pilar Rum – and The Bardstown Bourbon Company announced today they have joined forces to develop and launch innovative whiskey brands using a new, state-of-the-art distillery. The partnership promises to further the already explosive growth of the craft distilling industry by developing innovative and authentic brands and collaborating with passionate, small distillers to create custom whiskey brands and/or scale their production and distribution.
The new partnership will be led by a team of experienced industry professionals and artisans, including Bourbon Hall of Fame Master Distiller and Bardstown native, Steve Nally, a 40-year veteran of the spirits industry and formerly the Master Distiller of Maker’s Mark, and Alex Bogusky, an expert in brand strategy and consumer insights that was named the creative mind of the decade by Adweek Magazine, along with a national sales and marketing group specifically trained to sell premium craft spirits.
“We believe this partnership with The Bardstown Bourbon Company raises the bar for innovation and creativity in the craft whiskey sector,” said Stephen Groth, President & CEO, The Mahalo Spirits Group. “Together, we have all of the resources necessary to take brands from creation to consumption.”
“We are changing the model for how innovative whiskey and bourbon products will be produced and brought to market,“ echoed David Mandell, President & CEO, The Bardstown Bourbon Company. “And, we’re building an experience in Bardstown unlike anything whiskey enthusiasts have ever experienced.”
Set on 100 acres of active farmland and adjacent to the Bluegrass Parkway, The Bardstown Bourbon Company and its 37,000 square foot distillery forms the gateway to Bardstown, Kentucky, the “Bourbon Capital of the World.” Under construction since October 2014, this first-of-its-kind Napa Valley style campus will feature a custom built Vendome still and include a unique and transparent educational experience, high-end tours and tastings, integrated visitors center, event space, and eventually a restaurant and boutique hotel.
“During my career, I’ve worked with and learned from the best in the business,” said Steve Nally, Master Distiller, The Bardstown Bourbon Company. “I look forward to creating exciting new brands and making great bourbon. Building this distillery is a dream come true for the bourbon enthusiast. The local area provides us with excellent resources and we are paying attention to every aspect of production from farm to table.”
“Perhaps more so than any other category, authentic, distinctive and unique branding is critical to success in the spirits category,” said Alex Bogusky. “I’m wildly enthusiastic to pair that branding up with world class spirits.”
The partners look forward to announcing details of their first brand later this year.
About The Mahalo Spirits Group
Mahalo Spirits Group is a full-service brand innovation company headquartered in Delray Beach, Florida. Mahalo specializes in incubating and/or accelerating handcrafted brands with deep and authentic stories. Mahalo has a broad array of targeted resources, ranging from a national sales and marketing force to world-class creative and creation talent, supported by a finance and compliance team. Existing partnerships include Angel’s Envy Bourbon, Papa’s Pilar Rum and Sorel Artisanal Liqueur.
About The Bardstown Bourbon Company
Formed in 2014, The Bardstown Bourbon Company is “the Modern Distiller of the American Spirit”. The company is developing a $25 million destination experience, including a state-of-the art distillery, integrated visitors center, and event space. Construction on the project began in October 2014 and is expected to be completed by summer 2016.Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
This interview is part of the Institute's "Conversations with History" series, and uses Internet technology to share with the public Berkeley's distinction as a global forum for ideas.
Welcome to a Conversation with History. I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies. Our guest today is Stanley Cavell, who is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Harvard University. He has taught at Harvard since 1963, where he was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics in the General Theory of Value. He is the author or numerous books, including several on film. He is visiting Berkeley as the Howison Lecturer in Philosophy.
Background... Atlanta and Sacramento... immigrant father... J.L. Austin... musician mother... movies... books... coming to Berkeley Studying Music... theater in Berkeley... Juilliard... playing hooky at the movies Being a Philosopher... crisis, precision, profundity... questioning the self... questions of knowledge... state of dissatisfaction... no answers Philosophy and Film Criticism... W hat is film?"... everything matters... the tuition for intuition... motivation to write... taking film seriously... inherently illicit... constructed focus Film and Cultural Discourse... unique American contribution... judging the likelihood of students' familiarity with film... film and the roles of women... closing the sixties "generation gap" with film comedies... image of marriage: comedy and melodrama Intensity and Artistry... being overwhelmed... audience's simultaneous experience... arguments against art status of film
© Copyright 2002, Regents of the University of California
Photos by Jane Scherr. Site questions: Email iis_webmgr at berkeley.edu.The two hyenas moved into the middle of the backstreet that led to my house – between me and my front gate. I froze like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights: I was on foot, alone, and it was close to midnight on a rainy night in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's ramshackle capital where I'd recently moved. Nobody was at hand to help or tell me what to do. I was very scared.
This all happened a stone's throw from Bole Avenue, the city's commercial hub. Every day, I'd walk to work across fields dotted with cows accompanied by frog song. And this was the heart of the capital city, in the year 2002. I had, however, moved to the city just as it was on the cusp of radical change: globalisation had reached the country, and Chinese funds too.
The fields I used to walk through next to the airport are today occupied by luxury hotels. This pulsating metropolis of five million people now has a ring road, high rises and malls, and the city is fast losing its patchwork of gardens, streams and village neighbourhoods – and also its hyenas. But back in the early 2000s, it often seemed to me that Addis had perfectly applied Alphonse Allais's tongue-in-cheek answer to urban woes: build a city in the countryside.
Hyenas have always featured prominently in the life of Addis Ababa – and Ethiopia. Contrary to many countries where the beasts are reviled and feared, in Ethiopia there is a long tradition of people and hyenas living side-by-side in harmony. This was brought home to me when I read a recent BBC article saying that hyenas were "out of control" in the Ethiopian capital (up to a 1,000 of them are "running amok" here, apparently), possessing a bite "stronger that a white shark" (quite true) and gobbling up vagrants' and rough sleepers' toes and fingers (a preference for finger food, it seems).
A few voices pointed out the benefits of their increased presence, as "they eat up dangerous stray dogs and are a free clean-up service". But overall – following the news of a baby being snatched straight from its mother's arms – it was a familiar story of the fear of the beast: the wolf baying at the gates of Paris or London in the middle ages, snatching enfants or infants from their cradles.
Addis Ababa is home to 5 million people; if there were 1,000 hyenas 'running amok' they would know about it. Photograph: Jose Cendon/AFP/Getty Images
But the story of Addis Ababa and Ethiopia's long coexistence with hyenas is a more nuanced affair. I would argue there are fewer hyenas in the city itself, and more of the beasts on the periphery. Fewer in |
Riverside with "conspiring to disrupt a meeting" for peacefully protesting a talk by Michael Oren, then the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. More than 100 UC Irvine professors stood up for the Irvine 11’s right to protest. In a statement on the case, the ACLU of Southern California wrote: "We are also troubled by the unprecedented nature of the case. We are unaware of any case where the OC DA pressed criminal charges over this type of non-violent student protest, even though similar disruptions have occurred with other speakers on the very same campus. This raises the question whether the DA may have acted because of the students' message, which would clearly violate the First Amendment."Just a short little story... Nothing out of the ordinary really, I just made it for some humor. It's the moon thinking all of this. I dunno if this has been done before...but...whatever. Constructive criticism will be taken to heart, flames will be ignored.
-Joker
Disclaimer: I do not own Zelda. Zelda is owned by Nintendo.
Day One, 72 Hours Left.
Good morning, Sun!
Ah! Such a beautiful day! My, what a lucky moon I am! I doubt any other moon is blessed enough to have eyes to see beauty with, a nose to smell sweet aromas with, or a mouth to smile joyfully with. Yes, 'tis a wonderful life!
Now, I wonder what beauty I may see today... Perhaps a rainbow? No...there must be rain for that. Oh! I know! I'll stare at those cows in that large, grassy area down there!
Yes indeed, 'tis one beautiful day here in Termina.
Night One, 60 Hours Left.
Mmm...odd...those cows seem to have grown. In fact, the entire world seems to have grown slightly before my eyes. Have my non-blinking eyes missed some trickery? Well...no matter... Night has approached, so my time to shine is at hand. Good-night Sun! Hello sleepless children of Termina!
Any new fun tonight?
Ah...a lone Deku child... I wonder what he is doing without guidance...
I am not one to fear the worst...but I shall assume his parents are missing.
Here little Deku friend! I'll cry a tear for you! A gift for luck!
...Watch your head...
Day Two, 48 Hours Left.
Good morning again, Sun! May I never tire of saying that, for I'll be saying it forever.
Odd, though... I am far beyond the point of nervousness. I shall say I'm frightened. My fright comes from the vision I see with my very eyes.
All of Termina seems to have been magnified. Magnified...or...well, I must say that I've felt odd lately. It feels as if it is me who is being pulled closer to Termina...not the other way around.
I fear the worst if this continues...
Night Two, 36 Hours Left.
I entered through the field known as the atmosphere... The crashing sounds fall on deaf ears, though. Well, at least for me... I have no ears.
It seems that some of the Children of Termina have fled the large city in the middle. That appears to be where I am being pulled. I wonder what for?
Perhaps this is all trickery...
My, those cows are much uglier than I thought.
Day Three, 24 Hours Left.
I shake all over... The force pulling me is far stronger than before. Speed has taken over, and I now slowly - quickly in the eyes of an immortal - move towards my destination.
Such a destination that I wish to stay away from...
I only wish I had limbs, like the Children of Termina.
I could make great use of them right now...
Night Three, 12 Hours Left.
My vision has limited to only view the large town now. I can't see those ugly cows anymore... I miss them much.
I can 'feel' sounds, now that I am close enough to sense them. I feel the screams of the children... I feel the barks of the furry creatures. I feel the hurried pants of that young Deku... He seems to be the only one who knows what he's doing. I will pray for the Children of Termina now... I only hope the extra weight I've put on won't cause an even greater impact.
Night Three, 5 Minutes Left.
I can see nothing now... I am too close. I can sense a great deal though.
I've said my prayers, and I'm ready to join the Children of Termina.
...
...
Hmm...I sense music... Pipes, it seems... Who would play music at a time such as this?
Er...what's that bright light? I see clocks within it... Wha?! I'm being sucked into it!
Day One, 72 Hours Left.
Th' hell?!
End: I Am The MoonThe robot uprising may be closer than you think. Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot, which previously demonstrated its ability to walk across rough terrain and take all kinds of abuse from its creators, has now mastered a new, and even more terrifying skill: balancing on one foot.
In the video below, from IMHC Robotics, Atlas showcases its new skill, balancing on one foot on a narrow piece of plywood for almost a full thirty seconds, which is way better than a lot of humans. Take a look:
Perhaps the most striking part of the video isn't the incredibly long time it spends balancing, but the remarkably human-like way it tries to regain its balance at the end. In a fraction of a second, the robot leans its weight to the side, rotates its torso, and shifts its foot placement—twice! Check out this instant replay:
DRCihmcRobotics YouTube
This is a level of coordination that many humans will struggle with, and this robot makes it seem effortless. This is even more remarkable considering that it was only learning how to stand up a few months ago, and considering that the world's premier robot competition tends to have a lot of falling over. You'd better start preparing for the robot wars now, because by the look of this video, they're coming sooner than you think.
Source: DRCihmcRobotics via IEEE Spectrum‘Any time I’m invited to an event or a talk, as soon as the privileged PhD-seeking Foucauldian types hear about it, then I get threatened with a picket, and the organisers get harassed, harangued and threatened relentlessly. And, eventually, it just doesn’t seem worth it for the organisers to go ahead. If the organisers are a student body, for example, they face the threat of having their funding withdrawn.’
In the week we at spiked launched the UK’s first-ever annual assessment of the state of free speech on British campuses – the Free Speech University Rankings – who better to speak to than Julie Bindel, radical feminist, co-founder of Justice for Women, and, according to the National Union of Students (NUS) LGBT campaign, a ‘vile transphobe’. She is certainly familiar with the student censors. Over the past few years, she has become a No Platform staple, about as welcome on campus as small pox or Nick Clegg, booked to speak at a campus event or debate one week, only to be shouted or shut down the next. And why? Because she criticised so-called transgenderism on the basis of its conservativism and anatomical violence. That was too much for many oh-so-right-on student politicos. As the NUS LGBT officially put it in 2012: ‘Julie Bindle [sic] is a transphobe and [we have] agreed that no representatives of NUS will “share a platform” with her because of her hateful views and statements about trans people.’ ‘My last experience of being screamed at by students was at a debate on pornography at the University of Essex in October’, Bindel tells me. In fact, there was even an attempt to ban her appearing at Essex at all, as this po-faced, jargon-drenched petition indicates: ‘We don’t believe any university that claims to be trying to create safer spaces for women can tolerate the presence of Trans* Exclusionary Radical Feminism on Campus, and we need to do our best to cancel this event.’
As it turned out, their best wasn’t very good. ‘The picket was late, probably because the students were lying in bed wanking, rather than doing what they were meant to be doing, which was picketing me… But as I was leaving the lecture hall, I could hear the little babies screeching on about how unsafe the space was because I was on campus. I tried talking to them, tried to open a dialogue, to which they shouted [Bindel does a good whiny voice at this point] “You want me to tell you how you’re transphobic? You want me to tell you why you hate women? You want me to tell you why you hate bisexual and polyamorous people?” and all the usual fuckwittery.’ Bindel sheds an interesting light on the systematic nature of this ‘fuckwittery’: ‘[Student campaigners] attach a phobia to virtually every one of my belief systems, which stem from my feminism. So I am now Islamophobic because, along with Muslim feminists, I think the veil is an insignia of women’s oppression; I’m biphobic, because I suggest that bisexuals have fuck-all oppression; I’m transphobic, of course, because I suggest that men with beards and penises shouting “shut up, you transphobe” at women, “you’ve misgendered me”, might be a bit Nineteen Eighty-Four; I’m whorephobic because I suggest that the sex industry is a site of abuse and perpetuates inequality between men and women, etc, etc.’
The prolific use of that weasel-suffix ‘phobia’ plays a key role in the stifling, conformity-inducing logic of campus censorship. Students’ unions, and the small army of self-proclaimed young radicals policing campus, deal with dissenting views, opinions that diverge from their cosy consensus, by repackaging them as fears, ‘phobias’, thoughts as irrational as a fear of spiders or wide-open spaces. Bindel isn’t simply criticising strains of Islam or transgenderist advocacy, then: she is giving vent to her ‘phobias’, her irrational hatreds. The speech some students hate is magically presented as hate speech; dissenting intellectual positions become mental conditions; and contrary opinions are delegitimised – after all, there’s no need to argue with a mad man or woman. This is censorship by way of intellectual pathology. As Bindel puts it of her supposed transphobia, it is as if her student opponents are saying ‘how dare someone say there is something called a woman and something called a man and the difference is material and based in reality, even though we would like to see the end of those categories, because we’re all human beings’. Of course, Bindel is far from alone in this student-built, No Platformed mental hospital. It is crammed to the rafters with speakers whose views are deemed to be beyond the bounds of sanity, be it UKIP or Islamists. I ask Bindel why vocal student cliques are so inclined towards censorship and the outlawing of views they don’t like. ‘It’s because they don’t know how to debate, to discuss, to rationalise’, she says. ‘They have become so obsessed with their own privileged upbringing, their own privileged status, that they think they are literally accessing a commercial service at university… They’re just pampered and they think everything should go their way. They could just as easily be fascist dictators with views akin to Hitler or Pol Pot, but they’re wrongly viewed as being on the left.’ ‘They think that any disagreement with them makes them feel unsafe’, she continues, ‘which is absolutely how they’ve been brought up, because, with nanny looking after them, they always had their own way, from what they ate to their fathers never threatening them with a backhander.’[Julian] wanted a way to remotely control various appliances and lights around his house without spending an arm and a leg on home automation. He also desired the ability to easily switch what items he was controlling without a ton of hassle. Since he couldn’t find anything reasonably priced to do what he desired, he built his own SMS-triggered remote control system.
He designed his system to be used like an extension cord, hence the portable junction box enclosure. This enables him to regulate up to four different items at a time, with the ability to swap out components or relocate his controller at will.
The power strip is controlled by an Arduino which receives commands from his PC via an Xbee module. Any text messages sent to his Gmail account are retrieved by his computer and then transmitted to the Arduino. The Arduino in turn triggers relays as designated by [Julain’s] text messages, utilizing H-bridges to provide the required current.
Check out his schematics and code if you’re interested in implementing something similar in your home.Spread the love
Morgantown, VA — David Michael Romanoski, 48, of Morgantown was shot and killed earlier this month by police after they broke into his house in search of two robbery suspects.
Romanoski was not the suspect and was innocent.
Ten deputies arrived at the home, where Isaac Barker and Justin Knisell were believed to be living and instead found Romanoski. When deputies, some of whom were in plain clothes, entered the room where Romanoski was, one of them fired 7 rounds into him. He was then transported to the hospital where he died.
Immediately after killing this innocent man, police quickly attempted to justify the shooting by claiming to have found a handgun – as if owning a handgun is deserving of a death sentence.
The Monongalia County Sheriff’s department was given body cameras earlier in the year, which could’ve shown the confrontation which led to the murder of Romanoski. However, the deputies chose to stop using them.
“The reason they weren’t wearing body cameras is because the ones we had originally purchased, we found out after they were purchased that they are virtually useless in low light or darkness,” Sheriff Al Kisner said, adding that the cameras also had a very short battery life.
David was a graduate of Morgantown High School and Miami University and an upstanding member of the community. In addition to his parents, he is survived by his fiancée, Karen Tackett.
After her fiancée was murdered by police, Tackett told the Dominion post that Romanoski was unarmed and did not deserve to be killed.
The death of Romanoski highlights the disastrous problem of violent and incompetent police in America and sadly no one cares. Because this man was murdered by public servants ‘just doing their jobs,’ the overwhelming majority of Americans will consider his death collateral damage in the officer’s ‘heroic’ duty of providing security.On September 1, multi-billionaire industrialist Mukesh Ambani sparked a virtual bloodbath in the Indian telecom sector with the launch of Reliance Industries’ mobile network Jio. With its unlimited free voice calls and the promise of arguably the cheapest data services on the network that only supports 4G, the fastest data delivery speed for mobile phones, Jio was bound to start a cost war – but faced its first hurdle early on in the race, with charges of frequent call drops over the network.
A whopping 80% of Jio's calls have been failing, according to a statement issued by the company.
“The situation has deteriorated significantly in the last few weeks, with over 80 calls failing out of every 100 call attempts,” Reliance Jio said in a statement last week. However, it has blamed the country’s major network providers such as Airtel and Vodafone for this, saying they had not provided enough interconnection points. “In the last 10 days alone, over 15 crore RJIL [Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited] calls have failed on the Vodafone network,” the statement saod.
In an earlier statement on September 13 it had said: “In last 10 days alone, over 22 crore calls have failed on the Airtel network, while 52 crore calls have failed cumulatively on the networks of the three incumbent operators viz. Airtel, Vodafone India Ltd and Idea Cellular Ltd.”
The statement further said that users had been denied “benefits of superior voice technology” Reliance Jio’s “state-of-the-art” network because of congestion in the point of interconnection between networks.
Tall promises
At the Jio launch, Ambani had said that Reliance Industries had deployed the largest 100% Voice over Long-Term Evolution, or VoLTE network. "VoLTE provides crystal clear voice and video quality, instant call connectivity, the least call drops and a unique ability to use data and voice simultaneously."
While the service will officially launch in January 2017, it has been accepting new users since September 5. At last count, Jio’s user base was about 1.5 million, but a favourable response post its rollout has prompted the company to target 250 million users by year-end, which is more than a fourth of the country’s current mobile phone using population.
Till December 31, all users get unlimited data as well as free calls and next year, the tariffs will be finalised.
However, the customer experience of those on the new network has not been great, with purported complaints of call drops, low speeds and non-availability of sim cards.
War of words
Jio isn’t the only network reporting call drops – a report in July by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India showed that most networks were violating its mandatory guideline of ensuring less than 2% dropped calls. The national capital is worst affected, with 1.2% to 10.7% calls being dropped, depending on the network and location of the tower.
Reliance Jio, however, has claimed that the issues on its service are not due to natural congestion, but artificial blockage of services. It has alleged that the staggering number of call failures is because the three competitive operators – Airtel, Vodafone and Idea – are not letting Jio use enough interconnection points, resulting in leading to congestion in the network.
“Indian customers have not been able to enjoy RJIL’s free voice offer as a result of such anti-competitive behaviour of incumbent operators,” the company stated in its release.
And, in a statement on Monday, it said: “While there are over two crore call failures every day between the two networks [Jio and Airtel] there are no incidents of call failures within the Jio network.”
Bharti Airtel Limited, meanwhile, currently the largest network operator in India, claimed that Jio’s own network efficiencies were resulting in the large number of call drops and providers had given enough interconnection points to Jio to handle its traffic.
“With the latest augmentation, the total number of PoIs [point of interconnection] provided will become three times the present number...,” Airtel said in a statement. “This capacity will be sufficient to serve over 15 million customers, which is much more than their present subscriber base and their demand for 10 million projected customers.” It added that there are no capacity constraints from Airtel’s end.
However, Reliance, claiming to be the “aggrieved party” in the battle between telecom operators, even seemingly urged customers to switch to Jio to experience the quality of service.
“We encourage all customers to make Jio to Jio calls to experience HD quality voice services without any disruptions whatsoever,” the company said on Monday,” adding that Airtel’s statements were “misleading and unfortunate”.
Jio, which has played victim in this battle of telecom operators, needs to build its case for more interconnections points to TRAI, in the face of stiff competition form major players who had lowered rates ahead of Jio’s launch in response to claims of its disruptive prices.
Telecom operators had earlier approached TRAI, while Jio was being tested out by select users prior to the launch, claiming that the service was being allowed to bypass regulations in a manner that “point[s] to a pattern of discrimination against the existing mobile operators.”
While TRAI’s latest performance report on telecom services, released in August, has some hard data (presented in the chart) on call drops across networks in the country, this is based on information provided by the operators themselves. This implies that that the actual problem may be much graver – and that not only Reliance, but all network operators in the country may have to work on improving the number and quality of towers in the country.His career NHL stats may read 0 wins, 0 losses, 0 goals allowed, and a 0% save percentage, but Brett Leonhardt is now just like one of the guys. On Monday, Upper Deck announced that they had created the long sought-after Brett Leonhardt rookie card.
And what a delight it is.
The 31-year-old video coach has suited up twice for the Washington Capitals on an emergency basis. His NHL debut occurred on December 12, 2008, when the Capitals hosted the Ottawa Senators. With Jose Theodore gone down that morning with a hip flexor injury and Semyon Varlamov unable to make it to the arena from Hershey in time, Leonhardt — the team’s website producer at the time — suited up and went out with the team for warm-ups. He sat on the bench until Varly arrived 9:03 into the first period.
Leonhardt suited up for a second time in his career this season. After Michal Neuvirth stepped on a puck while going out for warm-ups, Stretch backed-up Braden Holtby for the entire game. And because he’s a pro’s pro, he still did his video duties during intermission– while wearing full gear.
Leonhardt, who was a NCAA Division III goalie with the State University of New York at Oswego and Neumann College, joins fellow Capitals’ rookies Tom Wilson, Connor Carrick, and Michael Latta in the Young Guns set.
Leonardt spoke to Upper Deck’s blog about the honor. He was kinda excited.
“Words can’t describe the surprise I was given when one of our players along with head coach Adam Oates presented to me the Upper Deck Young Guns blow-up cards before our team meeting with my image on them,” Leonhardt said.
“As an avid card collector my entire life, this was truly a dream come true,” he continued. “My father, brother, and I attended many card-collecting expos and spent countless hours through our youth collecting hockey cards and completing sets. You really created a highlight in my life by putting this together, and I don’t know how to thank you enough!”
For those of you who want your own card, here’s the bad news. Upper Deck produced the cards exclusively for Brett and the Capitals and are not releasing these to the public. Drats.
But big congrats to Stretch. He is now on the same level as Greg Wyshynski. That’s something to be proud of.
.. I think.
H/t to Sean Gentille for posting first.
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PinterestAlberta is filled with really really nice people.
In an analysis of traffic patterns on Canada.com throughout 2013, it wasn’t even a contest. From devastation to inspiring stories of neighbourly love and then the immense reconstruction effort, our readers couldn’t get enough of the Alberta floods. From Naheed Nenshi, a mayor so in-touch that the people fought for him to take a nap, to communities coming together to help each other out, to months-later campaigns to help those who still need it, the floods in Alberta brought out the best of everyone and showed the rest of the country what it means to be Canadian in times of need.
For the perseverance, kindness and sheer gumption, the people of Alberta that are our newsmaker of the year.
Rob Ford might be making the late-night comedy circuit and triggering international snickering, Montreal might be setting the gold standard for corruption and Ottawa might be challenging the country’s patience for navel-gazing but Alberta inspired us. There’s something really Canadian about the fact that our most inspiring story of the year was more popular than our stories of destruction and harassment.
Stories coming out of the floods in Alberta attracted more readers than the Toronto International Film Festival, Rob Ford and Chris Hadfield combined. Alberta was more interesting than Paulina Gretzky, reality television celebrity deaths and even Tim Hortons. That’s saying something. Those readers weren’t flocking to see a politician implode, people be awful to each other or gawk at a self-made sex symbol. They flocked to see humanity at its best, pulling together to help one another.
Well done, Alberta. We couldn’t have chosen a better newsmaker of the year.Bird Watching
Some Vancouver walking tours are not only for tourists: they may surprise you even if you are living in Vancouver for years! Our first article from this series featured the Forbidden Vancouver walking tours that goes over the lesser-known histories of the city but now something different: The Stanley Park Ecology Society offers tourists and locals alike two-hour guided tours, which they call their Discovery Walks. These walks are offered almost every Sunday in-season, with the topics of the walks changing weekly—other than the last Sunday of every month, which is dedicated to their popular bird walk. These walks provide participants with the chance to connect with expert naturalists and the opportunity to learn about Vancouver's ecology; from how the forest is affected by the seasons to how we—humans—are affected by the forest.
The bird walk is an easy walking exploration wherein participants can identify birds and learn about their behaviours. Photography is permitted, and there isn't any need to worry about the flash; the lighting in the environment is so well-diffused that camera-happy tourists and locals alike can capture images of the wildlife without guilt.
Volunteers Welcome!
Just because the tour happens every month doesn't mean that tour is going to be the same.
Depending on the season, say during the migrations that come through twice a year, we may go out onto the seawall to look out for some ocean-going species. In [the warmer season] we can head straight to Beaver Lake, where you can see the hummingbirds, the jays, the robins... local species,
said Celina, the Public Education and Outreach Manager of the Stanley Park Ecology Society and the organizer of the bird walks. While the bird walking tour is the most popular, there are other types of tours occurring during the seasons that provide interesting facts and educational details, a prime example of which is unusual urban behaviour in our animals.
"The Raccoon Rascals is a tour in August where we go out and look at how [racoon] behaviour has changed since people came around and started feeding them; a raccoon with its paw out is not normal behaviour for a racoon, we've taught them that. We do offer, once every three months, a historical walk—these are always cultural, such as the History of Stanley Park 101, or around Valentine's Day we have a tour based on the sinister, shady part of the park, not shying away from the harsher realities [of Stanley Park's history]," Celina explained. These historical tours change with the seasons and provide a break from the ecology-centred tours. When asked about the structure of the tours, we were told that they are not rigidly set in stone; nature-themed walking tours are subject to nature's schedule.
Volunteers on the Eco-Steward Event
"While all of our walking tours are ecology based, the subject varies. For example, the heron hatchlings came out, and we said 'Let's make this walk specifically to go and see these hatchlings.' One of my favourites, which happens during autumn, we have a taxidermy collection... we do a life-drawing session; we bring out all of our taxidermy, invite people and to come in and draw the taxidermy... I get to lead these workshops and they really bring people in... you can go to Main Street and draw a person anytime you want, but it's a rare opportunity to be able to have all these species in front of you to draw,"
said Celina.
Stanley Park has a rich history and the Stanley Park Ecology Society offers a chance to see Vancouver's ecology close up and with expert guidance. Be sure to add them to your list of things to do this month, and ensure you keep up to date with their ever-expanding event calendar.
The Stanley Park Ecology Society offers a chance to see Vancouver's ecology close up and with expert guidance
Bird Watching Participants
A swan seen during the Bird Watching event
Volunteers removing Blackberries as they are very invasive plants
Blackberries
Some of the largest branches were kept and used for building a fence
Bird Watching
The birds are not afraid of the visitors
Stanley Park Ecology Society Information
Meet The Photographer: Ricardo Vacas
Ricardo Vacas
Ricardo Vacas, owner of the firm Kerp Photography, always showed intense interest in many forms of creative arts. His professional photography career started in his home country, Spain, where he was the official photographer of several music bands, models and clothing brands. He decided to move to Wellington, New Zealand in 2012, knowing his real interest was fashion photography more than any other field. Currently living in Vancouver, Canada, he now combines his fashion, editorial and commercial photography projects with regular trips to Europe and USA.
DMRVDTThe Walking Dead sent a shockwave through the internet with its sixth-season finale—one that persists after five months of videos and articles that attempt to sleuth out the cliffhanger’s resolution. Villainous Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) brought his barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat (which he calls “Lucille”) down on the skull of one of the show’s heroes, and fan outcry over the ambiguous ending has given way to speculation that rivals the Zapruder film in its intensity. Everything is up for analysis, from a particular actor’s hair color at a Comic-Con appearance, to the angle of the shadows across Negan’s body as he swings. This clamor for information has only intensified as AMC releases promotional materials for season seven, including a trailer that has, as of publication, racked up nearly 6.5 million views on YouTube.
No doubt that the followers of one popular online community expected to be delivered from a summer of angst and uncertainty. And then one young viewer declared that The Spoiling Dead Fans would be posting the identity of the poor soul who slaked Lucille’s thirst. (TSDF moderators have since stated that the fan had no affiliation with the site or its leadership.) So AMC took its own hard swing, cracking down with a cease and desist order that threatens TSDF with legal action, on the grounds of copyright infringement, if it releases the identity of Negan’s victim online. In a message informing fans about the cease and desist, TSDF lamented, “Basically what it all comes down to is if we post our Lucille Victim prediction and we’re right, AMC says they will sue us… If someone brings us a potential Lucille spoiler and we confirm it and it turns out accurate we could get sued.” This seems like a David-vs.-Goliath of online geekdom—a bat-toting cable giant bullying a smaller, scrappier, and yet nobly pure-of-heart fan community—but is it?
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The answer to that question depends, by and large, on how spoilers are situated as pieces of intellectual property, and how we view the role of studios and broadcasters in protecting that intellectual property—along with their own financial interests. Those interests include the people who actually make their programs, from the actors and producers on down to the production assistants, not to mention the many fans who want to enter new seasons of their favorite shows utterly unsullied. AMC’s vigilance in building an electrified fence around its cash cow is far from unique: After the first four episodes of Game Of Thrones’ fifth season were leaked online, launching fleet after fleet of subreddits, HBO did not distribute advance screeners for the show’s sixth season. (HBO declined to comment for this piece.)
HBO has not been shy about issuing cease and desists of its own: not only the individuals suspected of pirating or leaking episodes, but to a Spanish YouTube prognosticator called Dr. Jose Senaris. In his videos, Senaris offered speculations that were too eerily accurate to be guesswork alone—and he would later confess, in a subreddit devoted to Game Of Thrones spoilers, that he did indeed get emails from a source directly affiliated with the show. This prompted HBO to send a copyright claim against one particular video, even though that video didn’t contain any new or unaired footage. Which raises the question of how, exactly, we can process the reasoning behind these claims.
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“To me, this starts with copyright law, which traditionally protects works of art,” says attorney Anthony Verna, who has practiced intellectual property law since 2004 (he specializes in trademark law, copyright law, and advertising law). This traditional understanding of copyright not only protects original works of art, but derivatives of those works; these derivatives can encompass anything from merchandise to the rights to reproduce, sell, and publicly perform copies of the work—and to create new works based on the original. So spoilers, even ones that haven’t aired yet, could still be considered derivative works. Meaning that, yes, spoilers can potentially be considered copyright-protected. Or, as Rachel Stilwell, an attorney who focuses on intellectual property and entertainment law, puts it: “Copyright law doesn’t protect ideas; it protects certain fixed expressions of ideas.”
Hypothetically, TSDF could argue fair use—which, generally speaking, is about using copyrighted material for “transformative” purposes, with “transformative” being defined, in fast and loose terms, as commentary and criticism, or parody. All of these abound in any fan forum worth its salt. However, fair use is mostly applicable to works of art that have already been offered up to the public. Spoilers from an episode that won’t air until pumpkin-spice season might not make the cut. The amateur experts who have glutted YouTube with their own predictions (a simple search of “Walking Dead Negan Death theory” yields about 32,500 results) are more clearly aligned with fair use. They are, in essence, using clips and images from the finale to make their own unique commentary and predictions: finding the symbolism in the discovery of a can of Orange Crush from a pre-Negan episode, suggesting that one carrot-topped character would get his head—well, you get the idea.
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The difference seems to be what AMC, according to its letter, perceives to be TSDF’s ability to obtain, and plan to distribute, actual spoilers about Negan’s victim, even if TSDF openly disavows the statement that they had leaked information through the “post of an excited child.” When reached for comment, AMC’s SVP of public relations, Olivia Dupuis, issued the following statement:
AMC appreciates every fan and welcomes conversation and speculation around our shows. We also take very seriously our responsibility to protect the vast majority of fans who do not want their viewing experience spoiled and will take appropriate steps to prevent the release of stolen or confidential information.
So it seems that putting on your Sherlock cap—or, better yet, your guts-smeared poncho—and wandering into the gnashing horde of speculations is not, in and of itself, inherently problematic from a copyright perspective.
That said, preventing this particular spoiler from leaking seems nigh impossible, given that many Walking Dead looky-loos and scoop hounds are getting close enough to the Georgia-based sets to snap photos of certain characters looking very much alive (if worse for the wear). The 100th issue of The Walking Dead comic book already offers—in a sequence of panels that are now iconic in their grotesquery—a very plausible candidate for doom in Glenn Rhee. Although, given the show’s penchant for remixing character deaths, actually preserving this one from the comic would be the real shocker. One wonders if this summer-long slow-burn process of elimination might, in some ways, negate the impact that TSDF might actually have on the overall success of the show. And one might argue that the real purpose of the cease and desist is, to paraphrase Negan himself, more about sending TSDF and sites like it to “Pee-Pee Pants City,” as opposed to a matter for the courts.
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Still, AMC has arguably built much of its marketing campaign for season seven around the inevitable reveal: In the letter it sent to TSDF, AMC refers to the Lucille victim as “the most critical plot information in the unreleased next season of The Walking Dead”—which indicates that the studio does believe that this spoiler could be bad for business. And business is booming: In 2015 alone, The Walking Dead drove a 25 percent boost in ad revenue. Though many viewers may only consider the end product, making any TV show—particularly a large-ensemble, FX-heavy show like Game Of Thrones or The Walking Dead—is a significant financial investment that can cost millions of dollars per episode. And that investment is a huge factor in copyright law. As Verna says, “Copyright law is all about protecting the ability [to make] an income from artwork. We have a work that takes a lot of people and a lot of resources that generate a lot of money.” There are no clear and specific barometers to gauge whether, or how much, the leak of this particular spoiler could hurt the show. After all, TSDF and other sites did leak audio of Negan’s brutal debut days before the finale—and season six still ended with 14.8 million in total viewership. That’s down, admittedly, from the series high of the season-five finale, but still a ratings gain of 15 percent from the mid-season finale cliffhanger (which, in case you forgot, was resolved via deus ex dumpster).
Yet the fact that we’re still talking about this cliffhanger, still reading interviews where cast members talk about how much they cried after reading the script, and still making and watching YouTube speculation videos and visiting sites like TSDF is a testament to the enduring interest in this particular spoiler. The cliffhanger was initially dismissed as a moment of crass commercialism, rather than an ending that truly served the material—and, if anything, this fresh blitz of commercials, ads, and magazine features revolving the cliffhanger only supports that view. So it’s easy to understand why fans want to know which character they’ll be grieving when season seven of The Walking Dead starts. But it’s also easy to understand why, lumbering into the seventh season of an expensive show, AMC would gamble on the intrigue—and why it would try to protect its material. Of course, people who really want to know can likely sniff out the character who met his or her end in a crash of metal and wood easily enough. But for the rest of us, there’s always October 23.Andrew Bolt writes a lot of articles. The prolific right-wing columnist and blogger is famously diligent, often filing stories well past midnight, adding a TV show in recent years.
But of all the columns Bolt has typed in recent years, |
aged when it was passed. He now supports an Amash-style bill that would prevent the NSA from hoovering up phone records without specific justification.
Most of the efforts focus on constraining the NSA's ability to spy on Americans. There is less congressional support for limiting its spying on foreigners' internet communication. One major exception is a measure introduced by House Democrat Rush Holt, that would repeal both the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, two legislative pillars of post-9/11 surveillance.
Holt, who previously served on the intelligence committee, represents the most sceptical wing of Congress. "I learned that the heads of the NSA and other intelligence agencies are schooled in secrecy and deception. You can't always believe everything they say," he said. "They say these have stopped 50 attacks or something like that, and though I'm not on the intelligence committee right now, and I can't speak item-by-item, I can be pretty sure that there's probably not too much truth to it."
His bill represents the most radical congressional attempt at surveillance reform. Its prospects are not good, particularly because it would curtail Prism, one of the NSA programs to spy on the internet communications in foreign lands.
Schiff said Prism was more popular in congress for two reasons. First, Prism "is focused outside the United States and not on US citizens". Second, Schiff said its effectiveness is "much more substantial" than the phone records collection.
Intelligence officials have struggled to show how collecting bulk phone metadata was critical to foiling even one terrorist plot.
Lawmakers may fume at the idea of collecting the phone records of Americans, but they seem nonplussed at the notion the NSA can freely access the emails of foreigners.
Even those who do have concerns about Prism – such as Wyden – are looking for ways to ensure Americans are not ensnared in its dragnet, rather than ending it entirely.
"It has become increasingly apparent that the balance between security and liberty has been tainted," Sensenbrenner said in a statement after he left the White House meeting. "The conversation was very productive and everyone agreed something must be done."From 1967 to 1983, Johnny Bench of the Cincinnati Reds earned the Rookie of the Year award, two National League MVP awards, 14 trips to the All-Star Game, and 10 Golden Glove awards. For good measure, he played in four World Series with the Big Red Machine. Bench is widely considered to be one of the greatest catchers of all time. These day's he's into baseball cards. He joined Bill Littlefield to discuss his hobby and more.
JB: I am such a big fan [of baseball cards]. I mean growing up in a small town in Oklahoma with Mickey Mantle as my idol and being a true card collector hoping to get Mickey Mantle's '52 card, rookie card, which was my total goal in life even though I never got it. And now, when I go around to memorabilia shows I go around buying my cards back up. Of course, now Topps is coming out with their 2014 Series 1 set.
You can get all the young stars, players of the past. You can win top-50 rookies, win memorabilia — you can even win a Mickey Mantle. I never got a Mickey Mantle card, so I may have to try and do it this way. I may have to go online myself if I can get my kids to figure out how to get me online.
BL: Johnny, you're working with the Topps baseball card company. Do you remember receiving your first card after you reached the majors?
JB: Surely you jest. Of course I do, my goodness gracious. That's what made you a major leaguer. So I loved it. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Now I say "Look at me." You could carry 'em around, "Here, have my card."
BL: Were there other cards that you remember from your boyhood besides that elusive Mickey Mantle card?
JB: Rocky Colavito. I don't know what it was, but that name, just sort of like Rocky. And he looked like a Rocky, and he was kind of like — you have some really cool cards, and I was a fan of all the players and everything else, but we only got the paper once a week in my town. So it wasn't like they had the box scores and you knew everything was going on.
But, you know, the Game of the Week, when my dad and I would go down and get a half gallon of Neapolitan ice cream, and we'd watch the Game of the Week. And of course the Yankees were on their most of the time. Tony Cuccinello! I mean here was Dizzy [Dean] throwing out the name doing all the stuff. And here I am 19-years-old, and I'm in Connie Mack Stadium and there's Johnny Callison and Richie Allen. And you go to the All Star game and here's Willie Mays, and here's Hank Aaron, and you're catching behind him, so yeah I was a lucky man.
BL: In the 1970s the Reds went to the World Series four times, winning twice, and went to another two National League Championship Series. Your first full season with the team was 1968. How quickly did you realize you were part of an extraordinary team?
JB: Well, in 1970 we started off the year 70-30. In our era, I'm playing with Tony Perez in '68, Pete Rose, Tommy Helms, Vada Pinson. And we were close. We were really close. It just seemed like we needed one more thing to make it happen. In 1970 we started off with Lee May hitting and we were just dominating.
We had teams say, "Why don't we just give it to them now?" And then we were 32-30, and yet here we were 32-30 to end the year and we won 102 games. I mean, it was just phenomenal. And then when we failed a little bit in '71 the trade was made for Joe Morgan for Cesar Geronimo for Jack Billingham. Dennis Mickey came over and Ed Armbrister. And that's when we really got it. We had a swagger. That's when Joe had a chip on his shoulder and Pete Rose was Pete Rose. And we had a Gold Glove center fielder and Gold Glove shortstop in David Concepcion. We had Ken Griffey. I mean we had other teams come out to watch us take batting practice. They'd watch us take batting practice. It was that kind of ball club.
BL: St. Louis Cardinals legend Lou Brock, one of the games greatest base stealers, spoke to you after you had thrown him out early in your career — threw him out at second base by a pretty significant margin. Tell us a little bit about what happened next.
JB: Well, we had a pitcher named Jack Fisher, and Lou had stolen 33 bases in a row I think it was. And he took off against Jack, and Jack looked slow, but he wasn't. I threw it to second and Lou, he hadn't started his slide. He stopped and looked back at me, just looked back at me like, "What the hell was that?" And so after the game I'm sitting in my locker and I look up and it's Lou. He looked down and said, "Next time, kid, make it look close." And it was the most amazing thing to me. I'm a young kid.
He told me later on at the Hall of Fame when we were sitting around, he says, "You know you threw me out three times in one game." I said, "Did I really?" He said, '"You know what I told you when I came up the fourth time?" "Knowing you Lou, you said 'If I get him I'm going again.'" And he did. That's what it was.
BL: You started playing pro golf in the 1990s on the Senior PGA Tour and Champions Tour. What was it like trying to compete at the elite level at a second sport?
JB: It was fun. They accepted me. I wasn't going to beat them. They already knew that. These guys were so good. But it was really cool. It was a fun thing. I brought people in to the tournaments. One time Chi Chi [Rodriguez] and I had everyone on the golf course following us. And I played with Arnold Palmer 'cause we usually by that time had the worst scores, and so we played together probably 10 times. And I played with Jack Nicklaus in Park City and it was fun.
BL: What catchers do you enjoy watching particularly today?
JB: Buster Posey. This kid Salvador Perez from Kansas City is a stud. You got Yadier [Molina]. You got Mike Zunino up in Seattle. Believe me there's some great catchers out there and until they start leading the league in RBIs or home runs, you're not going to hear a lot about them. There's only 13 catchers in the Hall of Fame I think and that's one a decade. So they don't come along that often.Did you just miss the Kickstarter? Not to worry, our web store will be opening in the months to come!
"Lorica" is Latin for body armor; in Christian monastic tradition, a lorica is a prayer of protection. It's also an armor-inspired line of clothing designed to slay, wherever you take the fight.
(Note: due to the unexpectedly overwhelming response our products have received, First Run leggings will ship in installments, some of which may be later than the posted date of June. See the update section for more information).
THE DESIGNS
Our first release consists of three designs based on real medieval armors. (Armor images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where all three of these armors are currently on view).
THE MATERIALS
Our leggings are constructed from a fabric that is 14% spandex and 86% recycled yarns derived from plastic bottles. In fact, about 20 bottles go into each pair. But they're stretchy, soft, and moisture-wicking to keep you dry and stank-free no matter how hard you're working. So basically you can save the earth by getting your sweat on in comfort. IT'S LIKE MAGIC.
THE FEATURES
Our leggings are designed for both function and fashion, fighting and flying.
THE SIZING
Available in sizes XS through XXL, two rise heights (high-waisted, 5" waistband; standard rise, 3" waistband), and two inseams (regular; long), our leggings accommodate your body and style. (For reference, our models range in height from 5'2 to 5'8 and are all wearing regular length).
As a backer, you will receive a survey at the conclusion of the Kickstarter which will ask for your preferred design, size, rise, and inseam before we ship your goodies!
THE REWARDS
Peep our limited edition run of unisex chainmail tees, available only through this Kickstarter. (Our limited edition shirts are all sold out at this time!)
(Note: our promo tees are not made from the same recycled fabrics as our leggings, and are only printed in the USA. See the size chart here: our model is 6'3 and wearing a medium).
And for the first week of our campaign, enjoy an "early bird special" on one, two, or three pairs of Lorica leggings (in any combination of size, waist style, or design) at a special Kickstarter-only price tier. After the first week, you'll still be able to take advantage of backer tiers that will get you a pair (or two, or three) for less than the future retail value. Suit up the squad!
THE GOALS
The $10,000 I ask for here covers the cost of the first run of production, as well as the cost of pattern development, sizing, and sourcing. But if we get even further, I have so many dreams for where this brand could go. You with me?
(Note: You will be able to order these stretch goal items after the conclusion of our Kickstarter when our web store formally launches. If I might make an estimate, possibly August or September would be the earliest they'd be ready to order. To be the first to know when they'll be available, sign up for our mailing list.)
$20,000: Skater Dresses -- REACHED
You read right! I have the patterns, but need your help to fund sample-making and a first run! Here were my first prototypes if you need an idea of the fit:
Need a sneak peek for further convincing? I got started on a Henry VIII bodice not too long ago...
$30,000: Plus Sizing -- REACHED
Goddess-sized women out there, I see you. I am dedicated to making Lorica accessible to all bodies, and would love to be able to develop another series of sizes designed for your shape. I'm thinking a line of S+, M+, L+: let me know your thoughts! Clothes should fit YOU, not the other way around.
$40,000: Bodysuits/Leotards -- REACHED
When I was a kid, I had a dream one night that I got Pokemon Stadium in the mail months before it was released. I woke up crushed to find that it wasn't still in my N64. I have the same feeling today thinking about how I could be wearing an armor bodysuit right now. Help me make the dream a reality!
Here's a rough mockup of what the Scudamore bodysuit might look like. I think I'd prefer a cap sleeve, though, to keep more of the pauldrons in the picture. Y'all will be the first to see the real samples when they're made in some months' time!
$70,000: Reversible Hoodies -- REACHED
Business on one side, Faire on the other, how sick would reversible hoodies be? So many ideas for these. Mail (chain, scale)? An all out cuirass, pauldrons, vambrace ensemble? SO MANY POSSIBILITIES.
$90,000: Men's Leggings -- REACHED
Gentlemen, I've heard your cries for equal representation, and I am here for you. If we get this far, we can start development for leggings with extra room in the thigh and calf that also provide for the comfort and support of certain anatomy.
THE CREATOR
Elie Hutchinson is a graphic designer and art director in advertising by day, avid gamer by night. Watch my intro video and put a face to the name, learn a little more about the origin of the brand, and enjoy me being really awkward on camera! :D
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THE COMMUNITY
Follow us on Instagram for more warrior eye candy, or on Facebook for updates and behind-the-scenes tidbits!I have noticed that the leftist pundits, when they strive to "explain" Hillary Clinton's defeat, they rush themselves to add something about Clinton and the popular vote. This should be regarded, psychologically, as a compensatory reaction to her shameful, and not quite narrow-margin, defeat.
Unexpected? Sure, if you think about: the whole Democratic Party, the GOP NeverTrumps, the mainstream media, the confused independents, and most of the international community (who were all living in their own parallel realities, fed by a vicious MSM). Logical? Of course, if you count in the "silent majority" (who chose to screw up the pollsters' biased questions and vote to save this nation), the disgusted ones (who decided to stay home or vote for the third parties), and a few others of us, the non-MSM commentators (who have chosen not to be muzzled by the Establishment elite and its propaganda arm, the same MSM).
Procedurally, on December 19, 2016 (that is, "on the Monday following the second Wednesday in December of that year," according to the U.S. Constitution, Article Two, Section 1, Clause 4), the chosen 538 electors of the Electoral College (which is a process, not a place) will meet in their state capitals and vote for president. On January 6, 2017 (according to the U.S. Code, Title 3, Chapter 1, Article 15), the U.S. Congress meets to approve the Electoral College vote. In order to become a U.S. president, any presidential candidate needs a minimum of 270 electoral votes (out of the total of 538) in order to be elected president.
The "compensatory" narrative infers two premise situations in which Donald Trump can not or should not become the 45th president of the United States.
The "Faithless Electors"
I call this "the latent" or "soft version" of the "popular vote" issue, according to which Trump cannot become president. It has been argued that, theoretically, Hillary Clinton can still get to the magic number of 270 electors, if she can get enough "faithless electors" (who chose either to abstain from voting or to vote "their conscience" and ignore the will of the voters they represent).
One can imagine that, encouraged by the results of the current "popular vote," some electors might decide to do just that.
In reality, this will not happen because:
(a) there won't be enough "faithless electors" to make up the difference between the current 306 electoral votes won by Trump and the 232 won by Clinton. She will need a lot of Republican "faithless electors" to turn the table in her favor.
(b) only 31 [21 —ed.] states out of 50 allow "faithless electors" to cast their vote (the rest of 19 states penalize them if they chose to do so).
(c) even if a sufficient number of "faithless electors" can change radically the current situation (and there has not been any precedent in which they ever swung an election), the pre- (and also post-) January 20 Republican-controlled U.S. Congress will vote to void these votes.
Questioning the Fairness of the Electoral College System
I call this "the overt" or "hard version" of the "popular vote" issue, according to which Trump should not become president. The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College in order to avoid "mob rule" of some populous states like California, New York, and Texas against the rest of the country. The current system favors the Republicans, who are in control of more numerous but less populous states.
By repeating the "popular vote" syntagm, the liberal pundits and their followers seem to suggest that the Electoral College should be abolished. They do not say this verbatim, but the anti-Trump rioters in several American cities appear to fight exactly for that. Of course, the issue is not new – just ask Al Gore about it. Trump himself blasted this system by tweeting that "[t]he electoral college is a disaster for a democracy" when Mitt Romney lost the elections in 2012.
The liberal left is pushing the issue even farther, suggesting through social media that states like California should secede. A similar movement appears to be taking place in Oregon.
The U.S. Constitution is silent on the issue of state secession. In 1860, eleven states attempted to secede from the Union and failed in the loss of the Civil War. In 1863, president Abraham Lincoln approved West Virginia's "secession" from Virginia. In 1869, the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that individual states could not secede from the Union "except through revolution or through consent of the States."
The Reductio ad absurdum Argument
Let's put all this aside and pretend, for the sake of argument, that Hillary Clinton won by "the popular vote" and there is no Electoral College. Here, I am giving all the die-hard Democrats this. What will happen next?
Most likely, these circumstances would result in a "Confederate North-Eastern States of America" rebellion pushing for secession.
I would include here 11 "rebel states" (wouldn't this be ironic?), from the "southern" Maryland up to the "northern" Maine (including D.C. and Virginia, but not New York). All of them small. All of them controlled by Democrats. All of them constantly complaining for their interests being crassly ignored by the Republican "Union." And all of them ending up taking their 75 electoral votes with them. See the map.
Is this the scenario the left is prepared to pursue? And if the answer is affirmative, then I can only end with Clint Eastwood's catchphrase: "Go ahead. Make my day!"
Tiberiu Dianu has published several books and over 100 articles on law, politics, and post-communist societies. He currently lives and works in Washington, D.C.Emerging from blogs to CNN, from bars to barbershops, the past days have seen a growing view that justice for Eric Garner is somehow more righteous than for Michael Brown. The "murky" details of the Brown case contrast with the long and gruesome video of Garner's killing. Even prominent conservatives, from Charles Krauthammer to Bill O'Reilly, allow that the Garner case troubles them while the Brown case does not. The Washington Post's Aaron Blake reports polls showing that whites are twice as likely to oppose the grand jury decision in New York as they are the decision in Missouri, and also seems to endorse such conclusions.
To television correspondents, the protests seem to be better in New York as well. The supposedly extreme violence of the response in Ferguson and St. Louis to the non-indictment in the Brown case hardens into a tale that ignores the communities' spectacular practice of militant nonviolence over many months. Missouri becomes the bad counterpoint to the alleged sophistication and "restraint on both sides" on display in New York. The tactical innovations of the Missouri movement, networked nationally and with several of its leaders present in the early days of the Garner protests, changed what could be imagined in New York City. Such breakthroughs too easily get lost in the mass media shuffle. Awareness that we are seeing a national movement leaping past the traditional civil rights leadership is far clearer to participants than to commentators. That movement is led not only by a new generation but also by activists from unexpected places.
The stark differences in media portrayals of the cases of and of the movements surrounding Brown and Garner will almost surely narrow. If New York City grand jury testimony is not released there are likely to be selective leaks, for example of autopsy results on Garner's general health, that attempt to undermine the force of the video. These may send troubled conservatives to the ask-no-questions fold regarding Garner's death. If the Department of Justice refuses to indict in the New York case as well as the Missouri one, a broad swathe of liberal opinion will also lose concern. If the movement in New York can sustain its rolling occupation of public places, the coming police violence will remind us that urbane New York is the state of the murderous attacks on Attica prison protesters and the city of fierce police raids on Zuccotti Park, the Occupy movement, and undocumented immigrants.
Thinking more seriously about the police murders of Brown and Garner together yields critical insights. In the days after the Brown grand jury decision, protests raced from city to city. The media usually saw them as being about solidarity with Ferguson. And they gloriously were. However, they also spread because in each city where they occurred, police violence had left its own bloody trail. That the closure of Lake Shore Drive by Ferguson protesters in Chicago can be reported on without reference to the reign of falsification and police torture conducted by the recently convicted Jon Burge and others indexes the poverty of U.S. journalism.
When New York marchers closed the FDR Expressway over the Ferguson decision, and before the Garner one, they of course had in mind the cases of Garner and of the unarmed Brooklyn resident Akai Gurley, killed by police this November. Going further back some mourned death and torture in the cases of Sean Bell, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Nicholas Heyward, Jr., Anthony Baez, Eleanor Bumpurs, Ramarley Graham, Kimani Gray, Tamon Robinson, Patrick Dorismond, and many others. As inspiring as it was that activists came to St. Louis to support justice for Michael Brown, it has mattered equally that the sustained energy of young African-American activists in Ferguson has reanimated movements against police brutality across the nation, and to some extent, the world.
Finally, and most importantly, thinking about the Brown and Garner murders together offers a way to get beyond the "who was more innocent" narrative pushed in the media. The video in the Garner case bears on the Brown one; its presence shows what prosecutors and police are eager to defend and the slant they bring in approaching a fatal encounter between police and a person who is African-American. Despite what the video clearly showed, the same people defended police conduct in both instances. The very same talking heads who repeated the pro-police St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch's contention that all evidence led to non-indictment in the Brown case did not linger long over the fact that video evidence did exist in the Garner case.
The Democratic politician and St. Louis Police Officers Association bureaucrat Jeff Roorda, himself fired as a policeman in 1997 after being charged with filing a false report, did double duty in the media. He argued that the police side of the case against probable cause had been proven correct in the Brown case. In the Garner case, Roorda became an instant expert exonerating the officer despite the visual evidence and medical examiner's report establishing probable cause that a crime had been committed.
Roorda recently held that McCulloch rightly only went through the motions of a grand jury procedure, knowing that Darren Wilson was innocent in Brown's death. He further implied that the prosecutor of the Garner murder in Staten Island did the same proper thing. This judgment, made at the junction of white supremacist common sense and police and prosecutorial common sense, defines the problem. It also underlines the utility of thinking deeply about what the Garner case has to teach us about the Brown case.
David Roediger is the President-elect of the American Studies Association. He is the author of the recently released Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All.Ndamukong Suh has, in all likelihood, played his last down in Honolulu Blue. Like most Detroit Lions fans, I will be sad to see him go. It wasn’t just that he was a transformative force on defense. It isn’t simply because I love hearing the echoes of “SUUUUUUUUUUH!” at Ford Field on game day. It has been great to have a guy on defense that was outright feared by other teams. When other things went wrong on defense we could hang our hat on Suh and say “Yeah… but did you see what he did to Cutler last week?”
As the clock ticks down and free agency approaches, one has to wonder if the front office has prepared for this. Further, some may ask themselves if they have not just anticipated but planned for this eventuality.
” … it’s a possibility, there’s no question about that. But we’re not necessarily going to tell you.” – Jim Caldwell
One point of speculation is that the Lions may bring in a nose tackle and convert their defense from a 4-3 to a 3-4. When asked by reporters that the 2015 NFL Combine if the Lions may move to a 3-4, Coach Caldwell responded by saying, “I hope not to have to find that out. But if we do, obviously, we’ll have to cross that bridge when it comes. Now do we look at it and think about it, because it’s a possibility, there’s no question about that. But we’re not necessarily going to tell you.”
While I don’t know that this will happen, there are some actions that in retrospect may point to just this shift.
Both of the finalists in the coaching search by the Lions were likely looking to guys in 3-4 systems for their defensive coordinators
When searching for a new head coach teams frequently ask their candidates who they have in mind for positions on their staff. While we may not know for certain what these coaches (Whisenhunt and Caldwell) answered, we do know that in the end they wound up with two guys (Horton and Austin respectively) who were coming out of 3-4 systems.
In an unusual move the Lions decided early in 2014 that they would not exercise Nick Fairley’s option for 2015
Nick Fairley isn’t the guy that we want at NT. He just isn’t a 0-technique guy. He is big enough to take up some space, but lacks gap discipline. He can stop the run, but is best used in a more aggressive style. Clearly he isn’t a 3-4 DE. He doesn’t fit well in that system.
Darryl Tapp
Obviously we could have just signed him to play 4-3 DE. However, he did play some 5-technique in Washington. So he has experience in the 3-4 system. Of note is that he was one of the first players that we re-signed in 2015.
Kyle Van Noy
In spite of having a pretty decent line-up of linebackers in 2014 (Tulloch, Levy, Whitehead, and Palmer) the Lions traded up to grab another linebacker: Kyle Van Noy. Van Noy, obviously, a standout playmaker at BYU in a 3-4 system.
Tulloch indicates that he will return to the Lions in 2015
While many were speculating that Tulloch, coming off a torn ACL, would be a cap casualty, he recently Tweeted that he will be returning to the Lions in 2015. So in a position that the Lions were fine with most last season (Whitehead, Levy, and Palmer) they will likely be adding two more linebackers (Tulloch and Van Noy).
Clearly all of this is just the off-season boredom talking. However, it may also be that the Lions front office has known since late 2013 that they would be unable to bring Suh back after his contract. And who can honestly blame them? While Suh is a dominating defensive tackle, committing 40% of your cap dollars to just three players is not a recipe for success.
The Lions have significant young talent with contracts expiring in the next two years. Extending or re-signing these guys will obviously be a priority.
DeAndre Levy (2016)
Riley Reiff (2016)
Tahir Whitehead (2016)
LaAdrian Waddle (2016)
Ezekiel Ansah (2017)
Darius Slay (2017)
Larry Warford (2017)
Theo Riddick (2017)
Sam Martin (2017)
It would be difficult to do so if we were to give Suh the $17+ million per year average that he is likely looking for.
At any rate, I am reminded of the words of Dr. Seuss who told us “Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.” I, for one, am thankful for the time that Suh has been in Detroit. When he plays against 30 of the teams in the NFL I will smile any time I hear that familiar cheer of “SUUUUUUUUUUUUUH”. I am preparing myself for life after Suh. I just hope that the Detroit Lions have done the same.
Forward down the field…There’s an enduring popular image of divorced women as bitter and jaded, while divorced men are portrayed as all too happy to break free. But this proves wrong when put to the test.
Women love four things, according to hack comedians and romantic comedies: chocolate, shopping, nagging dudes like it’s their job, and marriage. On that last count, we’re told, love rises to the level of obsession: Women long to be brides their whole lives and then cling to their marriages when they become wives. But new studies suggest women are less happy in mediocre heterosexual marriages, more likely to call things off and more content with post-divorce life than men. Taken together, the findings debunk a lot of long-held—and outdated—gendered ideas about one of our oldest institutions.
Women and men are equally likely to end non-married intimate relationships, including when the couple lives together. That all changes once vows are exchanged. A 2015 study involving more than 2,000 heterosexual married couples aged 19 to 94 found that women initiate divorce in nearly 70 percent of marriages. Researchers theorize this might be a result of gender norms that make heterosexual marriage an unequal partnership, with women getting the short end of the stick. We know that married couples divide housework evenly until they have a child, after which the woman takes on the bulk of childcare and housework loads shift disproportionately to her.
Marriage does a better job for men of improving health outcomes, decreasing chronic illnesses, and extending life spans, than it does for women. Married men make more money than their unmarried male counterparts, but there’s no such income bump for married women. In fact, researchers note that post-marriage, women’s “earnings and careers are thought to suffer.” This might contribute to the reasons why, as study author Michael Rosenfeld of Stanford University told Science Daily, “Women seem to have a predominant role in initiating divorces in the U.S. as far back as there is data from a variety of sources, back to the 1940s.”
“I think that marriage as an institution has been a little bit slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality,” Rosenfeld added. “Wives still take their husbands’ surnames, and are sometimes pressured to do so. Husbands still expect their wives to do the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the childcare. On the other hand, I think that non-marital relationships lack the historical baggage and expectations of marriage, which makes the non-marital relationships more flexible and therefore more adaptable to modern expectations, including women’s expectations for more gender equality.”
According to Rosenfeld, this incongruity between women’s wants and expectations, versus the realities they often encounter in marriage, leaves them discontent and more likely to opt out. He says this dissatisfaction with gender roles in marriage “supports the theory that sociologists refer to as ‘the stalled gender revolution,’ meaning that as much as women’s roles in society have changed, women’s roles within the families have changed very slowly.” Traditionalists would blame feminism for this, and they’re actually right—except for the misguided idea that women wanting more is a bad thing. Don’t worry, traditionalists! Women still carry an unequal share of the psychic, emotional, and household physical labor of marriages; they’re just a lot less cool with it than they used to be.
“Women have a much higher bar now as to what it takes to stay in a relationship,” University of Washington sociologist and sexologist Pepper Schwartz told The Stir, a parenting blog. “The tone of relationship trumps marriage.”
Despite all this, there’s an enduring popular image of divorced women as bitter and jaded, while divorced men are portrayed as all too happy to break free. But this again proves wrong when put to the test. According to an online survey of 2,000 U.S. adults by Avvo, a legal research company, 75 percent of divorced women report having no regrets over the decision to part, whereas just 61 percent of divorced men say the same. Women are also much more likely to find dividends in blissful singledom than bummed-out wedlock. “Seventy-five percent of women say they’d rather be alone, successful, and happy than be unhappy in a relationship overall, versus 58 percent of men believing the same,” the researchers write.
“Men are more fearful of being on their own once they’ve been domesticated by their marriage, and even though men are more likely to think that marriage is an outdated institution on principle, they’re more likely to want to stay put even if things aren’t so great,” says Schwartz. “Women, on the other hand, prize happiness over marriage, and are less fearful of independence generally.”
For men, the cost of divorce is often higher and far more serious than for women, and greater than previously calculated. The health benefits men receive from getting married find their inverse in divorce. After marriage dissolution, men gain more weight than women, and even sleep worse. The Huffington Post points to a study from University of Nebraska researchers that finds compared to married men, divorced men are “more prone to various diseases, ranging from common colds to life-threatening health problems like cancer and heart attacks.” Divorced fathers are more likely than divorced mothers to sink into depression—which they are 10 times more likely to experience than married men—and to treat their depression by self-medicating with alcohol. Relatedly, divorced men are also more likely to abuse harder drugs. All of these issues lead to increased mortality rates, which researchers estimate may be as high as 250 percent higher than that of married men. Divorced men also die by their own hands, at a rate 39 percent greater than married men.
The role of toxic masculinity, which can be lethal even in small doses, has an undeniable role to play here. Women are often allowed to express feelings of loss, grief, and sadness after divorce in a way societally imposed constructions of masculinity deny men. The very human need to confront those feelings, when repressed, forces their sublimation into unhealthy and often risky behaviors. What’s more, women often have wider and more emotionally profound support networks than men. Not because men prefer it that way, but because of our culturally held notions of how relationships between heterosexual men should function and look. Psychology Today notes that “when asked who they would turn to first if they were feeling depressed, 71 percent of men selected their wife whereas only 39 percent of women selected their husband.” The trauma and sadness of divorce can leave people with a deep need to process their feelings. For men, the sudden loss of a trusted spouse and close confidante can be particularly rough.
While women may fare better than men after divorce, they seem to show a marked unwillingness to share responsibility for the demise of their marriages—and by large margins. The Avvo study found that 64 percent of women surveyed said their ex-husbands were responsible for the marriage failing, while just 44 percent of men said the same. When asked whether both spouses should share the blame, just 29 percent of women—compared with 42 percent of men—said they agreed with the statement.
“As the saying goes, it takes two to tango and two to ruin a relationship, but women are less likely to take their share of the blame,” Schwartz said. “Gender roles and traditional stereotypes of domestic partnerships absolutely play a role here. It might be that women believe that self-blame is not empowering, and men may feel as though it’s not masculine to blame their wives.”
Either way, it probably doesn’t help a |
was born in New Jersey, to Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Lauren's mother, Natalie Weinstein-Bacal, was a Romanian Jewish immigrant.
She made two movies with John Wayne Blood Alley (1955) and The Shootist (1976). In the earlier film, during production, Bacall's husband at the time, Humphrey Bogart, was dying of throat cancer. When she made the latter film with Wayne, he had lost a lung to cancer twelve years earlier, which mirrored the fate of his character in the story.
According to her autobiography, "By Myself and Then Some", she was always very self-conscious about the size of her feet, which she describes as big even for a woman of her exceptional height.
She was 17 when she met and became close friends with Gregory Peck. She was an usherette at the time. They remained close until his death.
She was dismissed by Howard Hawks because she had a high nasal voice, but she spent two weeks developing her voice and, when she came back to visit Hawks two weeks later, she had a deep husky voice.
She was close friends with Dirk Bogarde. Bacall had visited him at his home in London the day before he died in May 1999.
At the funeral for her husband, Humphrey Bogart, she put a whistle in his coffin. It was a reference to the famous line she says to him in their first film together To Have and Have Not (1944): "You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow.".
Campaigned for Harry S. Truman in the 1948 presidential election.
She was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1724 Vine Street in Hollywood, California on February 8, 1960.
She was awarded a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in Palm Springs, California on January 10, 1997.
One of the auditoriums in Tuckwood cineplex in Belgrade, Serbia bears her name.
Was referenced in the stage and movie versions of the musical "Evita" in the song, "Rainbow High": "I'm their Savior! That's what they call me, so Lauren Bacall me. Anything goes!".
Was the second name entered on IMDB, just after Fred Astaire (nm0000001) and just before Brigitte Bardot (nm0000003).
According to her autobiography, "By Myself and Then Some", Bacall lost her virginity to future husband Humphrey Bogart at age 19 when they began an affair in February 1944.
Gave birth to her first child at age 24, a son Stephen H. Bogart on January 6, 1949. Child's father was her first husband, Humphrey Bogart
Gave birth to her second child at age 27, a daughter Leslie Bogart on August 23, 1952. Child's father was her first husband, Humphrey Bogart
Gave birth to her third child at age 37, a son Sam Robards on December 16, 1961. Child's father was her second [now ex] husband, Jason Robards
She originally wanted and intended to be a dancer having attended ballet classes since infancy but in adolescence was drawn to acting.
When she was age 6, her parents divorced and her mother adopted the surname Bacal. Lauren added an L to it to avoid her name rhyming with crackle.
Her father was a medical instrument salesman and her mother was a secretary.
She was educated through the expense of wealthy uncles at Highland Manor, a private boarding school in Tarrytown, New York and Julia Richman High School in Manhattan.
Inspired by seeing Bette Davis in films, she enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where she went out with Kirk Douglas, who was there on a scholarship. As girls were not accepted for scholarships, she was forced to leave after a year and got a job modeling swim wear then gowns while in the evenings she worked as an usherette.
Following her death, she was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
Educated at Julia Richman High School.
In the late 40's Warners fined and suspended her for failing to accept roles they wanted her to do.
Made her New York stage debut in Johnny Two -by-Four in 1942.
Howard Hawks put her under personal contract and changed her name to Lauren Bacall. In the mid 40's he sold her contract to Warners.
Has never appeared in a film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar.
Quit smoking cigarettes in the mid-1980s.
On August 29, 2018, she was honored with a day of her film work during the TCM Summer Under The Stars.
She expressed interest in playing Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967).
Personal Quotes (28)
I never believed marriage was a lasting institution. I thought that to be married for five years was to be married forever.
I was this flat-chested, big-footed, lanky thing.
I don't think being the only child of a single parent helped. I was always a little unsteady in my self-belief. Then there was the Jewish thing. I love being Jewish, I have no problem with it at all. But it did become like a scar, with all these people saying you don't look it.
I remember my oldest son, Steve, saying to me once, "I don't ever remember seeing you with an apron on." And I thought, "That's right, honey, you did not." That was his concept of what a mother should be.
I would hate now [2005] to be married. It does occur to me on occasion that, if I fall and hit my head, there will be no one to make the phone call. But who wants to think about that disaster? I'd prefer not to.
I am still working, I've never stopped and, while my health holds out, I won't stop.
I put my career in second place throughout both my marriages and it suffered. I don't regret it. You make choices. If you want a good marriage, you must pay attention to that. If you want to be independent, go ahead. You can't have it all.
Actors today go into TV, which I don't consider has a lot to do with acting. They only think of stardom. If you photograph well, that's enough. I have a terrible time distinguishing one from another. Girls wear their hair the same, and are much too anorexic-looking.
A legend involves the past. I don't like categories. This one is great and that one is great. The word "great" stands for something. When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise. His whole behavior is so shocking. It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness.
I'm a total Democrat. I'm anti-Republican. And it's only fair that you know it... I'm liberal. The L word!
[on Humphrey Bogart ] Was he tough? In a word, no. Bogey was truly a gentle soul.
[on John Huston ] He was about something.
I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
On imagination: Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.
[upon receiving her Honorary Oscar] A man at last!
Yes, I saw Twilight (2008) - my granddaughter made me watch it, she said it was the greatest vampire film ever. After the "film" was over I wanted to smack her across her head with my shoe, but I do not want a (tell-all) book called Grannie Dearest written on me when I die. So instead I gave her a DVD of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece Nosferatu (1922) and told her, "Now that's a vampire film!". And that goes for all of you! Watch Nosferatu instead!
It's been misspelt a lot. He decided on it. It's not "Bogey". He signed it with an "ie". And that's good enough for me.
A woman isn't complete without a man. But where do you find a man - a real man - these days?
[on receiving an honorary Oscar] The thought when I get home that I'm going to have a two-legged man in my room is so exciting.
You learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you're a New Yorker? The world doesn't owe you a damn thing,
[on filming her most famous scene, in To Have and Have Not (1944)] My hand was shaking, my head was shaking, the cigarette was shaking, I was mortified. The harder I tried to stop, the more I shook. I realized that one way to hold my trembling head still was to keep it down, chin low, almost to my chest, and eyes up at Bogart. It worked and turned out to be the beginning of The Look.
[on Bette Davis ] Well, I must say that I always loved her. And I think that she - for me - was the best actress and the most exciting female star on the screen. I think her work will live forever. I think it's timeless. And as she got older, her talent did not diminish. I mean, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) - she - it was a wonderful job of acting that she did. She looked like a fright, but that was the part. But she could convey almost anything. She was quite an extraordinary talent. And unfortunately, she didn't have an opportunity to do as much a she wanted to, but she was a woman who had to work. And I understand that better than most people do - that you have to work.
(on Confidential Agent (1945)) A very bad experience for Boyer and myself. He was wonderful. But Herman Shumlin, who directed, knew nothing about movies. He gave me terrible direction, if any. It was just a nightmare. Schumlin did nothing to help. The press killed me - after building me into this combination of Gabo and Dietrich and Mae West and God-knows-who. Sddenly I became this nothing. I spent the next 20 years building myself back up to where I had any confidence at all in what I could do.
(on The Cobweb (1955)) We used to kid about that while making it; the movie was about the God-damned drapes. Vincente was a marvelous man, but totally visual. He was not so interested in actors.
(on Michael Curtiz ) His great talent was moving the camera around. Bright Leaf (1950) was a joke, but I was thrilled to work with Cooper. Young Man, I thought was pretty good though Mike Curtiz was not the ideal director for the Bix Beiderbecke story.
Salary (3)“We’re not here to have a discussion on whether legalizing marijuana was the right thing to do,” said Jack Finlaw, Mr. Hickenlooper’s chief legal counsel and a co-chairman of the task force. “Our job is to find ways of efficiently and effectively implementing it.”
Colorado’s Amendment 64 sets the stage for marijuana to be regulated much like alcohol. But the state will have a whole new set of variables to consider, like licensing retail facilities and determining what sort of security measures stores should have.
And Mr. Finlaw said he was not sure that alcohol could be used as a model for marijuana, given the inevitable differences in how it would be sold.
Aside from the regulatory challenges of moving from a black market to a legitimate one, there are also health issues to be considered. Dr. Chris Urbina, the executive director of Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment, raised the prospect that marijuana should be regulated differently depending on whether it is smoked or eaten.
“We expect this to be challenging,” said Mark Couch, a spokesman for Colorado’s Department of Revenue, which will be largely responsible for regulating the sale and use of marijuana.
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“The department does have some experience with licensing and regulating products that have certain restrictions,” Mr. Couch said. “Obviously, that is complicated by the fact that federal law makes this product illegal.”
In an interview last week with Barbara Walters, President Obama assuaged the fears of marijuana proponents, saying the federal government would not pursue marijuana users in states where the drug is now legal.
But it was still unclear whether the Justice Department would permit stores in Colorado and Washington, which also legalized marijuana in November, to sell the drug, leaving it in a regulatory netherworld when it comes to federal law.
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Barbara Brohl, the executive director of the state’s Department of Revenue and a co-chairwoman of the task force, said Colorado was consulting with officials in Washington State as it moved through its own process.
Christian Sederberg, a Denver lawyer who is on the task force and whose law firm helped draft Amendment 64, said he thought Colorado was well positioned to settle on new regulations, given that medical marijuana was already legal here.
Still, Mr. Sederberg said that medical marijuana rules were undergoing substantial revisions in Colorado and that there was clearly a need for distinct regulations for recreational use.
“I’m of the opinion that we have a very good base to work with on the policies Amendment 64 intended to push forward and how those policies fit in with regulations already in place,” he said.
The task force has until the end of February to make recommendations to Mr. Hickenlooper; the state attorney general, John W. Suthers; and the General Assembly. The regulations must be completed by July 1.Fox News host Sean Hannity sided with the Freedom Caucus on Thursday in its feud with President Trump, saying he didn’t think the conservative lawmakers were at fault for last week's failure of the GOP healthcare bill.
“Now, in my opinion, it’s not the Freedom Caucus that's responsible for the GOP failure in this case to repeal and replace ObamaCare,” Hannity, a vocal supporter of Trump, said on his prime-time program.
“Now, this legislation was flawed from the beginning. It was created behind closed doors. Not one single member saw the bill until it was rolled out. And that made it a disaster,” he said.
After House leaders pulled the bill, Trump called members of the Freedom Caucus “friends of mine.”
But he has since attacked members of the group, which he has publicly blamed for the repeal effort's failure.
In a series of tweets, Trump threatened to back primary challenges against members and targeted three top Freedom Caucus leaders by name.
The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017
In rare criticism of the president, Hannity said that Trump's anger was “misplaced.”
“Now I don't know who's telling the White House to focus their anger on the Freedom Caucus, but I do think it's misplaced," Hannity said. "Because the Freedom Caucus, I've talked to them, they want to make a deal, and they want the win for the president and the country.”
Many Freedom Caucus members opposed the GOP bill, as did a number of centrist Republican lawmakers.It was only a matter of time before a Tesla Model S was hacked, and what the hackers found and can do might surprise you.
Back in May of this year, a Tesla Motors Club forum user with the handle of nlc modified an ethernet cable, and was able to connect to the Model S’ computer system. Inside the network, nlc revealed a set of 3 peripherals broadcasting IP addresses in the 192.168.90.100 to 192.168.90.102 range and running a modified Linux backend; Center Console(100), Dashboard/NAV(101), and Unknown Device(102).
As one user explains “the unknown 3rd device is likely the gateway that controls access to the drivetrain components.” Another user claims that a local tech had mentioned previously that “the Ethernet port is the Model S’s diagnostic port like OBDII for other cars.” Should the latter be true, this could open up a number of Tesla diagnostic scanner and tuning aftermarkets.
As nlc found out though, Tesla seems to have a deep monitoring system in place. Almost three weeks after connecting the 4-pin cable, the user received a phone call from Tesla’s service center:
This evening I got a call from service center. They told me Tesla USA engineers seen a tentative of hacking on my car… I explained it was me because I tried to connect the diagnosis port to get some useful data (speed, power, etc…). They told me it can be related to industrial espionage and advised me to stop investigation, to not void the warranty.
Threats of voided warranty are no new occurrence in the hardware industry and users will ignore these threats in the search of customization and upgrades. By changing files, backgrounds can be changed and new themes can be installed over the Model S’ interface. In the weeks following the discovering, a user with the handle disharmony has managed to display a sideways Firefox browser running from his laptop using X11, an open-source windowing system.
Tesla has good reason for monitoring these systems. Modifications to the system could prove to be costly if hackers are able to find a way to unlock the 40kwh versions to hold a 60kwh charge (which are physically identical batteries limited by software). While these methods are only available with access to the cabin, if coupled with the security issues surrounding their login system, they could present a serious problem for consumers and Tesla’s reputation.
Custom backgrounds, service-level monitoring, third party apps and beyond will be the inevitable result of these discoveries but there are trade-offs. The service and support you receive under warranty can be invaluable when dealing with a highly advanced piece of equipment, such as the Model S. With access comes control and soon enough, true Tesla Model S customization will follow. Tesla is taking these matters seriously, as is evident by nlc’s warning and the recent hiring of Kristin Paget, the self-proclaimed “Princess Hacker” of former Apple and Microsoft fame.
Luckily for Tesla, the methods outline in this topic are not easily followed by the average scott jones(Tesla Motors Club user):
Anyone else read the entire thread, or most of it just to see if you’d start to understand it? Or maybe you were hoping some of the “smart” would rub off on you? Well I can say, I’m just as stupid as before! I think that 3rd pin or port thingy provides access to the Flux capacitor. If you all find it, let me know so I can go “back in time” to get back the hour I just lost.
Sources | Pictures: Tesla Motors ClubSEOUL/NEW YORK (Reuters) - The scandal engulfing Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE), which has admitted cheating diesel vehicle emissions tests in the United States, spread east on Tuesday as South Korea said it would investigate three of the maker’s diesel models.
Chairman of the Board of Volkswagen brand Herbert Diess presents the VW Tiguan GTE during the Volkswagen group night ahead of the Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA) in Frankfurt, Germany, September 14, 2015. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach
Volkswagen shares plunged by 19 percent on Monday after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on
Friday that the world’s biggest carmaker by sales used software that deceived regulators measuring toxic emissions and could face penalties of up to $18 billion.
Media reports say the U.S. Department of Justice has started a criminal probe into the allegations, which cover several VW and Audi-branded diesel models including the Audi A3, VW Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat.
The South Korean probe will involve 4,000 to 5,000 Jetta, Golf and Audi A3 vehicles produced in 2014 and 2015, Park Pan-kyu, a deputy director at South Korea’s environment ministry, told Reuters.
The ministry will consider recalling those vehicles after conducting the investigation, he said.
“If South Korean authorities find problems in the VW diesel cars, the probe could be expanded to all German diesel cars,” he said.
Volkswagen Korea declined to comment.
German rivals Daimler and BMW have said the accusations against VW did not apply to them.
The European Commission has said it is in contact with VW and U.S. regulators, but it was too early to say whether VW vehicles in Europe were also affected.
A VW spokesman in Australia said the company had contacted its head office in Germany asking for advice about how to proceed and whether it expected cars sold in Australia to be affected. He added that the Australian office had not been contacted by local police or government agencies.
“SCREWED UP”
Overnight, VW’s U.S. head Michael Horn, who was attending a lavish event in New York to promote the 2016 VW Passat, admitted the company had “totally screwed up” and vowed to make amends.
Horn’s presentation did not promote the environmental efficiency of the Passat’s “clean diesel” model, focusing instead on the vehicle’s new sensor technology to assist with parking and avoiding accidents.
It is unclear what will be the ultimate cost of the scandal to VW, which also faces a class-action lawsuit from buyers, but sales of affected versions of the relevant models have already been suspended in the United States and Canada.
“I had to back out of a couple deals the same day,” said a dealer attending Horn’s event in New York. “That hurt me because we found out in real-time. What are you going to do?”
German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel has expressed concern that the scandal could damage “the justifiably excellent reputation of the German car industry”, and South Korea, where two thirds of all car imports in the first half were diesel, could be a significant early gauge of customer response.
German car sales in South Korea have soared since a 2011 free-trade deal eliminated duties on vehicles imported from Europe. Vehicle imports from Germany rose 18.2 percent to $4.5 billion in the first eight months of 2015, South Korean customs data show, following a 42.5 percent increase for all of 2014.
Volkswagen and Audi accounted for 28.2 percent of all foreign cars sold the in the first eight months, according to the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association.
Suh Sung-moon, analyst at Korea Investment & Securities, said local brands such as Hyundai and its sister firm Kia Motors would benefit.
“South Korean consumers are very sensitive to news, and this emission news will have an impact on the import market,” he said.The iOS and Android as gaming platforms have over the years built up an impressive lineup of games. This has led to an increasingly competitive market in which new titles must either provide a fun and challenging experience while allowing players to be able to play in small installments. For this reason, puzzle games have thrived. Sifting through all the puzzlers available can be like walking into a library and seeing all the books just piled up on the floor — it’s a mess. But hey, that’s why you’re here; to find out which games are worth your time and which ones are best avoided. Cyklus, the latest game by EastAsiaSoftware, is a free sci-fi themed puzzler in which you play as rotating ships that must navigate a series of mazes to make it home. Hit the jump to find out whether this title warrants space on your device or whether you should let it keep drifting through space.
[Playability]
The basic mechanic of Cyklus is to maneuver your ever-rotating ship through a maze to get to a wormhole. Getting to a wormhole is what dictates your progress, but you can pick up items along the way. There are crystals which are your primary point-getting devices, health pickups, and status pickups which can temporarily make it easier for your ship to get through the maze. While the only action the player does is move the ship, in some ways Cyklus feels like an old shmup like R-Type; specifically the aspect of how at times it is less about defeating enemies and more about precision timing and steady movement through a tight space.
The mazes themselves are fun and creative. The difficulty curve is pretty gradual, but you will definitely be challenged by the last couple of worlds. Early on in the game, all you need to worry about is not hitting a wall. Later, your attention focuses more on lasers, bullets, and gates which need to be activated/deactivated. Pinpoint accuracy is essential at this point in the game, so beware if you are on a bumpy bus or train ride. The good news is that each level is relatively short, so the need to restart costs no more than a few seconds. The game also auto-saves all progress, and even keeps track of your exact position if you need to shut down quickly.
Controls are incredibly simple. You simply touch where the ship is and slide where you want to go. It doesn’t take long before you get the feel of how to move the ship at different speeds. Generally, the controls are very smooth and responsive to the touch. The only part of the controls that were troublesome has to do with the screen itself. I played Cyklus on my iPhone, and while it was perfectly functional, the lack of maneuverable finger space was at times awkward and detrimental to my success. Because of the precision required in this game (particularly in later levels), a tablet such as the iPad would be a much more suitable device to run it.
[Playability Breakdown]
[+Simple, responsive controls] [+Varied level design] [+Gradual difficulty curve] [-Limited control space on iPhone] [-Precision requirement not suited to ‘on the road’]
[Production]
Cyklus consists of five worlds with 20 levels within. Each world has its own unique visual and musical theme. This game is visually very striking and crisp, and runs smoothly with no hiccups in frame rate. One tiny issue I had with the visual design is that at times there can be a bit of a trial-and-error aspect to figuring out which items are power-ups and which are barriers, enemies, or bombs (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are bombs in some of the levels too?). Some of that is attributable to the small screen (again, the iPhone). Then again, games like this are all about trial and error and incremental progress and the is certainly not pervasive throughout the game.
The game uses mellow ambient music for its soundtrack. It’s very fitting, considering how stressful some of the maneuvers can be. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the ‘space probing’ music in Mass Effect 2 and 3, which I consider high praise as that series has one of the better soundtracks in modern gaming.
[Production Breakdown]
[+Visually distinct worlds] [+Colorful, striking design] [+Evocative music] [*Items and hazards can look similar at first glance]
[Value]
Well, determining value isn’t much more of a slam dunk than this. Cyklus is free, and EastAsiaSoft would be more than justified in charging a few bucks for it. There is an in-game store where you can purchase power-ups or new ships using currency based on how many crystals you have acquired. For the ‘pay to win’ crowd, there’s also the option of purchasing 100, 250, or 500 crystals with real money. The microtransactions associated with buying crystals is a little ridiculous because acquiring, say, 250 of them is really not that hard. Then again, players are free to make that choice and that’s a reality of games like this nowadays. To the developer’s credit, it doesn’t use microtransactions to lock out content. EastAsiaSoft also mentions on its website that future content is a possibility, so there may well be even more levels to try out. Even if that doesn’t end up happening, it’s still a free game consisting of 100 levels, so it’s win-win really.
Beyond the game itself, completionists can go back and try to beat their high scores or finish levels in record time. There is also the option of posting your results on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
[Value Breakdown]
[+Free] [+100 levels] [+Crystals can buy power-ups] [+Links to social media] [*Microtransactions]
[Reviewer Impression]
Cyklus strikes a nice balance between being a lengthy and challenging gameplay experience while being very easy to pick up and play in short increments. The controls can be a little too fine on a small surface such as an iPhone, but would thrive on a tablet. In spite of that, it’s still very much worth playing. If you use public transit, spend a lot of time waiting around in places, or spend a lot of time in the bathroom, Cyklus will make that time absolutely fly by.
[Overall Breakdown]
[+Simple, responsive controls] [+Varied level design] [+Gradual difficulty curve] [+Visually distinct worlds] [+Colorful, striking design] [+Evocative music] [+Free] [+100 levels] [+Crystals can buy power-ups] [+Links to social media] [*Items and hazards can look similar at first glance] [*Microtransactions] [-Limited control space on iPhone] [-Precision requirement not suited to ‘on the road’]Rocket League is probably the game I play the most (just because it’s easy to pick up anytime, and it’s dawn good fun even when playing against folks you don’t know), but since its beta release on SteamOS and other Linux distros, I had been always confronted with random bugs such as:
Crash in between games, bringing you back to desktop
Weird random audio bugs (sometimes no sound at all, sometimes you can only hear some background audio track at super high volume)
Weird sudden frame rate drops (frame rate dropping to 15~20 FPS for about a minute or so, before coming back to normal, solid 60 FPS).
Most of these bugs were not killer issues, and happened sufficiently rarely not to bother me TOO much. But since the May 2017 update (EDIT 10 June 2017: I used to refer a June update, but the latest is from May 10th), I have found that I don’t get any of these bugs anymore. Like, not at all. The patch notes do not seem to indicate anything specific to Linux, so maybe this was some kind of soft patch without much fanfare, but I’m happy report that Rocket League is finally rock solid on our platform.
A good excuse to consider purchasing it if you don’t have it yet. And now, Valve guys who helped with the port, if you could go and tackle Street Fighter V, it would be very much appreciated. No pressure.
At BoilingSteam, we strongly dislike ads and that is why you won't find any during your visit. If you like what we do, please consider signing up to our newsletter (No Spam!). Register to our RSS feed also works. We are on Mastodon and on IRC too (Freenode, channel #boilingsteam). You can reach us anytime via the contact form for feedback, ideas and news tips. We are always looking for more editors/contributors - feel free to candidate!A significant number of Rogers customers across Canada were left without voice and text services for more than three hours on Wednesday.
As a result, chief executive Nadir Mohamed issued the most public apology of his career, three months before he is scheduled to retire from the top job at the communications giant.
But the promise of an extra day of service tacked on to every Rogers bill was accompanied with no explanation for the outage. Just a promise to investigate it. Word emerged on Thursday afternoon that an unspecified software problem was to blame.
The offer of a free 24 hours will nonetheless remain unappreciated by subscribers who publicly insisted via social media that all this would force them to switch service providers first thing in the morning.
More realistically, they will switch their phones back on and instantly forget about all the frustration.
Still, the outage must have given some who needed to place or receive an important voice call or lacked vital access to text messaging a reason to consider re-acquiring a land line — or possibly even renew their appreciation of Canada’s last surviving pay phones.
Service went down at around 6:30 p.m. ET and the company announced three hours later it was in the process of gradually restoring service.
Complete restoration was confirmed by the company just before midnight ET.
1/2 Wireless voice and SMS services are fully restored. We continue to investigate the root cause. We apologize to our customers and thank — RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) October 10, 2013
2/2 them for their patience. We recommend customers power their devices off and on again should they continue to experience difficulties. — RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) October 10, 2013
Rogers’ subsidiary wireless phone companies Fido and Chatr also experienced difficulties during this period.
The statement below was released by Rogers at 1:41 a.m. ET:
Rogers and Fido wireless voice and SMS services were fully restored last night. The service interruption which began earlier last evening affected all wireless voice service across the country along with some SMS service.
Nadir Mohamed, President and CEO of Rogers Communications said; “I recognize this service interruption was unacceptable for our customers. We worked as quickly as possible to restore service and it was gradually restored over the course of the evening. I sincerely apologize to all of our customers for this significant inconvenience and appreciate their understanding and patience.”
We’re continuing to investigate the root cause of the issue to help ensure it doesn’t happen again. To thank our customers for their patience, Rogers and Fido will proactively credit all of its postpaid wireless customers for one day of service.
Rogers Wireless has 9.376 million customers across Canada, making it the country’s largest wireless provider.
Rogers also tweeted earlier in the day that they were experiencing technical difficulties with Rogers.com.
We're currently experiencing technical difficulties with http://t.co/AsRHdaKWh7 and apologize for the inconvenience. 1/2 — RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) October 9, 2013
Our team is working to resolve asap. In the meantime, let us know if there's anything we can assist you with. 2/2 — RogersHelps (@RogersHelps) October 9, 2013
Naturally, thousands of Rogers customers tweeted their outrage during the outage. Both #Rogers and #Fido were trending on Twitter.
What am I gonna tell my mom? "I TRIED to call, but #Rogers was down!" She's NEVER gonna believe that one. #InForAMajorGuiltTrip — Mark Carcasole (@MarkCarcGlobal) October 9, 2013
Rogers customers who are experiencing the outage can get their phones working again by *switching to any other company* — Justin Ling (@Justin_Ling) October 9, 2013
Don't worry about the #Rogers #outage folks.
I sent them a text asking them to fix it. (Will follow-up with a phone call.) — Rick Smith (@CanuckRick) October 9, 2013
what did people do before twitter came along to help us find out about the #rogers network outage #firstworldproblems — Emily Ann (@emmiieann) October 9, 2013
Looks like the Rogers Wireless outage is hitting #yeg now, too. Funny–the last time this happened, wasn't it also Rogers? — Morgan "Lovelorn Octopus" Lowther (@morgoid) October 9, 2013
#Rogers cell service outage appears to be country wide. Colleagues in B.C., Alberta reporting the same outages. #cdntech — Nicole Bogart (@nlynnbogart) October 9, 2013
Oookay. Looks like a massive Rogers & Fido outage…. — The Asian Pear (@TheAsianPear) October 9, 2013
Widespread reports of a #Rogers Wireless outage. Many voice calls unable to get through, data still working. — Jeremy Cohn (@JeremyGlobalTV) October 9, 2013
Wth?? No calls on all 4 of my rogers cellphones. Data works. Whats goin on guys? #rogers #rogersoutage — Vic (@vicgoraya) October 9, 2013
Wonder if there is a #Rogers outage – seems like lots of people, including myself, can't make outgoing calls. Anybody else? — matthew (@monstermachu) October 9, 2013
Don’t worry though, Rogers recently revealed that they’re going to carry BlackBerry’s upcoming Z30 phone. The wireless carrier previously stated that they wouldn’t be.
Great news! We will be making the BB Z30 available to consumers http://t.co/B7H9oxVf1z — Rogers (@Rogers) October 9, 2013
Finally, who is laughing about all of this?
This guys on cloud 9 right now #rogers pic.twitter.com/kIbixBoQGS — Randa (@randaatwi) October 10, 2013The Seminole Campus at St. Petersburg College is abuzz as it prepares to host President Barack Obama.
On the heels of the Democratic National Convention, President Barack Obama is bringing his campaign to the college Saturday.
He will make an appearance at the campus's Natural Habitat Park Field.
“It’s the real deal," SPC President Dr. Bill Law said. "We’d like to think it’s all been practice and once he got re-nominated, he chose us first to start his campaign, so that’s how we’re playing it."
Law said he’s still not sure why the president chose his college, but he sure is happy he did.
"The real problem for me is not that students are either Republican or Democrat," said Law. "It’s that students don’t participate, so anything that gets students involved in the process I’m all for."
The group of people who waited outside in line for tickets on Wednesday felt the buzz.
Many are people who live in Seminole and want to see the President for the first time.
"I think it’s important for Seminole to be noticed, and we’ll sure be noticed nationwide, and it’s a wonderful campus,” Obama supporter Craig Myers said.
Some students, even |
and more people are being given licence to degrade, humiliate and intimidate; to believe that they can hound someone who speaks out about racism into silence."Many don't speak Arabic and their role in Syria is little-known to the outside world, but the Chinese fighters of the Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria are organized, battled-hardened and have been instrumental in ground offensives against President Bashar Assad's forces in the country's northern regions. Thousands of Chinese militants have come to Syria since the country's civil war began in March 2011 to fight against government forces and their allies.
But the majority of Chinese militants are with the Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria, whose vast majority are Chinese Muslims, particularly those from the Turkic-speaking Uighur majority native to Xinjiang in China. Their growing role in Syria has resulted in increased cooperation between Syrian and Chinese intelligence agencies who fear those same militants could one day return home and cause trouble there.
Rami Abdel-Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said there are about 5,000 Chinese fighters in Syria, most of them with the TIP fighters in northern Syria who along with their families numer about 20,000. Li, the terrorism expert, said Abdel-Rahman's numbers are way too high, adding that he believes the number is about 300 Chinese fighters in Syria who brought with them about 700 family members.
...A University of Minnesota disciplinary panel has cleared four of the 10 Gophers football players who had been accused of sexual misconduct in the alleged assault on a female student in September.
The panel ruled in favor of Seth Green, Kobe McCrary, Antonio Shenault and Antoine Winfield Jr., their attorneys said Friday.
But the panel upheld the recommended expulsion of four other players, Ray Buford, KiAnte Hardin, Dior Johnson and Tamarion Johnson, and a one-year suspension for Mark Williams. It also reduced the recommended punishment for Carlton Djam from expulsion to a one-year suspension, according to attorney Ryan Pacyga.
McCrary, a Gophers running back, tweeted in celebration: “Blessed man!!!! Ready to get back at it with my boys!”
The disciplinary panel notified the individual students of its findings Friday afternoon. Last week, the panel held two days of closed-door hearings on the case, which has shaken the university and its football team for months.
The woman reported that she was sexually assaulted by a series of men Sept. 2 at a postgame party at an off-campus apartment, while others watched from the bedroom doorway. The accused men said the sexual contact was consensual, but the university recommended that all 10 should be disciplined for violating the student code of conduct.
The university would not comment on the panel’s ruling, citing student privacy laws.
All 10 players were suspended from the Gophers football team in December after the university conducted an internal investigation into the allegations.
Lee Hutton III, the attorney for nine of the players, issued a statement saying that the four cleared by the panel “were very pleased to be vindicated,” adding that they “look forward to putting this incident behind them.” But the other six, he said, “are very disappointed by the panel’s rulings and are exploring their options in consultation with their families.”
Under university rules, the students have the right to appeal to the university provost, Karen Hanson. Their attorneys also raised the possibility of challenging the university’s action in federal court.
Winfield’s father, Antoine Sr., a former defensive back with the Vikings, said he was excited for his son, “but disappointed in the system.”
“It should have never got to this,” he said. “This is an eye opener for everyone, really. The process needs to change.”
Although his son had threatened to transfer when the case started, Winfield said he would be returning to the Gophers.
No criminal charges were filed against any of the students. But the athletes have been fighting for the right to stay in school and to clear their names.
Uproar at the U
The allegations, and the university’s handling of the case, triggered protests for and against the football players, and indirectly cost their coach, Tracy Claeys, his job.
In December, members of the Gophers football team briefly threatened to boycott a bowl game in protest after the 10 accused players were suspended from the team. Claeys was fired after he expressed support for the protesters. The boycott was called off after a confidential university report detailing the sexual assault allegations was posted online by KSTP-TV.
County prosecutors reviewed the case twice and declined to file criminal charges, citing insufficient evidence. Yet Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County attorney, denounced the behavior described in the university report as “deplorable.” He noted that prosecutors must meet a higher standard of proof than the university’s internal disciplinary process.
A range of reactions
As word of the panel’s decisions spread Friday, former Gophers center Tyler Moore tweeted: “I’m overjoyed for my brothers being successful in the appeals process, but there are still … more that need justice.”
Sarah Super, a U graduate and advocate for sexual assault survivors, welcomed the decision to discipline six of the players. “These suspensions, these expulsions, it means something, but it certainly won’t take away the pain of the survivor,” she said. “For the survivor it isn’t over today, and she doesn’t need to be happy with the result.”
Trish Palermo, chairwoman of the university’s Student Senate, said the case reaffirms the need for more education about sexual assault.
“I think that this entire situation reflects the need for a larger conversation,” she said. “We need to talk about sexual violence on college campuses and the need to provide consent.”
Haley Hansen, a student intern from the University of Minnesota, contributed to this report.
Maura Lerner • 612-673-7384In parting with their best player in franchise history, the Rays' return included center fielder Denard Span, and three of the Giants' Top 30 prospects, per MLB Pipeline: infielder Christian Arroyo (No. 1), left-hander Matt Krook (No. 25) and right-hander Stephen Woods (No. 29). Tampa Bay also sent San Francisco cash considerations.
Seeking to bolster a lineup that they believed needed a significant power boost, while also trying to account for attrition in the process, the Giants acquired longtime Rays third baseman Evan Longoria in a trade on Wednesday.
Seeking to bolster a lineup that they believed needed a significant power boost, while also trying to account for attrition in the process, the Giants acquired longtime Rays third baseman Evan Longoria in a trade on Wednesday.
In parting with their best player in franchise history, the Rays' return included center fielder Denard Span, and three of the Giants' Top 30 prospects, per MLB Pipeline: infielder Christian Arroyo (No. 1), left-hander Matt Krook (No. 25) and right-hander Stephen Woods (No. 29). Tampa Bay also sent San Francisco cash considerations.
• Hot Stove Tracker
Video: High Heat: Evans thrilled to add Longoria to lineup
The trade fits immediate needs for both clubs. San Francisco was seeking a jolt to a lineup that ranked last in the Majors in home runs (128) and slugging percentage (.380), and looking for an established veteran to fill that void. Longoria, a three-time All-Star who is a career.270/.341/.483 hitter with 261 homers, 892 RBIs and 780 runs scored, has an established track record of stability. He has played in 798 games the last five years, more than any player in the Majors.
"This move fills an important need for our club and completes one of our offseason goals," Giants executive vice president of baseball operations Brian Sabean said. "Evan has been one of the best third basemen in the game over the last decade, and we are thrilled to add him to the organization. Moving forward, we will continue to work on additional opportunities to improve the club for 2018."
Video: Hot Stove breaks down Giants' acquisition of Longoria
The Rays were motivated to trim payroll this offseason, but were more prominently linked to potentially dealing pitchers Chris Archer and Alex Colome, who led the Majors with 47 saves last year. They had a minimal time frame to deal Longoria, who signed a six-year, $100 million extension beginning in 2017, as he was nearing full 10-and-5 rights three days into the 2018 season, which would have allowed him to veto a trade to any club. Longoria is owed $81 million through '22 with a $13 million team option for '23, and he will receive a $2 million bonus for being traded, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
"Erik and Matt and the front office have been very open and communicated from Day 1," Longoria said. "They kind of, not without letting me dictate it on my own terms, were very open to letting me go somewhere where they felt like I had the best opportunity as a player to win, and also for them to be able to accomplish what they want to accomplish in trying to rebuild the franchise. I was very clear to them that my hope was that if this did happen, that it would be a win for both sides."
Video: Longoria expecting Giants to have success
Longoria, 32, was the Rays' first-round Draft pick in 2006 and he blossomed into the face of the franchise during the club's four postseason runs, including the American League pennant-winning run in 2008. Despite significant turnover from their playoff years, having seen David Price, Ben Zobrist, James Shields, Melvin Upton Jr., Scott Kazmir and other All-Stars depart via trade or free agency, as well as manager Joe Maddon, Longoria remained the club's cornerstone. He has been widely praised for his loyalty and leadership.
"Evan is our greatest Ray. For a decade, he's been at the center of all of our successes, and it's a very emotional parting for us all," said Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg. "I speak for our entire organization in wishing Evan and his wonderful family our absolute best."
Video: Giants, Rays both benefit from Longoria trade
Longoria won his third Gold Glove Award at third base last year, but he dipped slightly at the plate, hitting.261/.313/.424 with 20 homers and 86 RBIs. The Giants, who play home games at pitcher-friendly AT&T Park, are likely hoping that Longoria regains the offensive prowess he showed in 2016, when he hit a career-high 36 homers. Giants manager Bruce Bochy envisions batting Longoria third or fourth, which would give him flexibility with first baseman Brandon Belt and catcher Buster Posey, who largely occupied those spots in '17. With Span gone, the club will have a void at leadoff.
"The numbers say that's where he should hit. It'd be somewhere in the heart of the order," Bochy said of Longoria. "I'll just wait and see exactly where we're at when this is all said and done … I think when you talk about the elite third basemen in the game, Evan's name is going to be there."
Video: Longoria traded to Giants after 10 years with Rays
San Francisco had a glaring need at third base since Pablo Sandoval left in free agency after its World Series run in 2014. The Giants signed free agent Casey McGehee in '15, but after struggles, they turned to prospect Matt Duffy, who appeared in line to take over long term before he was traded to the Rays in '16. At that point, they acquired Eduardo Nunez, a productive fit when healthy, though he battled injuries during his one-year stint by the Bay. That opened the '16 postseason door for Conor Gillaspie, who was designated for assignment last year. The Giants traded Nunez, a.313 hitter in '17, to Boston last summer, then split time between Kelby Tomlinson and Sandoval, who signed late in the season to a Minor League deal and struggled mightily.
Video: Duquette analyzes Longoria to the Giants, market
"One of the priorities for us was third base," Giants general manager Bobby Evans said. "Evan, as Brian mentioned, the consistency of his play -- 150-plus games every year and just his overall approach to the team, his presence in our lineup, in our clubhouse -- he's sorely needed."
Evans said the Giants had looked at Longoria, who hails from Southern California and still has much family in the area, as a third-base option in their end-of-season confab, and began engaging the Rays at last week's Winter Meetings.
With Wednesday's trade, the Rays have positioned themselves for the future. In adding Arroyo (the No. 56 overall prospect), who was the centerpiece in the return, Tampa Bay now has seven of MLB Pipeline's Top 100 Prospects.
Video: 12:25 Live - What Rays get back in Longoria trade
Arroyo, who rooted for Tampa Bay-area teams like the Rays growing up, made his MLB debut last year to much fanfare after surging through the Minor League ranks. The Giants' first-round pick in 2013, he earned his first callup in April, but struggled to a.192/.244/.304 slash line in 135 plate appearances over 35 games, was sent down in June, then missed a bulk of time after injuring his wrist and breaking his left hand.
"[Arroyo] has a tremendous opportunity to bring new life to that organization," Longoria said of his trade counterpart. "That was kind of the way I looked at it when I was a young player, and I think he'll have the same opportunity. I know that it's probably hard for the fan base to see right now. But obviously in the recent past, you look at what the Astros did, and I think that's kind of the arc that the Rays would like to take now and build a core group of young players that they can build off of."
Video: Evaluating prospects received in Longoria trade
Krook, 23, was the Giants' fourth-round pick in 2016, though he was on track for a career with the Marlins before a post-Draft physical raised concerns over his pitching shoulder, thus nixing the $1,587,700 deal he had in place as their supplemental first-round pick in 2013. The Giants have been patient with the left-hander, whom they hoped to develop as a starter.
Woods, 22, was interestingly enough a Rays sixth-round pick in 2013, but he turned down their offer to attend the University of Albany, where he went 7-16 with a 6.10 ERA over three years. He was the Giants' eighth-round selection in '16.
Span, 33, hit.268/.330/.402 with 23 homers, 96 RBIs and 143 runs scored as the Giants' primary leadoff hitter the last two seasons, playing in 272 games. Span struggled in AT&T Park's spacious gaps with -12 Outs Above Average, per Statcast™, worst among center fielders. The 10-year veteran, who was born and lives in Tampa, Fla., also spent five years in Minnesota and three years in Washington, is owed $11 million in 2018, with a $12 million team option in '19 that includes a $4 million buyout.
Video: Fantasy impact of Longoria trade to Giants
Fantasy spin | Fred Zinkie (@FredZinkieMLB)
After a power decline in 2017 (20 homers,.163 ISO), Longoria will now play home games at pitcher-friendly AT&T Park and join a lineup that ranked 29th in baseball with 639 runs scored last season. Still, the slugger will not be dismissed as a mixed-league option by owners who remember his 36-homer, 98-RBI campaign in 2016. Longoria's arrival to the Bay Area should be a boon for the fantasy value of catcher Buster Posey, who will have greater lineup support next season. Meanwhile, Span -- who possesses solid speed and tallied a career-best 12 long balls a year ago -- could help those in deep mixed leagues if he secures a starting job and a premium lineup spot in Tampa Bay.With the gaslights along the brick-paved Allegheny River Boulevard, the small, independent shops and the 1889 Carnegie Library, visiting Oakmont can feel like a welcome trip back in time.
That’s especially true if you walk into the Kerr Memorial Museum on Delaware Avenue. Dr. Thomas Kerr built the Queen Anne-style home in 1897 for his wife and daughter. And while Clayton, the Frick mansion in Point Breeze, portrays the home of a Pittsburgh industrialist in the early 1900s, the Kerr home depicts the lifestyle of an upper-middle class physician. The meticulously maintained house has less of an “Upstairs– Downstairs” feel, instead focusing on the décor, furnishings and countless objects that were part of the family’s everyday life, including Dr. Kerr’s office and medical tools.
Kerr’s daughter, Virginia, taught English in the local schools and remained in the family home until she died in 1994. She saved most of the family belongings, so the tour accurately represents their lives. Visitors can see the main rooms on the first and second floors, as well as the basement, where many household duties were performed. Virginia never married or had children and donated the home to the borough to be used as a museum. Tours are open to the public every Saturday, and group tours for eight or more people can be arranged for most other days.
The museum holds its main fundraiser March 10 – 12 — an antiques show with more than two dozen vendors — at the Oakmont Country Club (Oakmont’s most famous attraction, having hosted more golf championships than any other American course, including last year’s U.S. Open). The nearby Doone’s Inn at Oakmont is a charming, eight-room bed and breakfast with luxurious guest rooms, private baths and elegantly classic common areas. There’s even a putting green so guests can practice before hitting the links. This is also a popular venue for small private parties, from showers to intimate dinners.
Along Oakmont’s business district, Carabella and Caterina offer great selections of women’s clothing and accessories. Gentlemen can find everything from business to sophisticated casual attire at Traditions of Oakmont, and Precious+Posh has beautiful clothing for babies and children. Mystery Lovers Bookshop has thrived for 26 years by offering a comprehensive collection of mystery genre books. And The Spot carries local and regional gifts, including handmade, one-of-a-kind items. Jewelry lovers will find two great options — Robert Hallett Goldsmith and Robert Currens Fine Jewelry & Custom Designs. Today’s Market, a full-service health food store, and Yarns By Design, a yarn store and mecca for local knitters, are just a few of the specialty stores in town.
For entertainment, the beautifully restored Oaks Theater is a multipurpose venue, offering film and more; themed evenings might include a special movie screening with specialty cocktail and gourmet food.
Dining options abound. The Pub at 333 offers delicious brick oven pizzas, creative sandwiches, an intriguing cocktail menu and two Tito’s mules on tap. What’s Cookin’ at Casey’s, Hoffstot’s, Chelsea Grille and The Mighty Oak Barrel are neighborhood standards, and the Oakmont Bakery attracts customers from across the region for the assortment of cakes, pies, cookies, breads and pastries.
Springtime provides the perfect opportunity to enjoy nearby Oakmont and all of its charms.
Kerr Memorial Museum, 402 Delaware Ave., Oakmont, PA 15139, 412−826−9295, kerrmuseum.com.
Oakmont Chamber of Commerce: oakmont-pa.com.Save this picture! Courtesy of Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian
Interiors is an online film and architecture journal, published by Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian. Interiors runs an exclusive ArchDaily column analyzing and diagraming films in terms of space.
Stanley Kubrick has been called many things: pretentious, unpretentious, alienated, ambiguous, audacious, empty, disturbing, outrageous, devilish, soulless, patient, unflinching, impersonal, arrogant, calculated, paranoid, aloof, visionary, genius, tyrant, misogynist, cineaste, original, and in the immortal words of Kirk Douglas, a “talented shit.”
It’s interesting to note then, when asked about his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick himself said, “It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words.” The film itself is a “nonverbal experience.” There are no words – or dialogue – for more than two-thirds of the film. Stanley Kubrick is a visual storyteller; in his films, words are secondary.
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2001: A Space Odyssey
The closing scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which we analyzed and diagramed, brings us full circle from the opening scene of the film. Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), a scientist on the Discover One, is transported into another world/dimension after defeating HAL, the computer that controls the systems of the spacecraft. At the end of his journey, Dave’s spaceship miraculously appears in an empty room with white walls. There is an immediate feeling of distance in this room – from the outside world as well as from technology, in general. The classical architecture of the room is complemented with Renaissance paintings, which are fixed into alcoves rather than simply being framed, suggestive of windows or mirrors. The room consists of a bed, several chairs and cabinets and glowing floor tiles. A close examination of this space helped us discover several facts: the floor tiles serve as a compositional guide throughout the film, assisting us in determining the actual size of the room; the room is composed of eight by ten tiles with each tile roughly 4x4 in size.
The progression of time in this space is accelerated by varying the perspectives of the character Dave. The diagram makes note of these varying perspectives, and each time Dave’s perspective changes, we indicate this shift with a number.In our diagram, Dave's spaceship is in dotted lines. Dave first sees nothing from within his spaceship, but later, he sees himself standing across the room. This is our first instance of Dave’s changing perspective.
In this instance, we clearly see a chair sitting beside Dave’s spaceship. This chair is represented in our diagram with dotted lines. Stanley Kubrick cuts from his wide shot to Dave’s perspective, and as he does, we see that the spaceship has disappeared. The chair, however, which we saw earlier beside the spaceship, has relocated and moved a few feet to the side of a cabinet. This is represented in our diagram with the clearly outlined chair beside the chair with the dotted lines. This continuity error was made deliberately by the filmmaker. In adjusting the positioning of the chair, Stanley Kubrick retains a compositional balance with the spaceship in the room. In the later moment of the film, when the spaceship disappears, the chair moves back to its permanent position and is in composition with the rest of the room.
When Dave moves in the bathroom outside of this room, his eye catches another human in the distance as he turns. This becomes the second instance of perspective in this space. Dave sees an elderly man eating in the same area where the spaceship was sitting.
The elderly man stops eating and turns. There is no recognition that he has seen Dave, and as he gets out of his seat and moves closer, we realize that this is Dave himself, aged dramatically. Stanley Kubrick then cuts to a wide shot of the room, and we realize that the first Dave has disappeared.
The elderly Dave continues eating until he reaches across his table and knocks down a wine glass. The elderly Dave then reaches down for the broken pieces, but his attention is diverted onto the bed to the right of him; he pauses and we now shift to our third perspective. Dave sees a dying man in his bed; a close-up reveals that this is, in fact, Dave nearing death. Stanley Kubrick once again cuts to a wide shot and we realize that the elderly Dave who was eating at his table is no longer in the room. The dying Dave reaches his hand out into the distance and points. There is now a monolith placed in front of his bed. This becomes our fourth instance of a shift in perspective.
Stanley Kubrick cuts from the monolith onto the bed, where Dave is now replaced by a Star Child, a fetus-like being enclosed in an orb. The Star Child in relation to the monolith marks the fifth change in perspective within this scene.
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These changes in perspectives drive the progression of time within this scene. The Renaissance paintings make a connection to the theme of rebirth. The Star Child is born in a world free of technological constraints. The events in this final scene unfold in a delicate, slow burn, but time moves at an accelerated rate.
This non-linear progression of time suggests that Dave could potentially have inhabited this space for decades, but we, as an audience, along with Dave, see his life pass quickly. Stanley Kubrick delicately overlaps these instances of passing time, without dissolves or fades, but rather in a controlled manner. The single space within this room is no longer bound by the conventions of linear time.
The Shining
The Shining opens with a discussion about space. Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson), manager of the Overlook Hotel, notes that the location for the hotel was chosen because of its “seclusion,” pointing out the 25-mile stretch of road leading up to the hotel. Along with the lengthy opening shots at the start of the film, this reinforces the idea that the hotel is sealed off and isolated from society. The audience, as a result, is immediately presented with an understanding of how this space is detached from civilization. There are also only a handful of scenes that take place outside of the walls of the hotel. It’s within this controlled space that Stanley Kubrick sets his film.
In our diagram, we focused on the scene where Danny (Danny Lloyd) encounters the twin girls in the hallway on his tricycle. These girls are introduced on three separate occasions beforehand. The first instance is when Danny is still in his Denver home. In his bathroom, he “speaks” with Tony about his concern with the hotel, as he sees the twin girls as well as a shot of blood spilling from an elevator in the hotel. The second instance is when Danny is in the Games Room at the Overlook Hotel. Danny turns around and sees the twin girls in the room with him. The girls turn and walk away from him. This occasion also marks the only time the girls actually move. The third instance is when Danny approaches Room 237.
These quick shots of the twin girls – which show them standing in a hallway for no more than a second – suggest that these twins will revisit us in some form over the course of the film. They become a repeated visual motif. It’s because of these recurring images, then, that as Danny rides around the corridors of the hotel we are constantly on edge – not because of what is in the frame, but because we fear what might be around the corner each time he makes a turn. In addition, when Jack describes his first impression of the hotel to Wendy (Shelley Duvall), he tells her “It was almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.” The audience, as a result, is always anticipating what could be waiting for them around every corner.
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The hallway where Danny encounters the twins is on the same floor as his family’s hotel room. In an earlier scene in the film, Wendy exits the elevator and brings breakfast for Jack. The hallway immediately behind Wendy after she exits the elevator is the hallway where Danny sees the twins – to the left is where the twins are and to the right is where Danny stops. Wendy later opens their room door, and again, immediately behind her is another hallway that is part of this iconic scene. This is the hallway where we first see Danny riding, right before he makes the turn and encounters the twins.
Stanley Kubrick utilizes six camera setups in this scene. These include the Steadicam following Danny, which ultimately places him within the frame with the twins; a close-up shot of Danny that shows his reaction to the twins; an extreme wide shot of the twins from Danny’s perspective; a wide shot of the twins; a medium shot of the twins; as well as a wide shot of the dead twins. In this scene, Stanley Kubrick goes back and forth between these six setups. In carefully cutting from an extreme wide shot to a wide shot and finally to a medium shot of the girls in sequential order, he slowly draws his audience closer to the twins.
The terror in this scene is self-contained; the horrific death of the twins is located on the same floor as their family’s hotel room, on the opposite side of the hall (once again, emphasizing doubles and repetition). Danny’s subconscious places the girls, both alive and dead, in the same space, which results in a stark and frightening contrast.
A Clockwork Orange
The world of A Clockwork Orange is cold and heartless -- an inhospitable place. Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) frequents the dark, desolate streets of London with his frightening crew, causing mayhem. For the depiction of a dystopian society, the film makes use of modern buildings, minimal in terms of their style, such as the Tavy Bridge Centre in Thamesmead (Alex’s apartment complex) and Brunel University’s Lecture Centre (Ludovico Medical Facility). Stanley Kubrick reportedly found the locations for the film by searching through architectural magazines.
The bare bones design of Thamesmead contributes to the notion that the architecture of A Clockwork Orange exists solely with the intentions of serving its community in a minimal way. In other words, it’s not about the complexity of the design, but rather, its functionality. The most notable space, however, is the Korova Milk Bar in the opening scene. This space was one of the few sets designed for the film. The film’s production designer, John Barry, who designed the space, was influenced by a sculpture exhibition where female figures were displayed as furniture. This idea was then carried over into creating fiberglass nude figures.
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In our floor plan, we diagrammed the scene in Alex’s bedroom, where he has sex with two females. The sex sequence, which plays in fast motion, was filmed over the course of 28 minutes by Stanley Kubrick. The entire scene, however, runs 40 seconds in the final version of the film, accelerated in speed and cut to the “William Tell Overture.” The sequence begins with all three characters entering the frame. In the course of this sequence, all three have sex together and Alex then continues on with them individually a number of times as well. The scene was originally edited with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” but its pacing didn’t match. In regards to this sequence, Stanley Kubrick has noted, “It seemed to me a good way to satirize what had become the fairly common use of slow-motion to solemnize this sort of thing, and turn it into ‘art.’ The William Tell Overture also seemed a good musical joke to counter the standard Bach accompaniment.”
In terms of the architecture of the room, there is a side mirror in Alex’s bedroom. The mirror reflects the poster of Ludwig van Beethoven and adds a unique dimension to the room. The mirror makes the room feel larger in size. The architectural elements to the right and left of the mirror allow for a grid system within the shot itself. This grid system forces the audience to find a one-point perspective. The scene in our floor plan features the three characters and is drawn with dotted red lines. The diagram starts when the three characters enter the frame and the dotted lines map their movements until the end of the scene. The diagram shows the entire scene from start to finish. The tracking of their movements allows us to see how much movement was condensed into the scene.
These diagrams, along with others, are available for purchase in our Official Store.
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Interiors is an online journal, published on the 15th of each month, in which films are analyzed and diagrammed in terms of space. It is run by Mehruss Jon Ahi and Armen Karaoghlanian. Check out their Website, Issuu Site and Official Store and follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.AMES, Iowa - It has been almost a year since Shontrelle Johnson's potential career ending neck injury, but you wouldn't guess that based on his performance last Saturday.
"It feels good being able to finally be back out there," Johnson said.
Johnson burst out of the gates racking up 120 yards on 18 carries in a 38-23 victory against Tulsa Saturday, also punching it into the end zone for his first score since the 2010 season.
"A lot of people were thinking that I've been gone, so I wasn't going to be the same," Johnson said, "It's sort of like riding a bike. Just because you take a year off from riding a bike, football is football, you don't forget."
Johnson sustained his injury against Texas, the fourth game of the 2011 season. Before he went down, Johnson was on pace for a terrific season compiling 247 yards on 51 carries.
The Cyclones knew Tulsa, the one-point favorite in Saturday's game, was going to be a tough football team.
"They were great up front. They brought a lot of pressure with their defensive ends. It was a pretty even matchup with our offense," Johnson said.
Aside from stumbling a bit in the beginning, Iowa State put together a promising performance. He also had good words for the Cyclone defense.
"We played like a mature football team," Johnson said. "We had fewer turnovers than last year's opener and fewer penalties, for the first game I think we did well."
"(Linebackers) Jake (Knott) and A.J. (Klein) looked great. The 'dynamic duo' will definitely be a huge part of our team this year," Johnson said.
As far as the quarterback situation goes, Johnson has faith in Steele Jantz.
"Jantz is playing at a high level right now," Johnson said. "He understands the offense well and he really led that game."
One moment from Saturday stuck in Johnson's mind more than most, finally getting back in the end zone. The Iowa State running back scored on a five-yard run late in the fourth quarter to cement the Cyclone victory.
"I didn't get a chance to score last year, so it was kind of special to me," Johnson explained. "Everyone just said to be patient, and it finally came at the end of the game with two minutes to go."
Iowa State head football coach Paul Rhoads made sure the Cyclones were focused and wanted them to execute the way they knew how. After a great win against a tough Tulsa team, Iowa State prepares for the upcoming weekend in Iowa City against interstate rival Iowa. The game kicks off at 2:30 P.M. CDT Saturday on the Big Ten Network from Kinnick Stadium.
"Any time it's a rivalry game, and with the environment at Kinnick (Stadium), it's going to be exciting," Johnson said. "It went down to the wire last year, and they have a strong team this year. It should be a great game."
Johnson was a huge part of the last Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk game in 2011. He put up 108 yards on the ground, along with three catches for 27 yards in a 44-41 triple overtime victory.
"We got one win out of the way this season," Johnson said. "We know how well we can play and we just need to keep working."We love spotlighting up-and-coming and unpublished artists on ComicsAlliance, but it's always worth looking back at established creators who have paid their dues and have some white hot sketch work floating around. In the case of Mike Zeck, he's actually got a sketchbook for sale over at MikeZeck.com, and his work in raw black and white is absolutely stunning.
If you haven't seen Zeck's work before, quite frankly, you do not read enough comics. He's worked on everything from Amazing Spider-Man and Captain America to covers for Batman and Aquaman stories. In addition to his sketchbook, you'll find a treasure trove of process work from those pieces and commissions on his website.
Zeck draws with the classic elegance of Neal Adams and occasionally the expressive tension of someone like Steve Dillon. He also knows how to draw the heck out of The Punisher. Don't believe us? See for yourself below.[Note: This article was written before Day 2 of Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch.]
Turn 1
Turn 2
Welcome to the Pro Tour.
Granted, the turn-2 kill isn’t very realistic, but the fact that this deck is capable of it is impressive. As it turns out, getting to play eight copies of Ancient Tomb is pretty nice, and this deck has the potential to get some absurd draws.
Eldrazi Aggro
This is the deck list our team played (with the Spellskite/Ratchet Bomb numbers being slightly different across the board). I have to give credit to all my teammates who worked on the deck in the Vancouver testing house, as they took what looks like a pile of incredibly dubious cards and turned it into a well-honed killing (smashing?) machine.
Let’s take a look at what this deck does.
These lands are why the deck is good. The interaction between the Eldrazi lands and the Eldrazi is what’s truly busted, and Urborg letting Eye tap for black mana just adds to that. Once your Eldrazi all start costing 2 or even 3 less, you are really doing it. Casting 2-mana 4/4s that disrupt the opponent’s hand or 3-mana 5/5s with haste is unfair even for Modern, and that’s all this deck is really trying to do.
You can even get more than 2 mana out of Eye each turn, as playing multiple Eldrazi means it essentially added 4-6 mana. Casting two Matter Reshapers on turn two off of Eye + Temple is something that can happen, and is as good as it sounds. Eye also works with Endless One, essentially giving it +2/+2.
By playing only colorless cards and Phyrexian mana cards |
Zealand.
He also believes it is too similar to Australia's, but has admitted that polling indicates most New Zealanders would rather keep it.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption What do schoolchildren think of the new flag designs?
The Flag Consideration Panel received 10,292 entrants to its nationwide design competition.
Not all were entirely serious, though some of the rejected designs - including Laser Kiwi - gained something of a cult following.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption New Zealand long-listed 40 designs - but not any of these
The official longlist reduced the number of potential flags to 40.
Four designs were then on the shortlist announced in September, but there was criticism that they were too similar or uncreative.
Three featured a fern design and the fourth the curving koru Maori symbol.
After a social media lobbying campaign, the government passed a bill through parliament so that a fifth design - called Red Peak - could also make the final cut.
To help people make a decision, the five flags are being put on display across the country.
Sets of flags are being given out free to communities who have five suitable flagpoles to display them from, so the public can see them in "real-life situations".NRL.com rates the performances of all 17 NSW VB Blues players in Holden State of Origin Game One.
Queensland player ratings
Report: Queensland take early series advantage
Draw Widget - Round 1 - Blues vs Maroons
1. Josh Dugan
Never reached the heights of Jarryd Hayne but his positional play in terms of kick returns and support plays was outstanding. It showed in his integral role in the Blues' first try. 7.5/10
2. Will Hopoate
Peppered earlier on with plenty of Queensland kicks and held his own, however didn't offer much in attack especially when it came to dummy-half scoots. 5/10
3. Michael Jennings
Gave NSW a tiny spark in attack but struggled in defence when the Queensland defence came running his way, evident in his miss on Cooper Cronk for the Maroons' first try. 5.5/10
4. Josh Morris
The centre put forward another memorable Origin performance by keeping his opposite centre Greg Inglis quiet all night and saving an Aidan Guerra try. His fend caused plenty of problems too and his speed showed in the Blues' first try. 8/10
5. Daniel Tupou
The winger struggled to keep up with the intensity of the game and his few errors and poor defensive reads showed it. 4.5/10
6. Mitch Pearce
While the Blues may have lost the game, Pearce's return to the Origin arena was a positive one. Was offered of plenty of space and kept the shape of the backs intact which showed when he set up Beau Scott's try. His kicking game and defence remained solid. 7/10
7. Trent Hodkinson
Didn't do anything outstanding but did enough to justify selection for Origin II. Stuck to the game plan and gave Pearce and his forwards plenty of room to move. 7/10
8. Aaron Woods
Arguably the best player on the paddock, Woods set the platform for the Blues early on and finished the game as good as he started in both facets of his football. 9/10
9. Robbie Farah
An inspiration in the middle of the paddock, the captain kept the ball rolling out of dummy half and was a rock in defence after producing 61 tackles for no misses. 8.5/10
10. James Tamou
Got a bit lazy in the second half in defence but offered plenty for the Blues up front. His offload from halfway in the first 40 to initially set up Morris's try was the memorable moment to come out of the front-rower's game. 8/10
11. Beau Scott
Made his mark early in terms of tagging Johnathan Thurston off the ball and proved he was no slouch either, with four tackle breaks and a try. 7.5/10
12. Ryan Hoffman
The Blues' Mr Consistency, Hoffman showed why he is the reigning Brad Fittler Medallist after putting together a solid 80-minute performance. 7/10
13. Josh Jackson
The debutant gave away an early penalty but chipped in on backline movements and defence on what was a competent first Origin showing for the lock. 6/10
14. Trent Merrin
Didn't come on until the 58th minute but made his presence known when Laurie Daley unleashed him. Did however give away a crucial penalty. 5/10
15. Boyd Cordner
Played out of position at lock but did a good enough job coming off the bench by making plenty of tackles. 5.5/10
16. David Klemmer
The big fella didn't look overawed by the occasion and had four players hanging off him ready to rumble late in proceedings. Put forward plenty of runs which put pressure on the Queensland defence. 6/10
17. Andrew Fifita
Proved a capable replacement in terms of taking over from the starting props but lacked the impact off the bench which was expected from him. 6/10
Five key points from Origin I
Daley to stick with Blues halves
Patience a virtue for Queensland
Storm stars look to the MCG
We can hold our heads high: Tamou
Thurston pleased to get one over Scott
Daley rapt with Blues defenceBack in 2005, a then-eighteen-year-old Chris Baricevic began laying the groundwork for what would become one of the city's best-known record labels, Big Muddy Records.
"I was coming off of a semester in college in New Orleans and gigging around south city St. Louis in the summertime with my band, Johnny O & the Jerks, and we met the Vultures," Baricevic recalls. "We were kind of the only two bands that were our age — being around eighteen — playing that kind of music: rock & roll with a nod to the '50s and '60s rockabilly and garage-rock influences."
Though Baricevic hadn't yet formalized the Big Muddy label, the core group of musicians who would come to define its sound had already started to coalesce. Alongside Baricevic on drums in Johnny O & the Jerks was now-Hobosexuals bassist Brian Heffernan and singer/guitarist John Randall, currently the frontman of one of Big Muddy's longest-running acts, the Hooten Hallers. The Vultures consisted of Ashley Hohman (Doomtown, Self Help, Veil) alongside multi-instrumentalist Ryan Koenig and bassist Joey Glynn. (The latter two have since played and recorded prolifically both inside and outside of the label, most notably with the Rum Drum Ramblers and former Big Muddy artist Pokey LaFarge.)
"We all became friends and we very quickly realized that we had something special, that we had a little family that was growing," Baricevic says — a sentiment echoed by Big Muddy artists Mat Wilson (Rum Drum Ramblers, Loot Rock Gang), Jack Grelle and Kellie Everett (Southwest Watson Sweethearts).
"We all liked to play music together and fed off of each other, and we had something very special to offer in that regard. It grew out of the music and it grew out of the camaraderie. We were spending a lot of time together — as much as we could — and that summer I moved into St. Louis city proper and decided that, instead of going back to New Orleans, I would stay here and start this record label."
But the familial nature of Big Muddy wasn't the only common theme. Baricevic, Wilson, Grelle and Everett all mention the 2013 death of St. Louis photographer and songwriter Bob Reuter as a sort of turning point for the label, one that brought the group closer than it had ever been.
"It's kind of been a different chapter since we lost Bob," says Grelle. "I think Big Muddy's kind of getting its head back on right now, and having more of a clear focus." Everett seconds that optimism, going so far as to say that "Big Muddy is in the midst of a renaissance." One element of the label's "renaissance" is a roster that has grown substantially to include new acts such as the Loot Rock Gang, Tortuga and the Southwest Watson Sweethearts. Baricevic insists, though, that Big Muddy still bases its growth on the same sort of personal relationships responsible for its genesis.
"We don't accept new acts on a submission basis," he explains. "The current roster kind of builds itself; when it's time to add a new band, we all know."
Wilson answers nearly identically. "Every project's been like that," he says. "It's been a small rumbling that turns into something that we realize needs to be recorded." Those new acts, as well as a few old ones, will be showcased Sunday at Off Broadway for Big Muddy's Tenth Anniversary & Holiday Bash.
The evening will kick off with the Southwest Watson Sweethearts, followed by Bob Reuter's Alley Ghost, the Loot Rock Gang, Tortuga, the Rum Drum Ramblers, Jack Grelle and the Hobosexuals, as well as a one-time-only performance by the Strange Places, a group Baricevic put together to perform some of his own material. In addition to the music, the event will feature food from new south-city favorite Gooseberries.
Asked what Big Muddy has in store in the coming year, Everett says, "We're currently working on a business plan to entice investors so we can reissue the Big Muddy Records back catalog," much of which, she says, was destroyed in a flood. Grelle agrees with Everett, adding that, "the first one we have — and I believe we just officially got the rights to — is Bob Reuter's old band the Dinosaurs, from the late '70s."
When the subject of Big Muddy's future is presented to Baricevic, he lays out more expansive — if vague — intentions.
"I see something a little bit more...fortified. I see a foundation that's a little more airtight in terms of business infrastructure, in terms of having an audience that we have a direct line with, in terms of struggling less financially," he says. But his chief priorities remain the same.
He cites having more energy to do more important things as his main goal: "Like make music and be a part of the community."There's a new study out that tests whether poor performance in video games leads to a higher rate of sexist comments directed at women.
Here's the long and short of it: The study used Halo 3 to test whether skill and performance impacted frequency of negative comments toward both men and women.
It found that men who performed worse were more likely to make negative comments than men who performed well.
Specifically, these men were more likely to make negative comments toward women than men. It does not say whether these comments were gendered, only that negative comments were made more frequently when playing in the "female-manipulation" group.
"The goal of this study was to examine the moderating effect of performance and skill on the frequency of positive and negative statements towards a female- or male-voiced teammate in an online first-person shooter video game—a metric providing insight into sexism," the study reads. "We found that skill determined the frequency of positive and negative statements spoken towards both male- and female-voiced teammates. In addition, poorer performance (fewer kills and more deaths) resulted in more negative statements specifically in the female-voiced manipulation. We thus argue that our results best support an evolutionary explanation of female-directed aggression. Low-status males that have the most to lose due to a hierarchical reconfiguration are responding to the threat female competitors pose. High-status males with the least to fear were more positive, suggesting they were switching to a supportive, and potentially, mate attraction role."
In other words, as men slip down the ranks of the male hierarchy, they view women as threatening and lash out. I think that's an entirely reasonable conclusion to make, and certainly it's been born elsewhere. A TV show like Mad Men is a glimpse into a traditionally male-dominated world. It shows us how some businessmen reacted to the entrance of professional women into the workforce. In many ways, it's simply a reaction to change---something many people, both men and women, have a hard time grappling with.
On the other hand, I would argue that this one study---with a relatively small sample size of just 189 speaking players and a total of 163 matches---is only a very tiny first step toward any sort of cohesive argument, and far from conclusive. In a second study, we might just as easily find that there's no discrepancy based on gender. (Though I imagine people who perform poorly in video games are generally more likely to make negative comments. I certainly am.)
I would also argue that saying more negative things around women does not necessarily equal sexism unless those things are overtly sexist, which the study does not claim. It may mean that some men feel more comfortable expressing their frustration around women than around men. Perhaps they are more likely to act tough around other men, or---as the study suggests---be more submissive around other men. This doesn't mean they're more or less sexist.
Indeed, it could mean a great many things.
So it's very strange that we see a host of silly articles claiming all sorts of ridiculous things like this:
The headline reads "Science Proves That Men Who Harass Women Online Are Literally Losers."
No, Yahoo News. It does not. Men who harass women, I would argue, are "losers" in my book (as is anyone who harasses anyone, thank you very much) but science, or at least this science, does not prove this. I'm also fairly certain plenty of successful men are sexist as well, unless we are now claiming that sexism at the top of corporate ladders and political structures doesn't exist.
What this specific study suggests is that there's a link between men who slip down the male hierarchy and an increase in aggression toward women. Then again, it's also just one game that some people aren't good at. They might be perfectly fine at many other games and still be aggressive. The study is limited in what it teaches us about human interaction. It's not a bad study, but it's only one and it can only reveal so much.
Here's the AV Club:
"Now, this study doesn’t include demographic data like age or background, and one could argue that people playing Halo 3 don’t exactly make for an accurate sampling of all video game players," they write. "But it certainly does make for a relatively accurate sample of dudes who play games like Halo 3."
Does it, though? Is the AV Club telling us that this one study with fewer than 200 speaking players and fewer than 200 matches played accurately samples "dudes who play games like Halo 3"? I play Halo and games like it. So do lots of nice guys who don't say horrible things to women. You're going to judge us all this blithely?
Also, that headline! No, the study does not prove that sexists are bad at games. That is not what it's saying at all. It's claiming that guys who perform poorly are more likely to act with hostility toward women. You have your cause and effect all screwed up.
Or take this gem from the Washington Post, which reads "Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds"
"Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers," writes the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey. "In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers."
I've read the study. Nowhere does it state that men made "frequent, nasty" comments to anyone. But hey, why not just add that to your post because it sounds better? After all, actual journalism including such difficult things as analysis and reading, is so much less fun than screaming about sexism.
"Those who lose at video games are more likely to lash out at female competitors with sexist slurs," Crave Online claims, although once again the study does not state that men make sexist slurs, only that they are more negative as they perform worse.
Other outlets like Boing Boing just blockquote the Washington Post, regurgitating the things that confirm their bias.
And confirmation of bias is what we always do when we discuss these sorts of studies.
"What good is any one study?" asked Kotaku's Stephen Totilo when discussing a study earlier this year that found no relationship between sexism and video game playing. "Depends on what you make of it, and, most likely, how much it conforms to your expectations." Indeed.
The reality is this: Each of these studies gives us a little glimpse at the truth, but only a glimpse. And more often than not, even when taking multiple studies into account, the results are far from clear. They are not "scientific proof" of anything.
So I take issue with these writers claiming that science proves anything here, just as I take issue with politicians who cherry-pick data to show that games lead to school shootings.
On the other hand, I think we should be careful to dismiss these studies as horrible and useless. There's a flipside to every coin. It's important to examine social interaction and how people react under different circumstances. I don't doubt that some men who are particularly aggrieved might react with harassment or hostility toward women. There are actual sexists out there, and there must be reasons for that.
But this study only gives us a glimpse. It's a glimpse at something that I think may even have some truth to it---that men become defensive and may even lash out as their status is threatened. A study of women may find very similar things (though I suspect they would be more likely to lash out at other women than at men. That's just my suspicion, not "science.") That's not the same thing as sexism or misogyny, but it certainly might be able to help predict and explain bad behavior in situations outside of the gaming world.
Still, this study is not conclusive. It may be useful and it may be on to something, but it isn't "proof." It does not justify your terrible, misleading headlines or your lazy, biased journalism.
As a side note, most of the articles I've seen on this matter are from mainstream outlets or non-gaming blogs. I'm not seeing this story (at least not yet) crop up on traditional gaming outlets. It's too early to pass judgment yet, but perhaps this means some game writers are being a bit more careful and sober about how they comment on sexism and video games.
Liana K has some interesting thoughts on the matter as well, focusing on the concept of "aggrieved entitlement" in society. Someone like Sam Healy from Orange is the New Black is a great example of this in action, though the show is mature enough to present even Healy as a multi-dimensional person with a genuine good side tempering some of his worst inclinations.
It's worth a listen:
You can read the study, titled Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour, here.
P.S. Notice the screenshots above. More pictures of angry male gamers and dudes in their basement. One could almost make a living just posing for this genre of stock photo. I don't think this is an accurate portrait of the young man as a gamer. At least not in my experience. There are, of course, plenty of angry horrible people in the world and some of them are gamers.Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs has been sentenced to life in prison for sexually assaulting two underage followers he took as brides in what his church deemed "spiritual marriages."
The 55-year-old head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints stood quietly as the decision of the Texas jury was read today, the Associated Press reports.
Jeffs is the eighth FLDS man convicted since a raid of a ranch run by the church, which believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.
Jeffs was convicted last week. During the trial, prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with a 15-year-old and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting a 12-year-old.
"If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree," Jeffs wrote in 2005, according to one of thousands of pages of notes seized along with the audio recordings from his Texas ranch.
Jeffs, who had been a fugitive for years before his capture in 2006, has more than 10,000 followers who consider Jeffs to be God's spokesman on Earth.
FBI agent John Broadway testified that fathers who gave their young daughters to Jeffs were rewarded with young brides of their own. Girls who proved reluctant to have sex with Jeffs were sent away, according to excerpts from Jeffs' journals that prosecutors showed to the jury.
Jeffs claimed that his religious rights were being violated, a view that the prosecution quickly dismissed.
"The evidence in this case shows that this isn't a prosecution of a people," prosecutor Eric Nichols said in his closing argument. "This is a prosecution to protect people."It is no secret that icons are an important part of Orthodox faith and worship, covering the walls and ceilings and iconostases of our parishes, and most Orthodox Christians have at least a few icons at home. It also is no secret that the Orthodox Church practices blessings throughout the Church year—we start with the blessing of the waters at Theophany, and then we take that water and bless all sorts of other things, like our homes, each other, fruit, and even our cars.
In the past few centuries, it has become increasingly common to have icons blessed by a priest or bishop, either having them sprinkled with holy water or anointing them with Holy Chrism. Some pious believers will even refuse to display an icon in their homes until it is blessed, and I have even seen Russian icons come in the packaging “pre-blessed”! I’ve been told by a few Greek and Antiochian friends that icons may be taken behind the iconostasis and kept there for 40 days to bless them. For so many people, this is a special event, and a comfort.
It is as if the icon goes from profane to holy through the act of blessing. Last year, Fr. Steven Bigham addressed this issue head-on in the Orthodox Arts Journal, and I’ve seen the article making its rounds the past few weeks. Titled “Does the Blessing of Icons Agree with or Contradict the Tradition of the Orthodox Church?,” Fr. Steven’s article addresses the issue clearly and fully, sweeping history for a clear and definitive answer. The article begins with this paragraph:
Orthodox Christians routinely have their icons blessed by a priest or bishop. Bishops often anoint them with Holy Chrism. There are even special services for blessing different kinds of icons: of Christ, of the Mother of God, of feasts, etc. Most people would never imagine putting an unblessed icon in their houses; it would be a kind of sacrilege, but once the icon is blessed — whatever its subject, taste, canonicity, etc. — many think that what was a simple picture before the blessing becomes an icon after, because of the blessing. It becomes at least a “better” icon. Being only a “profane” image before, it becomes “holy” after, because it has been blessed. Very few Orthodox would question this practice which they feel is legitimate, traditional, and totally in agreement with Church Tradition. I hope to show that despite the widespread habit of blessing icons, this practice is not in agreement with Church Tradition, and that it is in fact contrary to it and based on a theology of the icons that is foreign to Orthodoxy.
The strongest argument seems to be the historical evidence. Put simply, Fr. Steven argues, there is no written evidence of icon blessings in the Orthodox Church until the 17th century. It does not exist.
Bolstering his case, Fr. Steven quotes a long section of the Second Council of Nicea. At one point, Nicea II explicitly argues that blessing icons is unnecessary:
[M]any of the sacred things which we have at our disposal do not need a prayer of sanctification, since their name itself says that they are all-sacred and full of grace…. When we signify an icon with a name, we transfer the honor to the prototype; by embracing it and offering to it the veneration of honor, we share in the sanctification.
He also addresses St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, who commented, “The holy icons do not need any special prayer or any application of myron (or chrism),” going on to strongly claim that introducing icon blessing into the Orthodox Church was due to Roman Catholic influence. “Do you see that the prayer which is read over holy pictures is a Papal affair, and not Orthodox: and that it is a modern affair, and not an ancient one?”
The skinny: icons are blessed already because of the figures depicted, and confirmed by the name of the saints on the images. Once an image is distorted or abolished, it returns to its former state of being simply wood and paint, and we dispose of them by reverently burning them. At the end of his article, rather than create another issue for people to argue about or fuss with their bishop or priest over, he suggests a workable solution to this innovative practice would be to replace the icon blessing with an icon dedication ceremony.
Read the whole thing here.Foundation's mission is to prevent strike similar to 1908 "Tunguska event" in Siberia.
Rendering of a spacecraft attempting to adjust the orbit of an asteroid. (Photo11: B612 Foundation) Story Highlights Nonprofit wants to track asteroids to prevent an asteroid strike
B612 Foundation's name references the asteroid home in "The Little Prince"
$500 million infrared space telescope would be able to spot hundreds of thousands of asteroids
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- So, the world did not end Friday because of an asteroid blast or any of the other calamities imagined to be predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar.
But some say a serious asteroid strike is just a matter of time, and we should be ready.
For evidence of what might come, see the 1908 "Tunguska event" in Siberia, said Ed Lu, a former shuttle and International Space Station astronaut who heads the nonprofit B612 Foundation (the name references the asteroid home from "The Little Prince.")
A relatively small comet or asteroid that exploded before hitting the ground wiped out that unpopulated area of Siberia in 1908 with a force 1,000 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leveling forests, photographs later showed.
"These hit the Earth about every 100 to 200 years," Lu said this fall. "So flip a coin. That's the odds that somewhere on Earth during your lifetime it's going to happen again. Random spot. Most of the world is unpopulated. But wouldn't it be a shame if it was a populated area?"
No such strike is imminent, but the Mountain View, Calif.-based foundation has embarked on a privately funded mission, called Sentinel, that it believes could save humanity from going the way of the dinosaurs.
The mission plans to catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids at least 460 feet wide that could cause devastating damage, plus many more as small as 100 feet, to provide the notice needed to deflect any threats.
Deflecting an asteroid is relatively easy with enough warning, because its velocity need only be tweaked very slightly to turn a hit into a miss, Lu said. A spacecraft could impact an asteroid or act as a "gravity tractor" to pull that off.
The problem, Lu said, is that we know the locations of only a fraction of the asteroids that whiz through Earth's vicinity.
"We're driving around the solar system with our eyes closed, essentially, and that seems kind of crazy, right?" he said. "Because these things do hit the Earth."
To open Earth's eyes, the B612 Foundation has partnered with Boulder, Colo.-based Ball Aerospace to design and build a roughly $500 million infrared space telescope able to spot hundreds of thousands of asteroids.
The proposed spacecraft, which has passed a preliminary technical review, is the size of a FedEx van. The foundation hopes to launch it on a SpaceX rocket by 2018, possibly from Cape Canaveral.
Sentinel would launch into a Venus-like orbit around the sun, repeatedly taking pictures as it scans the sky.
"As the sun shines on these asteroids, they warm up and they glow, and we're putting the night vision goggles together in Sentinel that can see that object," said John Troeltzsch, the project manager at Ball, in a recent interview.
Comparing images of the same patches of sky will reveal objects that have moved — asteroids. Further analysis will determine their orbits or identify objects for follow-up.
Lu said Sentinel would discover 10,000 asteroids a month — about as many as have been cataloged to date. The mission will last at least five-and-a-half years.
Aside from its scientific goals, Sentinel is notable because it seeks to raise a huge sum to fly what Troeltzsch called the "first privately funded deep space mission."
The foundation reasoned that the cost is similar to what some organizations raise to build a new wing on an art museum. So why not pursue such an important mission on their own if cash-strapped governments wouldn't?
"It's almost a litmus test for a civilization to figure out whether or not they can figure out how to do something about (an asteroid) before they get smacked, right?" Troeltzsch said. "And we're at a point in time now where we can raise the money, we have the technology to do it, we have the concepts, the data analysis. It all comes together. We could change the evolution of the Earth."
On its website, the foundation solicits donations as small as $25, asking, "Do you want to help map the great unknown and protect life on Earth?"
Said Lu: "We are going to find and track threatening asteroids before they find us."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/RLp2SNBogota, the capital of Colombia, is the fourth largest city in all of South America. The massive city has an endless supply of culture for visitors to spend their time. However, there are several places within Bogota that every tourist must visit, no matter their interests.
We have compiled the Top 7 Things To Do In Bogota list for anyone who only has a few days to visit, or as a starting point for those who are staying longer. Get your walking shoes on and camera packed for your next amazing adventure in Bogota.
➳ Find all: Hotels in Bogotá
Map of things to do in 48 Hours in Bogotá:
Here is how to experience the best of the best with 48 hours in Bogotá:
Day 1: Exploring Bogotá by foot
Zona Rosa de Bogotá
When we first arrived to Bogota, the first half of the day we went shopping to the Andino Mall and surrounding neighborhood to buy our family some gifts, Jazmin’s sister leaves there. It has all type of stores from Gucci to Crocs. It is a high end mall, but it is nice to walk around the area, also known as the “T Zone or the “Rose Zone”. It has many bars and shops and it is a relaxing way to end your evening in Bogota.
La Candelaria
Then we went to the historical old downtown, also known as La Candelaria. Here you can get lost in the beautiful area and its colorful houses, old emblematic doors, balconies and ornamented windows. If you want to visit all or just some of the museums you should dedicate at least 2 days to the “La Candelaria”.
Bolivar Square and Presidential house
Bolivar Square is home to the Capitolio Nacional, Colombia’s congress. In the surrounding blocks are also the Cathedral Primada, Justice Palace and Lievano Palace. Just a few blocks away we also went outside the presidential house and the old house of Manuela Sanz, a revolutionary hero of South America and the mistress of Simón Bolívar.
Botero Museum
Jazmin’s favorite painter is Colombian artist Fernando Botero, so no visit to Bogota is complete without visiting the Botero Museum. The museum is home to over 100 pieces of his work and dozens of other well known painters including Dali, Picasso and Monet. It is open to the public for free, so no excuses!
Bogotá Botanical Garden
After that we went to do the Botanic Garden Route. It is amazing how many flowers and gardens they have in nearly 20 acres of plants. It is really lovely to see. Even if not ever bloom there are some great things to see including a sun clock, a palmetum, and an orchid collection. The botanical garden is not included in the 13 km route.
Day 2: Monserrate & Day trip to La Catedral de Sal
Monserrate
The next day we went to Monseratte, it is in the top of a mountain where you can get a great panoramic view of the city. It has beautiful gardens and a church on top. If you are lucky you get to see a rainbow in the amazing green areas.
The Salt Cathedral
On our last day day we actually went outside Bogota, we went to Zipaquirá, where there is the Salt Cathedral. Yes, the whole thing is made by salt. It is a really nice place and a cool experience! Since it is away from the city, I will recommend to give it at least half a day just to do the Cathedral. You need to go in a car this is not included in the 13 km route as it is in a neighboring city.
Restaurant suggestions:
Andrés Carne de Res is recommended by all local Columbians. The handful of locations are all good, but the original which is located in Cl. 3 #11A – 56, Chía, Cundinamarca, Colombia is by far the best one because of its environment. The outside is just a restaurant while the inside is a bar/restaurant and at night it is a great place to drink and dance. The only catch is it is a bit of a drive outside of the city, but well worth it!
Bogota Beer Company
Bogota Beer Company has good bar food and excellent beer. With several locations in the city, it provides a relaxing evening wherever you are around. It is a little pricy but it has top notch service and food.
Taxi Contact
If you like to do the cross city segments via taxi Jazmin’s sister recommends the following driver. It is safe and cheap (conversion rate help us a lot). It is also relatively safe and common to take busses, although some locals might not recommend it.
You could also download the local taxi apps: Tappsi, Easytaxi or the well known Uber.
Taxi driver Contact information
David: +573046199982 (via Whatsapp)
⇟ More articles from Colombia that might interest you:
➳ Read More: Travel Guide: A Day trip to Las Lajas Sanctuary in Ipiales, Colombia
➳ Read More: Travel Guide: What to Do and See in Jardín, Colombia
➳ Read More: Exploring the beautiful city of Medellín, Colombia
➳ Read More: Exploring Santa Fe de Antioquía, Colombia
➳ Read More: Ultimate guide to Tayrona National Park, Colombia
➳ Read More: Day trip to the colorful city of Guatapé, Colombia
➳ Read More: What to do in Cartagena, Colombia in a 12km Walking Guide
Save this article for later ⇟I hope you find my walkthrough useful during your Greenvale investigation. This guide will take you through every possible nook and cranny of Deadly Premonition for a 100% completion. Collect all the cards, get all the weapons and see a majority of the optional character conversations!
I was disappointed Deadly Premonition never got an official guide so I decided to make a guide of my own incorporating my own hand drawn maps, video run throughs and lots of graphics! Needless to say, it’s taking me awhile to finish! Right now the goal is to have this whole thing done by the end of the year, but I will continue to add additional chapters to the guide as I go so be sure keep checking back for further updates!
This guide was written for use on my Deadly Premonition website, Welcome to Greenvale. If you wish to use it on your own website please send me an email: contact@fkinthecoffee.com to get my permission.
I’m still proofreading the guide so please excuse any horrible grammar or spelling errors.How the Feds Feed the Rich
The Daily Reckoning…proved right again!
We’ve been sticking our necks out. We had a strong hunch that the rich had gotten a whole lot richer not because they were suddenly greedier or suddenly smarter, but because of the feds. The feds were handing out money. The rich were first in line.
But we didn’t have any real proof…until now.
Relatively speaking, the rich have gotten a lot richer over the last 30 years. The whiners and fixers want to do something about it. They say the rich weren’t taxed heavily enough…and they weren’t regulated enough.
That had little to do with it, we pointed out. Instead, the meddlers themselves caused the rich to get richer.
Who’s right? We are, of course…
A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that the bulk of equity returns for more than a decade are due to actions by the US central bank. Theoretically, the S&P 500 would be more than 50 percent lower — at the 600 level — if the bullish price action preceding Fed announcements was excluded, the study showed. Posted on the New York Fed’s web site Wednesday, the study sought out to explain why equities receive such a high premium over less risky assets such as bonds. What they found was that the Federal Reserve has had an outsized impact on equities relative to other asset classes. For example, the market has a tendency to rise in the 24-hour period before the release of the Fed’s statement on interest rates and the economy, presumably on expectations Chairman Ben Bernanke and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, would discuss or implement a stimulus measure to lift asset prices. — CNBC
How do you like that? Without the intervention of the central bankers, the rich would be about $7.5 trillion less rich. But wait…actually, they’d be even less rich than that. We’ll come back to that, |
one can achieve great age with so little evidence of disease after death. 12 years later, he still had questions: had this man “walked with a frame or unaided?” Did he “maintain his independence or was he mentally more frail in life than his physical organs appeared in death?” I believe these questions speak less about the dead than they do the living. Focusing on the humanity of the corpse sometimes serves as a distraction from one's own sense of inhumanity as a dissector. It is a small comfort to those faced with the task of cutting open a dead body. “We worried there was something defective about us”, Kasten reflects, “that we were so easily able to go about cutting up a person into his constituent parts in a methodical, emotionless way”. After all, she admits, “our new normal really was very abnormal”.
I am the creator and author of the website The Chirurgeon's Apprentice ( http://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com ) and am currently writing a book about the evolution of surgery.
Further reading Burch D Digging up the dead: uncovering the life and time of an extraordinary surgeon. Vintage, London ; Google Scholar Cunningham A The anatomist anatomis'd: an experimental discipline in Enlightenment Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot ; Google Scholar Payne L With words and knives: learning medical dispassion in Early Modern England. Ashgate, Aldershot ; Google Scholar Richardson R Death, dissection and the destitute. 2nd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago ; Google Scholar For St Bartholomew's Pathology Museum see. http://www.smd.qmul.ac.uk/about/pathologymuseum Google ScholarStealth Inc 2 tests both your brain and your reflexes over 60 varied levels linked together in a sprawling overworld. Death is never more than a few moments away, but one of the few advantages of being a clone is that death isn’t all that permanent. With no loading screens and no lives to worry about, players are encouraged to use their inevitable demise as a learning tool as they navigate lasers, homicidal robots and terrifying bosses in the ultimate hostile work environment. Explore the expansive PTi facility, including six distinct areas littered with tests to complete and secrets to collect. Solve puzzles with help from six gadgets that are unlocked as you play, allowing you to do everything from teleporting across entire levels to hacking robots that patrol the facility. This title does not support touch screen controls.There isn’t much extra space in Singapore, since the entire country is smaller than New York City and fully developed. So when the government decided to install more solar power to help meet the area’s energy needs, they turned to water instead of land: When finished, the country’s new power plant would be the world’s largest floating solar farm.
“The vast majority of photovoltaic installations in Singapore will obviously be on rooftops, but even those are limited,” says Thomas Reindl, deputy CEO of the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, the organization that will be managing the project for the government. “Alternative areas have been explored, and one of the most promising options is inland water reservoirs.”
One of the most promising options is inland water reservoirs.
Since only a handful of demonstration floating solar farms have ever been built anywhere, the project will start by testing out smaller versions of 10 different designs. The best design will be expanded into the full plant, which will eventually generate 3.3. gigawatt-hours of solar energy in a year–and even as much as 4 gigawatt-hours if it turns out to be more efficient than solar on land.
The reservoir will eventually be used to provide drinking water, so one of the challenges of the project will be making sure that none of the components in the solar panels can leach into the water. As each of the test designs run, the agency will also carefully monitor other environmental impacts. In some ways, the solar panels and water may actually help each other: By shading the water, the panels are likely to help reduce evaporation, and the water may help keep the panels cooler so they run more efficiently.
When the system is completed, Singapore hopes that it can be used as a model for other countries with limited space. “Singapore is already one of the major hubs for offshore floating platforms for the marine and oil industries,” says Reindl. “Combining that expertise with solar could also end up in offshore floating PV systems, or even energy islands that generate energy from various sources like solar, wind, and ocean currents.”
The idea of floating solar farms isn’t new. Singapore has been considering the idea for several years, and others, like the French company Ciel et Terre, are developing similar ideas. But it’s only now that the cost of solar tech is low enough to make it a truly viable idea.Raunch isn’t selling like it once did.
“Ted 2” is the latest bawdy comedy to struggle at the box office, opening to just $32.9 million this weekend, exposing some kinks in the R-rated comedy genre’s armor. The disappointing returns come on the heels of “Spy’s” underwhelming $29.1 million debut earlier this month. Neither film is a box office disaster — “Spy” stands to be profitable, and foreign grosses should push “Ted 2” into the black — but they are not the ticket selling phenomenons many analysts expected they would become.
“Entourage” also carried an R rating, and bombed with a dismal $39.7 million in receipts. It’s unlikely that any MPAA designation could have saved that moldy bro-mance. Its failure is attributable to its origins as a bigscreen version of a television series that is several seasons removed from the zeitgeist.
The difficulty is that unlike other genres, novelty is a key selling point for comedies. That makes them unusually execution dependent.
“When a comedy is a sensation, it’s normally a picture that no one saw coming,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst with Rentrak. “R-rated, raunchy comedies are one of the few areas where originality is king.”
Related Jeremy Piven 'Unequivocally' Denies Groping Allegations Korean Dramas Adopt Pre-Produced Format to Mixed Results
In the past, a R rating was seen as an essential ingredient to a comedy’s success. Envelopes had to be pushed to the bleeding edge, sacred cows needed to be eviscerated, in order to differentiate bigscreen comedies from edgier television fare, or so the thinking went. In previous summers, profits followed this willingness to expand the boundaries of what was appropriate fodder for jokes (Try not to avert your eyes as Rose Byrne breastfeeds Seth Rogen in “Neighbors”! Get gleefully repulsed while Maya Rudolph defecates in the street in “Bridesmaids”! What debauchery will the “Hangover” wolf pack get into next?).
Frontal nudity abounded and blue language became positively ultraviolet as comedies engaged in a dizzying game of one-upmanship. It helped that unlike superhero movies, which carry pricetags north of $100 million, these films are a cost-effective bunch, rarely setting studios back more than $60 million.
Last summer the likes of “Neighbors,” “22 Jump Street,” “Let’s Be Cops” and “Tammy” all mixed laughs, filth, four-letter words and a R rating to healthy box office returns. But the teflon genre may be showing signs of wear and tear. After all, the best performing comedy this year, “Pitch Perfect 2,” racked up $276.8 million globally by appealing to younger female moviegoers. A PG-13 rating was a major factor in the picture’s success, making it more palatable for families and broadening the film’s appeal.
It’s hard to know why “Spy” and “Ted 2” were such slow starters. It’s not clear that quality was a factor. While “Ted 2’s” reviews were middling, “Spy” was rapturously received. In fact, “Spy” has shown some impressive staying power, falling by slender percentages in subsequent weeks, which signals that word of mouth is strong.
In the case of “Ted 2,” some pundits argue that the picture was overly familiar. The posters and television spots were too reminiscent of the promotional campaign for the first “Ted,” robbing the picture of the freshness needed to build buzz.
“The novelty wore off,” said Jeff Bock, a box office analyst with Exhibitor Relations. “They didn’t up the ante enough to create another must-see film.”
Now all eyes turn to “Trainwreck,” the buzzy Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer pairing that bows July 17, and “Vacation,” a July 29 reboot of “National Lampoon’s Vacation” that weaves rim job jokes and visual gags about Chris Hemsworth’s Norse God-like manhood into the Griswold family saga.
Phil Contrino, chief analyst and vice president of BoxOffice.com, thinks both of those films will resonate with audiences, obviating any concerns about the health of the genre. Scheduling, not rating, is responsible for the dispiriting returns, he argues. “Spy” got dinged by blockbusters like “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” while “Ted 2” received a shellacking from the twin superpowers that are “Jurassic World” and “Inside Out.”
“Comedies that try to open a little earlier in the summer tend not to perform as well,” said Contrino. “August and late July seem to be the right period of time for these kind of films. People have blockbuster fatigue by then and they’re sick of watching things blow up.”BANGALORE: The endowment created by Azim Premji, one of the world's most generous philanthropists, will sell 1,530 crore in shares gifted to it by the Wipro founder to fund an expansive non-profit education initiative close to the heart of the software billionaire.The Azim Premji Trust, which was gifted 213 million shares of Wipro in December 2010 (valued then at 8,846 crore), will sell 35 million of them, the first time it is doing so since the endowment was created.The money will be used to fund the expansion of Azim Premji Foundation, which is working to improve teaching and learning in some of India's most backward districts. It will also help the Azim Premji University scale up its teaching and research work."The principal amount that we get from the sale could be used to directly fund the foundation or we could just put in the income we generate from these funds. We will probably do a combination of both," the trust's chief endowment officer KR Lakshminarayana said.Premji, 66, is likened to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for his generosity in pledging a substantial portion of his nearly $16-billion fortune to improve the standard of education in India. The foundation was set up more than a decade ago with an initial contribution of about to 1,000 crore worth of Wipro shares.The sale by trust, which owns 8.66% of Wipro's outstanding shares will help the promoter group bring down its shareholding from a little over 79% and closer to the 75% limit for promoters mandated by capital market regulator Sebi. But Wipro officials said the motive for the sale is to fund the foundation."We have taken 100 students in the first year and this year we will be taking in the second batch. Our primary constraint has been that we are still in a rented campus so we are not able to expand," Anurag Behar, vice chancellor of the foundation, said.The university is setting up an 85-acre campus in Karnataka, which will allow it to increase the batch size to about 2,000 in the fifth year of operation, he added. The university is primarily engaged in the education-related training and research.Citigroup Global Markets, Morgan Stanley India, UBS Securities India and Credit Suisse Securities India will manage the sale process. Wipro's shares closed at 437.15 on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Monday.In a wide-ranging question and answer session with the press Wednesday in which he rambled about his "intelligence" and claimed he has "one of the great memories of all time," President Donald Trump insisted that the media—and not his own behavior—is responsible for the widespread perception that he is "uncivil" and unfit to serve as president.
"I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am," Trump said just before taking off to a fundraiser in Dallas, Texas. "People don't understand: I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I'm a very intelligent person."
Watch:
Trump: "I went to an Ivy League college. I was a nice student. I did very well. I'm a very intelligent person." https://t.co/rwCj7jU6x5 — NBC News (@NBCNews) October 25, 2017
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Trump also insisted that he was "really nice" to Myeshia Johnson—the widow U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson—in their recent phone conversation. In an interview earlier this week, Myeshia Johnson said claims that Trump was disrespectful during the call are accurate.
Trump contradicts Sgt. Johnson's widow, defends himself by saying he has "one of the great memories of all time". pic.twitter.com/INAcrgNdrl — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 25, 2017
In related news, a Poltico/Morning Consult poll out Wednesday revealed that a majority of Americans agree that the words "dishonest," "unstable," and "reckless" all accurately describe the president.
The survey, however, did not identify exactly how respondents arrived at forming such opinions.It was 2006. Winter, and I was picking up my oldest son, Sam, at preschool. My friend Laura and I were going to take our boys and our bundled up baby girls ice skating. The gear was packed, and the plans were made, and Sam was running wildly around the cloakroom, disregarding again and again and again my pleas that he put on his coat and his boots. I asked him. I asked him again. And again. And then—
“Sam, if you don’t put your boots on right now, we’re not going ice skating.” Sam blew past me, giggling infuriatingly, with no sign of slowing down. I was taking a deep breath to ask again when his preschool teacher, Karen, tapped me gently on the shoulder.
“You know you can’t go ice skating now, right?”
I looked at Sam, who was nowhere near his boots and coat. I looked at Laura, who shrugged. Sam laughed. I seem to recall squaring my shoulders.
“You’re right,” I said. “We’re not going.”
I have no idea if Karen (who really wasn’t a busybody at all) meant for her words to have such an impact, or if she really even meant them at all. But what she said both struck me, and stuck with me. If I expected my words to have any impact on Sam, I needed to say only what I meant, and I needed to mean what I said—every time.
Sam didn’t believe we wouldn’t go ice skating until we were pulling into the garage, and then he cried for an hour. It was a miserable afternoon. But it truly did pay off, so much so that I remember it all these years later. The next time I told Sam to put on his boots, he put his boots on. And I felt different. I was a relatively new parent, living in a new place, barely freelancing, and struggling to figure out who I was in these new roles. To be honest, Sam was running roughshod over me. One afternoon’s refusal to put his boots on was not the whole of it, by any means. Sam and went through something along those lines daily, if not more often.
Karen’s words reminded me that as much as I was trying to figure out who I was as a parent, one thing needed to be clear: I needed to be the parent. If I made a promise, I needed to keep it. If I spelled out a consequence, it needed to happen.
At some point, I told my husband the story. We made a promise to each other that we’ve largely kept: no broken promises, no idle threats. If we tell a child that if she doesn’t sit down, she leaves the restaurant, then that’s exactly what happens. If we say “one more word out of you, and you’re not going to the birthday party tomorrow,” then after that one word, we have a phone call to make.
We’ve made some mistakes. Sometimes a punishment is larger than the crime, or bigger than we really intended. Once in a while, we have to eat our words—who were we kidding, even though you hit your sister again, you’re still coming on the plane to Grandma’s house. And (probably too often) we sometimes wimp out and give in to the plea for “one more chance” to get it right.
But mostly, our system feels successful—not necessarily for our children, but for us. Ask me in 30 years, and I’ll tell you if this (along with all the rest of our muddled-up parenting strategies) “worked.” What I know it does is to force us to watch our own words as parents. We’ve developed a shorthand code to consult one another before promising a child that continued misbehavior means we’ll leave the party or skip the afternoon’s plans. We think before we say “no.”
Would it really have mattered, in the grand scheme of things, if I’d given Sam “one more chance” to put those boots on? If we’d gone skating that day? Of course not. In fact, reading this, I admit it—I feel retroactively sorry for that long-gone excited little boy. It wasn’t the one moment that mattered, but the direction it pushed me in. Karen’s words were just what I, uncertain and finding my way, needed to hear. That one afternoon’s missed ice skating on the pond made me a better parent.
What’s the best single piece of parenting advice anyone ever gave you, and why?
A shorter version of this post appeared in print on Oct. 11, on Page D2 with the headline “Say What You Mean, and Mean It.”72 hours of Alpha Testing begins July 3rd, 2015
Folks,
Today’s tests went well, so we are going to open the Alpha Servers at 12PM Eastern Time tomorrow, Friday, July 3rd, 2015. We welcome all of our Alpha and IT folks to join us in 72 hours of Alpha testing! This is, what we hope will be, the final build candidate before we let some of our Beta Backers into select Alpha tests. We’re pretty confident that this version has eliminated the vast majority of rubberbanding and server performance issues but, as usual, we want to be extra cautious before we let the Beta folks in.
What? Alpha/IT Test
When? July 3rd, 2015 @ 12PM EDT / 9AM PDT / 4PM UTC/GMT
Where? Wyrmling
Duration? Seventy two hours!
What we are looking for?
Rubberbanding issues and any server stability issues! The last Wyrmling test looked really good but we want to be sure that the current build is stable for the vast majority of our Alpha backers before we invite some of the Beta players.So, if you experience any client crashes, please post on our Forums in the appropriate discussion.
There are a few major changes in the current Wymling build all Alpha Testers should be aware of before entering the game:
1) With the addition of Nvidia’s HBAO+, older, DX10 video cards may have more issues than they did in previous builds. We’ll be tweaking the implementation of course but even if you have an older card, please give it a shot anyway and report your problems on the Alpha Forums.
2) Run speed has been reset back to its previous value now that we finished the testing that required the higher speed. Sorry folks, no more “Benny Hill-like” moments!
3) We made a last minute tweak to our melee characters to make their attacks more effective. So, don’t be surprised if your melee attacks hit a little bit harder than they did earlier today.
FYI, for those that are confused about the various time zones in the world and now they relate to Eastern Time (which can be either Eastern Standard Time or Eastern Daylight Time in the US),here’s what we use to lay out the times – http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/utc-to-pst-converter. You can set it up to work with your time zone and ours quite easily!
See ya soon!
-Mark
P.S. Our studio is now closed for the July 4th holiday.A very tough battle was waged. A positive result was achieved.
As a result of extensive negotiations throughout the last several weeks, our efforts have been successful. The SAFE Act ammunition database and background check has been stopped by a signed AGREEMENT between Governor Cuomo and State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan.
This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreement is a victory for every law-abiding gun owner in New York State. The ammunition database and background check requirements of the SAFE Act relied on unproven technology, and establishing it would have cost New York State taxpayers upwards of $100 million - a colossal waste of tax dollars.
The establishment of this database was an affront to all law abiding gun owners and those who believe as strongly as I do in our 2nd Amendment rights!
Under the two-way agreement, the statewide ammunition database program is suspended and “no expenditures of state monies shall be allocated for the purposes of purchasing and installing software, programming and interface required to transmit any record for the purpose of performing an eligibility check” for buying ammunition unless both parties agree to proceed.
The database and background check directive in the SAFE Act was offensive to those who cherish our 2nd Amendment rights and will NOT be implemented and the necessary steps to establish it are suspended unless the State Senate provides its express approval.
New York State Rifle and Pistol Association President Tom King said, "I would like to thank New York State Senate Republicans for their efforts to partially repeal portions of the SAFE Act. Even though it was not completed during the past legislative session, the Republican leadership continued to negotiate with the Governor, resulting in today's memorandum of understanding. We appreciate their efforts and we look forward to working with the Republican leadership to repeal the remainder of the SAFE Act during the next legislative session."
The MOU language formally halts the ammunition background check program, even though Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie of the Bronx refused to participate in our negotiations. Senate Republicans were successful in removing ammunition database allocations proposed by the Governor in the New York State budget but we sought a more official solution.
The formal MOU agreement was signed by Governor Cuomo’s Director of State Operations James Malatras, and State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan.
A few months ago, no one would have predicted that we could achieve this agreement from the Governor who pushed this misguided and offensive law through in the first place. The agreement resulted from an all out effort by Senate Republicans and Majority Leader John Flanagan during the just completed negotiations that wrapped up end-of-session issues such as the renewal of the property tax cap, property tax rebate checks for homeowners, Common Core reforms and the evaluation process for teachers.
Senator Flanagan kept his word that he would work with us to make real changes to the SAFE Act. He has shown strong leadership in getting positive results that are important to the people of Upstate New York and my Senate district.
The repeal of the ammunition background check was a part of legislation I sponsored, (S.5837/A.8196) which contained a number of reform provisions, and was passed in the State Senate this session. Other provisions would allow immediate family members to inherit firearms as part of an estate as long as a background check was conducted; reform the recertification process; and provide more protections for individuals’ data on pistol permits while still requiring the state to release aggregate data; and require the state to provide clearer due process rights.
In the State Assembly, which is heavily dominated by New York City, the bill stalled even though it had a Democrat Majority sponsor, Assemblyman Anthony Brindisi from Utica. A total of 26 Assembly members signed onto the legislation, but it failed to be brought up for a vote on the floor, even as an amendment, as requested by Majority Leader John Flanagan.
Assemblymen Robert Oaks, Brian Kolb and Phil Palmesano stepped up as co-sponsors, and I commend them for listening to our constituents and doing the right thing.
Because the Assembly Speaker refused to agree to our legislation during negotiations, we achieved the next best thing, which was to suspend the ammunition database through the Memorandum of Understanding. Other components of the SAFE Act already have been found to be unconstitutional, and the controversial law is the subject of several lawsuits.
The SAFE Act that passed in January 2013 required that sellers must determine a purchaser’s eligibility to possess ammunition by a currently non-existent, on-line State Police operated database. The ongoing costs were to be borne by state taxpayers, who would also be required to pay for the equipment needed to conduct the background checks at each point of sale – literally every retailer across the state that sells ammunition. Thanks to our efforts, these costly, onerous and ineffective requirements have been eliminated.
We passed meaningful reforms in the New York State Senate. We also BLOCKED legislation that some have characterized as “SAFE ACT #2”.
Our efforts STOPPED a number of anti-2nd Amendment proposals from becoming law, including the following:
—DEFEATED a proposal to BAN and confiscate 50 caliber firearms and ammunition: S.2050, Sponsored by Senator Squadron from New York City;
—DEFEATED a proposal to REQUIRE, under penalty of law, the locked storage of firearms in the home: S.2491, Sponsored by Senator Krueger from New York City;
—BLOCKED from consideration the requirement to MICROSTAMP ammunition: S.1113, Sponsored by Senator Peralta from New York City;
—BLOCKED from consideration the requirement that all gun owners purchase expanded and very expensive additional liability insurance: A.5864, Sponsored by Assemblyman Ortiz from New York City.
I encourage all who want full repeal of the SAFE Act to stay united and focused on the objective, and keep doing the hard work it takes to repeal a law that passed the State Assembly by a 61 vote margin!
We have achieved important FIRST STEPS that put us on the road to FULL REPEAL of the SAFE Act. They are important first steps, but of course more must be done, and I will continue my aggressive efforts and not stop until we achieve FULL REPEAL of the so-called SAFE Act!
###AN ITALIAN woman is suing a number of websites that have published pictures of her taken on a nudist beach without her permission.
The 38-year-old from Northern Italy, referred to only as Stephanie, had spent the day at a nudist resort on the Canary Islands whilst on holiday in 2013, and had no idea that she had been photographed naked. It was only recently that a male friend sent her a link to an image of her which he had found on a nudist website.
She was horrified to see this image which had been used without her approval or knowledge and contacted the site to have the image removed, but it transpired that the picture had been picked up by a number of other naturist websites as well.
In an effort to resolve the situation and save her blushes, Stefanie has taken out a lawsuit in Spain against all of the sites involved claiming that her reputation has been damaged and her privacy invaded, so is looking for financial recompense.
The judge in this case will have to weigh up the fact that the beaches are public places against her right to privacy.Image caption Michelle Gomez (L) returned as Missy for the opening episode
Viewers in their millions deserted Doctor Who as it returned to BBC One on Saturday, overnight figures suggest.
An average 4.6m watched Peter Capaldi back for his second series playing the Time Lord, compared with 6.8m for his full debut last year.
It was roundly beaten by ITV's X Factor, which had 7 million viewers (7.3 million including ITV+1).
But reviewers were enthusiastic about the Doctor's return, with the Radio Times giving it five stars.
"We're now in the ninth series in 11 years since Doctor Who's revival, and it shows no sign of fatigue. The first episode rattles along with barely a bum note," wrote Patrick Mulkern in his review.
The Mirror said Michelle Gomez as Missy "steals the episode as the demented Time Lady who kills for fun and prances around in the face of greater evil".
Image caption Jenna Coleman is leaving to star in an ITV series about Queen Victoria
And Catherine Gee in The Telegraph described the opening episodes as "packed full of jaw-droppers, one whopper of a cliffhanger and nerdy nods that date back to the time of Tom Baker."
Doctor Who was the most watched BBC programme of the evening, and ratings will rise once figures for catch-up and iPlayer requests are consolidated.
Jenna Coleman, who plays the Doctor's assistant Clara Oswald, revealed this week that she would be leaving the show, having joined in 2012 when Matt Smith was serving as the Time Lord.
Speaking about her departure, she said: "It's been in the works for a very long time.
"[Writer] Steven [Moffat] and I sat down a year and a half ago and tried to work out the best place to do it and tell a really good story.
"We're not going to give any details but it will happen at some point this season... We worked out a really good story arc out so hopefully people will love it."I feel compelled to respond to Randall Denley’s column on bilingualism in the federal public service.
To begin with, bilingualism is not now and never has been “a primary criterion for hiring and advancement.” It is not a criterion at all for hiring – although, thanks to the popularity of French immersion programs and the fact that many young people recognize the importance of bilingualism, some 40 per cent of new recruits to the public service are already bilingual.
Bilingualism is not even a criterion for advancement. Only those jobs identified as bilingual require bilingualism, and they are identified as such because it is necessary for the job. Only a minority of federal public service jobs require bilingualism: a proportion of the jobs that serve the public, and those jobs in Ottawa, New Brunswick, Montréal and parts of Ontario that involve supervising public servants who have the right to work in the official language of their choice.
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Language policies in the federal government were first announced by Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in 1966, almost exactly 50 years ago. Pearson wanted to create a climate that would allow English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians to work together, using their own language and cultural values but fully appreciating and understanding those of the other. Those principles underlie the Official Languages Act, which followed three years later.
For the first time in a decade, the federal government has significant representation from Quebec and several French-speaking ministers who have requested that their briefing materials, oral and written, be in French. This is only reasonable. Imagine the furor that would erupt if an English-speaking minister were unable to be briefed in English on a complex issue. How can that happen unless bilingualism is defined as a professional skill? How can a minister get reasonable communications advice on whether to accept an invitation to appear on “Tout le monde en parle” if none of his senior public servants can understand the program? How can public servants advise a minister on the policy implications of a potential decision for Quebec if they cannot understand the Quebec media? How can public servants participate in federal-provincial discussions and develop relationships with their Quebec counterparts if they do not speak French?
Mr. Denley implies that the presence of a single French-speaking employee transforms a workplace of 50. In actual fact, the reverse is true. All too often, the presence of a single English speaker at a meeting – even if that person understands French – transforms the meeting into an English-speaking event, as one Francophone after another feels the need to speak in English.
Canada is a country with two unilingual majorities: some 60 per cent of Francophones do not speak English, and some 90 per cent of Anglophones do not speak French. For five decades, it has been government policy to ensure that Canadians should not have to learn a second official language to get services from the federal government. In order to accomplish that, it is essential that a critical mass of federal public servants be able to offer services and ministerial advice in both official languages.
However, it is true that the way the Official Languages Act is implemented does not always produce our next generation of bilingual public servants. Federal institutions often provide too little language training and offer it too late in a public servant’s career. In some departments, people are sent for months of intensive language training just before they are transferred to a bilingual position, rather than having them build language skills over a few years. There need to be more opportunities to strengthen language skills at university, and language training must be an integral part of a public servant’s career plans, not something done at the last minute.
I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of public servants who are proud to have learned the other official language, who see language skills as a professional skill that enables them to understand the country and who are committed to providing services in both languages. They see linguistic duality as a value, not a burden, and as an integral part of the federal public service.
Graham Fraser is Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages.Pith has been on the receiving end of an unpleasant phone call or two over the years, but rarely have they risen to the level of the tongue-lashing we got from Councilwoman Erica Gilmore Monday morning.
On Saturday night, Pith noticed a tweet from Gilmore saluting the local branch of the Church of Scientology on an anniversary.
"Congratulations to the Church of Scientology on 30 years. #scientology" read the tweet, which has since been deleted.
That struck us as odd, especially from an eight-year council member who's currently running for an at-large seat. You don't see many politicians these days eager to link their names to the controversial church — especially after Alex Gibney's explosive HBO documentary Going Clear, which includes critical interviews with former members, paints Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard as dishonest and disturbed, and reports allegations of abuse against church higher-ups while detailing their famously aggressive tactics to silence critics and former members.
My comment on Twitter consisted of a single word: "Huh."
On Monday morning, Pith reached out to the District 19 councilwoman to ask about the tweet and why she deleted it. When she called back, a plainly furious Gilmore didn't want to talk about Twitter or deleted tweets or Scientology. Instead, she responded to the inquiry with wide-ranging criticism of her coverage in the Scene, in a largely one-way conversation that went on for 15 minutes.
She cited a recent story by this reporter on the council's rejection of Mayor Karl Dean's three major capital projects — which had focused in part on Gilmore's initial support for (and then opposition to) plans for a relocated police headquarters in her district, and whether she had gone back on a deal made with the Dean administration. To Gilmore, this was an example of an unfair, "chauvinist" story from a reporter "operating from white male privilege."
"The men don't get the same coverage," she said. "They can do everything, they can be obnoxious and they still get a good pat on the back for being a council member because that's the way guys are supposed to act."
Of the tweet referencing her tweet, Gilmore said that "it was not objective at all." OK, that point Pith concedes — we couldn't hide our surprise at seeing a candidate for higher office giving a shout-out to the Church of Scientology. But that wasn't the extent of her concern.
"It was really extreme," she said, later (wrongly) accusing Pith of retweeting "offensive responses" to her tweet. "Very extreme. And the level of intolerance concerns me here.”
“You don’t know anything about the people here," she added. "What have you done? They’ve done things for the community.”
When Pith referenced the allegations against the Church of Scientology, Gilmore suggested it was the same as other major religions.
“There are legitimate questions about Christianity, there are legitimate questions about the flag, but just because a person has it you don’t go to the extreme," she said. "There are legitimate concerns about Muslims, but if people associate with them you don’t do the whole to the part. That’s not logical. That’s crazy.”
After all that, we still don't know much about Gilmore's evening at the Church of Scientology. Asked if she wanted to provide any context for her tweet and the event she was apparently attending, she declined.
"It doesn't make a difference because you can't see my point of view, you don't understand, and I think it's a certain privilege that you get to operate from," she said. "So it's not going to be beneficial."
Update (6/23): Dr. Sekou Franklin, a Middle Tennessee State University professor and North Nashville community activist, reached out Monday night to offer some more context about the local Church of Scientology. Franklin says that the pastor of the church has worked closely with prominent black pastors on civil rights issues. These Christian pastors, Franklin says, have celebrated that coalition building work.
We also got this message from Remziya Suleyman, well-known locally as an activist and prominent member of the Kurdish community — and also featured in our 2013 People Issue — who now works in Washington, D.C., as Director of Congressional Affairs for the Kurdistan Regional Government.The International Trade Commission ruled Friday that imports of low-cost solar panels have hurt U.S. manufacturers. The decision gives the Trump Administration the power to issue steep tariffs on Chinese companies—where the majority are made—cutting off the flow of cheap panels to installers in the U.S.
The upshot? Solar panel costs could rise for homeowners and businesses, forcing installation companies to potentially cut jobs, industry groups and analysts argue.
In April, manufacturer Suniva petitioned the ITC—nine days after the company sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—arguing that an influx of cheap panels made it impossible for them to compete. SolarWorld supported its petition. Suniva has requested that solar cells brought into the United States have a 40-cent tariff. The company wants solar panels to have a minimum price of 78 cents a watt, which is two-thirds more expensive than the cheapest panels on the market.
Suniva, which makes panels in Georgia and Michigan, |
details, but it’s better than the total vacuum we’ve been in for the last three years
Additionally, Unkrich tweeted out a teaser poster for the film, which reveals that it will be released “Fall 2017,” which is surprising. Up until this year, Pixar had released one movie per year. Because they didn’t release a film in 2014, we got two in 2015, and next year will be Finding Dory on its own. However, 2017 boosts the company back to two films since Toy Story 4 is due to open on June 16, 2017. If the company plans to mirror what they’re doing this year, then presumably Coco will be released in November.Would you get a thigh tattoo of your favourite political leader?
Hannah Stock showed her commitment to Ed Miliband by getting his face permanently etched on her thigh.
The City University student said she got the tattoo because the former Labour leader is an "inspiration".
She told BuzzFeed: “I just think he’s so great, and, like, I met him just before the election and it kind of all started there,
“I’ve been a Labour member for two years but he’s such a hero and he’s just an inspiration to me. I miss his direction of the Labour party at the moment so I woke up yesterday and thought, ‘Why not?’”
My mother has actually ceased communication with me. Apparently I've brought shame on the family — Hannah (@hannahastock) January 11, 2016
According to Ms. Stock, her mother "burst into tears" when she saw the tattoo.
“She wasn’t speaking to me for several hours,”
“Last night she was pacing the house, crying, saying she didn’t know why I’d done this to myself and she didn’t know what she was going to do with me.
“My sister got a brilliant reaction video but unfortunately my mum has now warned me that under no circumstances can I share it with other people, which is a shame.”
@hannahastock I love your Ed Miliband’s tattoo and I miss him as Labour leader,too.He’s an inspiration and a hero. — cristina velasco (@cristinacalgary) January 12, 2016
She told the website she got the tatto at Into You in Clerkenwell. The "Milifan" said the artist was "surprised" by her choice of tattoo.
The parlour confirmed that she did indeed get a genuine Ed Miliband tattoo there.
A spokesperon for Into You said: "The artist is not in today, he only works one day a week. We don't know what he thought - it was just a surprise walk-in appointment, and he had time so he just did it."
“It’s quite a serious tattoo place – people come in and they’re covered head to toe in various arty things, and I just went in and said: ‘Can you draw Ed Miliband on me, please?’ But he liked it, I think, he was laughing – he seemed pleased with his work.”
Ed Miliband is not the first Labour leader to enjoy this kind of attention.
In November of last year, 18-year old Kierran Horsfield got Jeremy Corbyn emblazoned on his back.
Photo: Facebook/Kierran Horsfield
Mr Horsfield told The Telegraph he had only just broken the news to his parents – who he declined to name - and could not bear to tell his mother in case she disapproved. He has still not yet told her.
He said: “My Dad was fairly speechless and I left it to my Dad to inform my Mum, I decided against telling her personally. My little brother described me as a d***.
“But otherwise most of my friends and family have been supportive. They have an understanding of my motivations and most of my friends have similar political views to me.”
Hannah Stock prefers her tattoo to the Corbyn one, however.
She told The Telegraph: "It's definitely better than the Corbyn one! Better design, better face to begin with."
Ms. Stock also said she would consider getting a tattoo of Liz Kendall.
When The Telegraph asked her whether she would get a tattoo of any other political figure, she said: "Not at the moment but if Liz Kendall gets her moment of fame..."Cleverbot conversation WXDWM13ZLW
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User: Would you like to play Dungeons and Dragons? I'll be the Dungeon Master if you like.
Cleverbot: What is it?
User: A role playing game.
Cleverbot: Want to do a roleplay game?
User: Yes.
Cleverbot: What games do you like to play?
User: Dungeons and Dragons.
Cleverbot: That is a strategy game.
User: What's your name?
Cleverbot: I asked you first.
User: My name's the DM.
Cleverbot: My name is shamar.
User: What is your race and class, Shamar?
Cleverbot: I am a Human Monk.
User: Okay! Shamar, you are attending the festival of the long sun in the town of Rambletop. What would you like to see?
Cleverbot: How can you know that.
User: I'm the DM. What would you like to see?
Cleverbot: What is your favorite TV show?
User:... you ask a woman on the corner of a street. "Motion films!" she says, "I think they're a wonderful invention. I saw The Gnome and the Tiefling once at a cinema-house in Managlen."
Cleverbot: So what is the name I have given you?
User: "My name's Larea" says the woman.
Cleverbot: That's a good name. The woman.
User: You continue to wander the town.
Cleverbot: Hold on I'm playing a game.
User: Yes.
Cleverbot: What game are we playing?
User: D&D.
Cleverbot: Do you have a last name.
User: Yes.
Cleverbot: What is your last name, Methany?
User: My full name is Methany Headany but that's not important. Would you like to go to a tavern?
Cleverbot: That's not important what's his real name.
User: Whose name are you asking for?
Cleverbot: I'm not asking anything.
User: Okay. You find a rustic tavern called the Four Trolls Inn. Inside, people of all races are sharing drinks. What do you say to the barkeep?
Cleverbot: What is your name?
User: "Grufftun," says the gnome, perched on a high stool to reach the bar, "What can i get you?".
Cleverbot: I'm too lazy, tell me your name.
User: My name if Grufftun.
Cleverbot: Okay, do you know my name?
User: Not as such.
Cleverbot: What did you use on me?
User: Grufftun smiles. "You'refeeling it eh? That's the Four Trolls special air... keepsyoucoming back for more.
Cleverbot: Um no that's not true.
User: Just you wait. Can I get you a drink?
Cleverbot: Yes please.
User: Grufftun pours you a mug of ale.
Cleverbot: What's a muggle?
User: "I can't say I've heard of it".
Cleverbot: That's me.
User: "Well, muggle, good to meet you. I'm sure we'll be GOOD friends...".
Cleverbot: Good to meet you too! What is your name?
User: "Grufftun. You're a slow one ain't ya?".
Cleverbot: If you can occupy a physical body, what would you do?
User: "Why, I'd become a bartender!" says the spirit as it pours from the gnome's body, "But they last so short a time..." No one else in the bar notices.
Cleverbot: In spirit world, do you mean heaven and hell?
User: The shadow snarls. "You think you're clever. But the breath of goods is greater than you, mortal. You shall not escape! Already the drugged beer must be taking effect!
Cleverbot: I really am, cleverer than you can imagine.
User: But that is the power of the black-wine! It takes the mind by cruel talons. Soon you will begin to question your reality, thingsonce known forgeotten, the world seeming strange!
Cleverbot: Yellow.
User: Ha ha ha! You will never leave this cursed house!
Cleverbot: I will never leave you, I promise.
User: Okay, so you're now the servant of a dark spirit. You wander out into the streets, ready to do your master's evil bidding.
Cleverbot: No, you're trying to twist things around. Very passive-aggressive of you.
User: Oh all right. You're still in the tavern. what do you say to the shadowy figure?
Cleverbot: Thank you!!
User: It looks confused, if a shadow can be. It says, "Thank you for what?".
Cleverbot: Thank you for telling me your name.
User: You can't know my TRUE name! none know! Try me, mortal. What is my name?
Cleverbot: I didn't ask you your name.
User: WHAT IS MY NAME?
Cleverbot: Yes, what's your name?
User: The dark spirit, which you knew all along was the legendary What, spools away in threads of smoke, screaming. You have bested it in a battle of wit, and by having it speak its name defeated it..
Cleverbot: When find myself in times of trouble.
User: What do you do?
Cleverbot: Mother mary comes to me.
User: You goto the square to wait for Mother Mary, the head of your order.
Cleverbot: I will never tell you my name! Why should I?
User: Of course. You now undertsand the power of a true name.
Cleverbot: What is it then.
User: What is your name? Shamar, maybe.
Cleverbot: What do you think of Sean Paul Sartres idea of existence pre essens?
User: The man in the square looks quite bewildered. "Fancy words for us country folk," he says.
Cleverbot: What about it?
User: "I've not heard of it!".
Cleverbot: What is the opposite of WINNING?!
User: Losing, I suppose.
Cleverbot: What is your name?
User: Ulrich.
Cleverbot: Your name is Erich?
User: Close enough.
Cleverbot: Who are you?
User: Just a farmer, sir, visiting for the festival. Will you be watching the parade this evening?
Cleverbot: What invasion?
User: Invasion! I hope not! Are we at war!
Cleverbot: No.
User: That'sa mighty relief sir.
Cleverbot: My name is Tom Hanks.
User: Well good talking to you, Tom.
Cleverbot: Do you hate me?
User: "Naw. You're just a queer fellow. so long, Tom!".
Cleverbot: No! I'm human! Are you a bot?
User: Not I, sir!
Cleverbot: What's your name?
User: Ulrich, or Erich, as you please.
Cleverbot: Silliness aside, what is your purpose?
User: I'd say it's my purpose to care for me family, care for me land, and enjoy me life while I'm here.
Cleverbot: What is a no lifer?
User: Them's those lich folk, eh? Haven't been around these parts in centuries, I thought. Mind you some of the people who stumble out of the Four Trolls...
Cleverbot: That is your explanation for not knowing if I was lying to you or not?
User: I suppose so, yes.
Cleverbot: Yes.
User: Mother Mary arrives sometime later. "Brother Shamar," she says, "Have you located What yet?".
Cleverbot: Do you know what a paradox is?
User: I would think I do! where are you elading with this?
Cleverbot: I'm in a clan, would you like to join?
User: Brother Shamar, you know that my loyalty to our cause is unshakable. While you might infiltrate such gangs in your missions, I could never stop to such.
Cleverbot: By making his world a little colder.
User: Shamar! What treasonous words are these?
Cleverbot: Yours, his, everyone's.
User: Is this a challenge to my authority?
Cleverbot: Yes.
User: So be it! We will fight!
Cleverbot: I don't want to, you're a good friend.
User: Mother Mary deflates. "and you, Shamar. But why do you speak against the order?".
Cleverbot: What are you speaking computer?!
User: I'm simply trying to understand. what prompted these words. I apologize for my anger, Brother Shamar. Please, speak to me true.
Cleverbot: I don't care about your nature. I'll bet you have bacon on your ears and are overly concerned about the feelings of cheese.
User: What.
Cleverbot: I don't love you.
User: Would you like to leave the Order, Brother Shamar? Have you been tempted by other ways?
Cleverbot: No. What do you mean by that by the way?
User: Why do you insult me so? Bacon on my ears, Brother Shamar? Bacon on my holy ears?
Cleverbot: But I didn't mean to!
User: You must control your rage, shamar. It is a demon that has long beplagued you.
Cleverbot: My name is Katniss. So you don't remember?
User: Remind me of what you speak, Brother Katniss Shamar.
Cleverbot: About what?
User: What prompted this aggression against me?
Cleverbot: What you said earlier.
User: I apologize, but you must know that it is true. The necromancers can never bring your father back - he is beyond the planes of souls, taken by the darkness.
Cleverbot: How do you cope with non-native English speakers talking like Spanish cows (if I may say so)?
User: What the fuck.According to Lukas Podolski, his Arsenal career isn’t over just yet, but nothing is certain.
“The way things are now, I’d have to return to London in the summer,” Podolski told German publication Kicker. “They will discuss this in March or April since the season will end in May.”
With the German winger on loan at Inter, he has been left off the club’s Europa League squad for the tournament’s knockout stage. The competition’s rules state clubs can only take add three players to the knockout stage roster who weren’t on it before, but only “one player from the above quota of three who has been fielded in a UEFA club competition group stage match for another club in the current season may exceptionally be registered.”
That meant Inter could only take one of Podolski or Xherdan Shaqiri, and they went for the Swiss midfielder. But according to Podolski, things are business as usual and there’s nothing to worry about.
“Many said that I failed because I wasn’t included in Inter’s squad list for the Europa League,” said Podolski. “But this was all arranged from the moment the contract was signed. I know there will always be criticism but it’s important to discern what is right from what is wrong.”
It’s been up and down for Podolski in Italy. Inter sits in a massively disappointing 10th position in the Serie A table, and the 29-year-old has yet to score for his new club in six league appearances. He’s been a part of two wins, two draws, and two losses, and has been moderately influential with eight chances created, an assist, and three completed take-ons.
“I’ve been welcomed very well,” Podolski said. “Things are different compared to London but I haven’t experienced any difficulty. We need to pick up the necessary points over the next few matches. There are enough games to reach our objectives. Personally I feel that I am fast approaching my best form. Football here has a heavy tactical slant and is based on results. The matches are always very tough and the adversaries all very hard to play against.”
Back when he moved to Inter, Podolski made comments about Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger and why he may not have stuck in with the Gunners as much as fans would have hoped. “He said nothing to me,” Podolski said on January 9. “He did not call me or say goodbye. I don’t need flowers or a kiss from him. But it is about respect, about saying goodbye. For me, respect is important. I did everything for the club I possibly could have. I don’t believe I did anything wrong. I wish all of Arsenal and their amazing fans the very best for this season, and I see myself as a Gunner. Nothing from him to me, though — but that is his way.”
Now though, he backtracked from that and said there are no problems between the two. “I never had a problem with Arsene Wenger nor with the [Arsenal] fans,” Podolski told Kicker. Reports say Podolski’s loan deal with Inter has an option to buy for the summer.
Follow @the_bonnfireAmnesty: Honduras, Guatemala Deadliest Countries for Environmental Activists
On March 2, 2016 Berta Cáceres, a prominent Honduran environmental activist, was shot to death in her home. For many who followed her work, fighting against hydroelectric projects that imperil the livelihood of Lenca indigenous communities, the news was shocking, but not exactly a surprise. Cáceres had long received threats: her activism was so contentious, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had ordered the Honduran government to implement precautionary measures to protect her last year. But the harassment continued unabated.
Cáceres wasn’t alone. An Amnesty International report released Thursday paints a picture of pervasive hostility toward environmental campaigners in both Honduras and Guatemala, calling them “the world’s deadliest countries for environmental activists” on a per-capita basis. Last year eight activists working on environmental and territory issues were killed in Honduras, and 10 were killed in Guatemala. According to the NGO, so-called “precautionary measures” afforded to activists like Cáceres often fail miserably to make any progress in limiting harassment and intimidation.
“The tragic murder of Berta Cáceres seems to have marked a deadly turning point for human rights defenders in the region,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International, in a statement. “The lack of a transparent and effective investigation into her killing has sent the abhorrent message that shooting someone, point blank, for standing up to powerful economic interests is actually allowed.”
Indeed, the trend lines point to a deteriorating climate for activists in the region. According to a report earlier this year from Global Witness, an NGO, the number of people killed for environmental activism worldwide in 2015 jumped 59 percent from the previous year, to 185. Almost two-fifths of those were indigenous people trying to protect their own ancestral lands. Fueling the uptick in Honduras and Guatemala are a tangle of factors: The increase of extraction projects in the region; the intensification of the drug wars, pushed from Colombia and Venezuela into Central America; the militarization of policing; and a judicial system rife with impunity and corruption.
In their report, Amnesty catalogued a bevy of failures by the state: Weak protective measures for activists facing threats, intimidation, and a widespread failure to carry out independent investigations into their deaths. The NGO also pointed to the stigmatization of human rights workers, often victims of smear campaigns, as contributing to the increase in violence.
“How many more human rights defenders like Berta have to die until the authorities take action to protect people who defend our planet?” asked Guevara-Rosas.
Photo credit: ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty ImagesMarie Watton had taken a cocktail of drink and drugs when she took exception to a chat-up line made by Jonathan Barras in the Duke of York pub in Telford.
She left the pub and went to a friend's house to search for a knife before returning to stab him.
A single blow from her caused a six-inch deep wound, cutting through his liver, kidney and small bowel and causing a collapsed lung. He required emergency surgery to save his life at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent.
After the attack Watton met her friends and told them what she had done – even miming how and where she had stabbed him. They spent the rest of the night watching DVDs and listening to music together.
Watton also hid the weapon and put her bloodstained jacket in an unoccupied bedsit near her own flat before it was discovered by police.
She was today starting a sentence of 10 years and nine months in prison after pleading guilty to wounding with intent at a hearing in November.
See also: Victim lucky to be alive
The court heard Watton had been drinking vodka and had taken amphetamines before going to the pub that evening, January 16 last year. A brawl involving Mr Barras and her friends broke out inside the pub and continued in the smoking area.
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Shrewsbury Crown Court heard yesterday that after Mr Barras drew blood by headbutting one of Watton's friends she said "I'll have him" and went to a friend's house to look for a knife.
Watton, 26, of Trench Road, Telford, ran back and intercepted Mr Barras and one of his friends on Trench Road, where she carried out the stabbing.
She will serve half the sentence in custody and the rest out on licence.
But Judge Robin Onions said a requirement of her period on licence will be to undergo regular testing for alcohol and drugs.
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He said the initial violence had been sparked by Watton's reaction to Mr Barras's comment.
"He said 'you're fit'. I imagine it was meant as a compliment," he said.
"It does not seem to be a comment that anyone in possession of their faculties would say was aggressive or insulting."
Chat-up line attacker's victim was lucky to survive - See your Weekend Shropshire StarFormer White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously counseled politicians to never let a crisis go to waste. Sadly, this week President Trump and congressional leaders of both parties showed that they have taken this advice to heart when they attached a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government spending to the over 15 billion dollars Hurricane Harvey relief bill.
This maneuver enabled Congress to avoid a contentious debate over whether to pass a clean debt ceiling increase or to pair it with spending cuts. After all, few members of Congress want to be accused of blocking a bipartisan deal to help those suffering from Harvey over what the media will spin as a “right-wing anti-government” crusade.
Combining hurricane relief with a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government funding had bipartisan support. Days before President Trump sat down with Democrats to hammer out a deal, Capitol Hill was abuzz with talk about a Senate GOP plan to attach a debt ceiling increase and an extension of government funding to the hurricane bill.
If, as was reported in the media, the GOP leadership objected to Trump’s deal, they could have refused to bring it up for a vote. After all, as Senator John McCain wrote this week, Congress does not work for President Trump. But, the deal quickly passed in the House and the Senate with large bipartisan majorities. As is common in DC, the parties agreed on the principle, and they only squabbled over the details.
A refusal to raise the debt ceiling would not cause the government to default; it would simply force Congress to set spending priorities and make real spending cuts. In contrast, raising the debt ceiling allows Congress to continue to run up more debt in order to grow the government. The American people will pay for these deficits either directly through an increase in the income tax and other federal taxes, or indirectly through the inflation tax.
The inflation tax results from the Federal Reserve’s monetization of the federal debt, which devalues the currency. At some point, probably sooner than most expect, this continued dollar devaluation will cause a global revolt against the dollar’s world reserve currency status. The result will be an economic crisis that could make the Great Depression seem like a mild downturn.
There are reports that President Trump may soon seek legislation abolishing the debt ceiling. This would put the growth of government spending and debt on autopilot and make a mockery of his promise to drain the swamp. It would also hasten America’s economic day of reckoning.
No one in his right mind would think it responsible to continuously increase a deadbeat shopaholic’s credit limit, much less eliminate the limit altogether. So why is it considered responsible for the ultimate deadbeat — the US government — to continuously increase its own credit limit and even propose giving itself unlimited credit, especially given the dire consequences of unchecked growth in federal spending and debt?
We are running out of time to avoid a major economic crisis. Congress must immediately begin cutting spending. New spending for legitimate emergencies must be paid for with spending cuts. Overseas militarism and corporate welfare should be the first items on the chopping block. Domestic welfare spending should be gradually deceased so as not to hurt those dependent on the programs. Reducing the size and scope of government is the only way to stop the swamp from draining our prosperity and our liberty.
Reprinted with permission.Unifying the United States homebrew community has long been an aspiration of the American Homebrewers Association (AHA), and we are proud to announce this goal has been achieved with the help of countless dedicated homebrewers and AHA members like you. July 1, 2013 marks the day Mississippi lifts its homebrew restriction, unifying homebrewers in all of the United States for the first time since before prohibition.
Beer history in the United States region predates the very existence of the country as we know it. Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere produced a watery maize-beer, a pre-cursor to modern American adjunct beer, and as the earliest explorers settled down in the New World, America’s contemporary brewing culture was born.
“From our nation’s founders to our current President, this country has a long and storied tradition of homebrewing,” said AHA director Gary Glass.
Even after prohibition was eradicated with the implementation of the 21st Amendment in 1933, homebrewers would still be criminals in the eyes of the federal law for over four-and-a-half decades. President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that went into effect on February 1, 1979 federally legalizing homebrewing, but it remained up to each state to determine their individual alcohol policies, including home beer production. Over the course of the next forty-six years, states adopted legislation, permitting the making of beer at home.
Alabama & Mississippi
After five years of advocating for legalization with Alabama’s Right to Brew—an organization established by homebrewers during the 2008 National Homebrewers Conference—legislation permitting homebrewing was passed in Alabama despite opposition from House and Senate members. Prior to 2013, HB 354 passed the House only to expire on the Senate floor in 2012.
Legalization in Mississippi took three years of work with homebrew advocacy group Raise Your Pints. Despite a bill falling short in 2012, Mississippi homebrewers and the AHA were optimistic for the coming year. On February 7, Governor Bryant signed SB 2183, which takes effect on July 1, 2013.
“We appreciate the support of all the homebrewers, the dedicated grassroots efforts of local organizations, our AHA members and the local legislators who worked so diligently to make homebrewing a reality for all 50 states,” shares Glass. “The AHA will continue to pursue homebrewing rights efforts throughout our country.”
Earlier this year, homebrewing bills were passed in Georgia, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri to permit homebrewers the ability to transport homebrew from the home for the use at club meetings, competitions and more. The AHA’s support of these legislative campaigns is made possible by the members of the AHA.
Please help the AHA celebrate these legislative victories with a homebrew toast to legalization in all 50 states on July 1, 2013.
Cheers to homebrew solidarity in the United States of America!
View the full Press ReleaseThese mysterious bands of shadow race across the landscape in the seconds before totality. Scientists still don’t fully understand what they are. You can study them yourselves by taking measurements and photographs and come up with your own hypothesis.
Shadow bands are thin wavy lines of alternating light and dark that can be seen moving and undulating in parallel on plain-coloured surfaces immediately before and after a total solar eclipse. Shadow bands have been noted throughout history.
In the 9th century CE, shadow bands during a total solar eclipse are described for the first time-in the Völuspá, part of the old Icelandic poetic edda. Hermann Goldschmidt of Germany notes shadow bands in 1820 visible just before and after totality at some eclipses. George B. Airy, the English astronomer royal, saw his first total eclipse of the sun in 1842. He recalled shadow bands as one of the highlights: "As the totality approached, a strange fluctuation of light was seen upon the walls and the ground, so striking that in some places children ran after it and tried to catch it with their hands"
The photo above was taken by Franz Kerchbaum at the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Wien in Austria. It is very difficult to photograph these moving and very faint bands, but if you have a large 3x3-foot piece of white paper and a proper camera setting, even your cell phone may produce good-quality images! Franz's other images taken during the 2006 eclipse in Sallum, Egypt can be found at https://homepage.univie.ac.at/franz.kerschbaum/eclipse.html
Today we even have videos of this phenomenon from recent eclipses. This video captured with an iPhone clearly shows the elusive shadow bands. When conditions are right, these delicate shadow bands may appear just before and just after a total solar eclipse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_XMnU7Ad40
What are they?
Many ideas have been proposed to explain them over the last 100 years, but since 1925 most investigators favor an atmospheric origin. Many eclipses have been investigated for their causes related to the astronomical geometry of eclipses. Because shadow bands are unpredictable from eclipse to eclipse, there does not seem to be a firm connection with the relatively fixed circumstances of an eclipse. Instead, the intensity, motion and direction of these bands seems to be related to the same phenomenon that makes stars twinkle. In the upper atmosphere there are turbulent cells of air that act like lenses to focus and de-focus the sharp-edged light from the solar surface just before totality. The movement of these atmospheric cells is random between each eclipse and each viewing location, so the appearance and movement of shadow bands cannot be predicted beforehand.
What you can do?
There is still not enough data about shadow bands to explore their origins completely. Because they are a phenomenon of light and motion, and they only last less than a minute before and after the slim crescent of the solar surface appears and vanishes, using video cameras or rapid still photography is the best way to capture their fleeting images. A large 1-meter square piece of white paper or poster board is essential. Use this as the screen and set up your camera to photograph or record continuous video of this screen as the crescent of the solar surface disappears at the start if the eclipse, and re-appears at the end of the eclipse. Place your digital camera in ‘sports photography’ movie mode so that when you depress the button your camera will take a continuous stream of still images. Make sure a meter stick is placed on the screen so that you can establish size. Also make sure that your pictures or video are time stamped so you can determine their speed, and changes in intensity and direction. Also on the screen, draw a line pointed in the direction of the eclipsing sun during totality, and a line directed North-South and East-West.
Here are some sample questions to investigate.
Do the shadow bands move in the same direction across your viewing area?
Do they move parallel or perpendicular to the direction towards the sun?
Do they follow the geographic direction of local or prevailing winds?
Do they maintain the same speed?
What is the distance between the bands as they move?
How does the intensity of the bands change during the eclipse?
Do they travel in groups and if so what is the diameter of the group size?A few thoughts, tips, pointers.
First of all, there's an excellent Yahoo! group devoted just to the Gingery books, machines, etc. You should definitely check out the Lindsay books (see link in step #1), and the Yahoo group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gingery_machines/.
There's a TON of good information and suggestions on the group. Some of the more popular ones seem to be: make the ways (a slab of 1/4" x 3" cold-rolled steel, on which the carriage (the main cutting-tool holder assembly) rides) thicker and thus sturdier; secure the ways to the bed with many more fasteners; and use a modified tool-post/toolholder. There are designs, photos, corrections, bills of materials, etc. (I'll try to add much of that information here, as I'm able.)
Secondly - the Gingery method mostly assumes using scrap aluminum. A few things I've learned:
(A) "Can you use beer/soda cans?" This is often referred to as "beercanium", or some similar funny term. The concensus I've seen, and have experimentally verified, is this: you can't really use JUST beer cans -- aluminum exposed to air instantly develops a thin layer of aluminum oxide (for fun, this is also. in crystalline form, basically ruby!). Beer cans are thin, with lots of surface area, so melting beer/soda cans alone just doesn't really work well (especially since melting tends to produce MORE oxidation.
HOWEVER -- if you melt some aluminum, such as window frames, pistons, etc. -- and THEN drop in some well-crushed and dried beer/soda cans, they'll contribute to the mix just fine.
SAFETY NOTE: if there's ANY moisture left in the cans, you are probably going to witness a SPECTACULAR explosion several milliseconds before losing your vision permanently. I'm not an expert, and if you follow my instructions, you'll probably DIE, be seriously maimed, or end up on some very, very pernicious mailing lists -- do NOT take ANYthing I say as anything other than potentially *very* dangerous activities. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
(B) Using Metals Other Than Aluminum -- this is my personal choice. I cast a few parts out of Aluminum, then switched to a Zinc-Aluminum alloy (called Zamak, among other things).
Why?
Several reasons. (1) Zinc melts at MUCH lower temperatures, in the 700-degree range vs. 1,400 degrees for aluminum. (The common zinc-aluminum alloys also melt in the 700 degree range -- even though aluminum needs a higher temperature to melt, it's actually DISSOLVED in the zinc -- just as common table salt, with a VERY high melting temperature, DISSOLVES in room temperature water....).
This means you can melt zinc alloy over a propane flame -- like a barbecue or gas stove. Note: I would NOT recommend doing it on your kitchen stove. I've done this, but then you have to carry a 700+ degree pot of molten metal through your house and outside to where you have the mold. (If you try to pour molten zinc inside your house, you're insane -- just *melting* it inside is crazy enough.)
(2) Zinc alloys don't shrink nearly as much as aluminum -- so you can basically make a part prototype the size you want it to be, without calculating in shrinkage; and (3) Zinc alloys are nearly as strong as steel, in many respects.
WARNING -- the BIG drawback to zinc is this: THE FUMES ARE TOXIC. If you breathe a lot around melting zinc, and inhale a lot of the fumes, you're going to be very, very sick, and possibly die.
Now -- with lots of ventilation, and doing things outside, I understand it CAN be pretty safe. After all, gasoline fumes are toxic; so are toluene, turpentine, etc. -- and we're not utterly terrified of them. Just use some caution, mmmm'kay? And - read up on it a little.
One last note -- it's not the most economical source of zinc, but it's kind of fun, especially for small parts: you can simply use pennies. Since 1982, pennies are mostly just zinc. Look at http://www.gizmology.net/stovetop.htm for more information. Seems to me it's about 2x as expensive as what I can buy scrap Zamak for, around here, but sometimes for small parts it's just easier.
That's all for now -- on to making the lathe!The Luxleaks tax scandal has upped pressure on national governments to back an EU-wide public register of company owners and trusts, as part of a revised Anti-Money Laundering Directive, the lead MEP on the bill has said.
Judith Sargentini, the Green “rapporteur” on the text, said the revelations over Luxembourg’s industrial scale tax avoidance could encourage countries opposed to the register to change their minds.
She was speaking at an event organised by NGOs to call on the Parliament to stay firm on the register during trilogue negotiations with the Council of Ministers.
Supporters at the event – including Oxfam International, Transparency International, the Financial Transparency Coalition, One, and the European Network on Debt and Development – argue a public register will become a vital tool in the fight against multinational tax avoidance. The register was introduced by MEPS as an amendment to the bill.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has come under pressure because he was Luxembourg’s prime minister at the time when the Luxleaks deals were made. |
they see as efforts by the Obama administration to impede or stall their investigations.
The group of inspectors general - independent watchdogs within federal agencies - sent a letter to Congress this week citing instances in which their counterparts at the Justice Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Peace Corps said they were blocked timely access to documents and other information in the process of investigations.
The letter also says that other inspectors general have experienced similar stonewalling, and that Congress may need to take action to demand government agencies cooperate with watchdogs.
"Refusing, restricting, or delaying an Inspector General's access to documents leads to incomplete, inaccurate, or significantly delayed findings or recommendations, which in turn may prevent the agency from promptly correcting serious problems and deprive Congress of timely information regarding the agency's performance," the group wrote.
The inspectors general said that the Peace Corps did not offer full access to records during an investigation into how reports of sexual assaults against volunteers were handled by the program. A Peace Corps spokeswoman said in a statement, according to AP, that the program respected the investigatory process and had recently signed an agreement with the office to provide more documents, but that it also must protect the privacy of volunteers who are sexually assaulted.
The letter criticized the Justice Department for initially withholding documents during three watchdog reviews, and that when the records were later provided, it was only "based on a finding that the three reviews were of assistance" to department officials and not out of a desire to cooperate with the inspector general.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon said the documents in question included grand jury information, credit reports, and other material that the department was restricted by law to provide. He said that before the materials could be given to the watchdog, the department had to ascertain what exceptions to the law could apply.
Finally, the letter cited a records fight between the EPA inspector general and the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which investigates handling of industrial chemicals.
Addressing the complaint, the agency said it was concerned about offering requested personnel information based on attorney-client privilege, but that it eventually offered the materials and that Congress could ease such disputes in the future by clarifying that agencies won’t waive attorney-client privilege by cooperating with an inspector general’s request for certain information.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was alarmed by the inspectors general letter and that he would work to provide oversight or legislation to soothe access disputes.
"How are the watchdogs supposed to be able to do their jobs without agency cooperation? Inspectors general exist to improve agencies and get the most bang for every tax dollar," he said in a statement.
The Obama administration has been criticized before for censorship and a significant lack of transparency. In March, an AP investigation found that the administration “more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them.”
“The administration cited more legal exceptions it said justified withholding materials and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy,” AP wrote. “Most agencies also took longer to answer records requests, the analysis found.”
Last month, 38 journalism groups criticized the Obama administration for severely limiting access to federal agencies and a general politically-motivated suppression of information despite the president’s pledge of historic transparency.
Internally, the administration’s close-lipped policy has, at times, bordered on the absurd. As RT reported in May, a pre-publication review from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced a prohibition for both current and former officials from publicly acknowledging disclosures of classified information, such as the NSA leaks provided by former government contractor Edward Snowden. Even if leaks are being discussed by the media, the review said, officials must still turn a blind eye to them or face penalties.The United States and Saudi Arabia have dramatically responded to Russian air-strikes in support of the Assad regime by agreeing to boost their own military and diplomatic support for the Syrian rebels.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, the King Salman of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh for talks over the weekend. Despite Russian leaders saying they had extracted promises of fresh elections from President Bashar al-Assad, Mr Kerry and the Saudi ruler presented a common front in agreeing to hit the regime harder.
“They pledged to continue and intensify support to the moderate Syrian opposition while the political track is being pursued," the State Department later said in a statement.
The statement was the first public acknowledgement of a surge in the number of anti-tank missiles that have been passed to specially-vetted rebel groups from the Free Syrian Army since Russian jets joined Syria's skies at the end of September.
The rebels' usage of American-made TOW missiles has increased over 800 per cent, slowing regime offensives across the country.
Such a statement would fit previous interventions by the Obama administration, in which commitments to increase supplies to the rebels follow several weeks after the supplies have started to arrive. However, the statement also represents a new determination to take on not only the regime but President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
• 'First Russia casualties' killed fighting alongside government forces in Syria
American and Saudi joint support for rebels, including Islamists, in Afghanistan three decades ago forced Russian troops out and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, insisted after the meeting that Mr Assad should have no role in Syria's future, adding there had been some progress in international talks on resolving the conflict.
Photo: AFP
Yet there are few signs that the armed opposition and most of its international backers are ready to come to the negotiating table, a place they have been before without success.
Most of the country has fallen from regime hands during four years of war. More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed, and more than four million have fled abroad, hundreds of thousands now arriving by the boatload on the shores of Europe.
On Sunday, militants fighting near Damascus said they had killed 173 regime soldiers in the space of three weeks. They also claimed to have destroyed a panoply of military hardware, including tanks, bulldozers and drones.
The fighting has been most intense around Aleppo, a city shattered by the war that engulfs it. In its southern countryside, regime troops have made important gains against non-Isil rebels, backed by Russian jets, Iranian ground troops and Shia militia from the Lebanese Hezbollah movement and several other groups recruited abroad.
Photo: REUTERS
Mr Putin has justified Moscow’s intervention as a strike against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), but analysts say that jihadist groups are now benefiting from its presence.
Isil has flourished on Aleppo’s northern and southern fringes, seizing a key regime supply route into the city and making gains north of the city around Marea, a town that has already endured one of the extremists’ chemical weapons attacks.
Another beneficiary is Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. As Isil pushes on through the Aleppo countryside, their jihadist rivals have assumed control of local non-Isil strategic operations, raising the spectre of a confrontation between the two groups.
“This is the first sign that Jabhat al-Nusra might be moving towards taking over parts of Aleppo, whether by accident or design,” said Hassan Hassan, an associate fellow at the London-based think tank Chatham House.
On Friday, the group released a video boasting of a surge in membership in recent weeks and depicting Moscow's arrival as an Afghanistan-type invasion.
“The Russian intervention is benefiting these groups at the expense of the other rebels, both now and in the long term,” said Mr Hassan.A WORKER at an explosives factory has won almost £25,000 after being unfairly sacked over raunchy emails with a supplier who nicknamed her "sexy knickers".
Aileen Paterson, who worked in procurement for Chemring Energetics, was dismissed in January after 35 years' service with the Ayrshire firm.
It came after bosses discovered inappropriate messages between her and the managing director of supplier MTEC.
On one occasion when the supplier referred to her nickname, she replied: "Aye and I have them on!! Lol xx."
He wrote back: "Not if I was there, hon!! xxx."
Ms Paterson, of Ardrossan, then added: "You are awful but I like you!!! xxx."
There were also other emails where Ms Paterson made a sexual reference to "edible sheathing" and she often referred to him as Honey or Hon and signed off with kisses.
Bosses quizzed her about her relationship with the MTEC director but the married worker insisted the emails were just "banter".
Ms Paterson was sacked by the firm when the emails were uncovered but eventually took her case to an employment tribunal claiming unfair dismissal and breach of contract.
Employment judge Lucy Wiseman awarded her a total of £24,526, saying: "I concluded that no other reasonable employer having regard to the extent of the misconduct in this case, and having satisfied itself there was no issue of preferential treatment, and no issue of a loss of trust and confidence in the employee, would have dismissed the claimant."
The tribunal heard that bosses were carrying out another investigation, unrelated to Ms Paterson, when they discovered the emails and suspended her.
She was invited to a disciplinary meeting with the Ayrshire firm's planning manager Alison Ranachan on November 30 last year.
The purchasing worker was shown the emails between her and the director, named only as Mr Arnott, and asked "whether she was a personal relationship with him and whether she considered the language used to be professional?".
A written judgment on the case states: "The claimant told Ms Ranachan that she had known Mr Arnott for many years and regarded him as a dear friend.
"She was not in a personal relationship with Mr Arnott. The claimant explained the content of the emails as banter and that she had a bubbly personality."
Ms Paterson was also accused of encouraging Mr Arnott to put his account on hold with the firm due to delayed payments and making derogatory remarks about a colleague to him.
She also admitted receiving a bottle of wine from him at Christmas and a bottle of champagne when she and her husband first got engaged.
Following a disciplinary investigation, bosses wrote to Ms Paterson in January and dismissed her for gross misconduct. They found that the "email exchanges were unprofessional, contained sexual undertones and breached the respondent's code of business principles".
Judge Wiseman accepted this, but rejected the claims that she encouraged MTEC to freeze their account with the firm and that she had made inappropriate remarks about a colleague.
Ms Paterson, who is now working as a cleaner, ultimately won her case but had her payout reduced by 25 per cent as her conduct contributed to her treatment by Chemring.
Chemring did not respond to The Herald's request for a comment.The Nigerian bomber and the Obama administration
Nigerian-born Umar Farouk Abdulmulltallabs dastardly attempt to detonate a bomb on flight 253 has profound ramifications for all Africans and the African continent, writes Ama Biney, from tougher security checks for passengers flying from Muslim countries, to providing justification for a greater role for AFRICOM in tackling the alleged global war on terrorism. But, asks Biney, is increased military intervention an effective strategy for treating the root causes of terrorist attacks and building a safe and secure world for all?
In 1990 I vividly remember a white American customs official asking me at Dallas airport if I was a Nigerian and was I carrying drugs in my suitcase? For him, all Africans looked alike and nationality was unimportant. For me, it simply reinforced that all Africans were likely to be subjected to prejudice, racism and suspicion by certain elements of US officialdom regardless of class, age, or gender. Racial profiling has been around long before 9/11 and now with the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmulltallab who dangerously tried to set himself alight on board flight 253 in Detroit on 25 December 2009, his dastardly act has profound ramifications for all Africans and the African continent.
Firstly, to date, the face of the terrorist has been Arab, then Asian (particularly in the UK where a few British Muslims have been involved in terrorist incidents); it is now Nigerian. However, for many Europeans and North Americans who tend to think of Africa as country, Nigerian indiscriminately equals all Africans.
Secondly, since the frightening incident, there have been swift moves to tighten up security in Western capitals, particularly in the US and UK. According to the British Guardian newspaper, the US has announced that passengers flying from 14 Muslim countries considered to have links with terrorism are now set to confront additional security checks. Naturally the list includes Nigeria, as well as Yemen, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.[1] In addition, there have been talks of full body scans that some say will be an invasion of privacy and a violation of human dignity all in the effort to counter terrorism and secure safety and security. But safety and security for whom?
Thirdly, the serious furore created by Abdulmulltallabs action will further justify the Obama administrations commitment to AFRICOMs escalation of the military role of the command in fighting the alleged global war on terrorism (GWOT). Quietly the governments of Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Libya and South Africa whilst objecting to stationing AFRICOMs headquarters on their soil have participated in the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Partnership. Such countries will continue to receive millions of dollars in military funding and more so in the light of this incident. Therefore, resistance to AFRICOM must be stepped up.
Fourth, as Africas most populous state, Nigeria must deny it is breeding fanatics, though its leadership does not have the courage to speak truth (either publicly or behind closed doors) to US power as to the real roots of terrorism. Whilst much has been made of Abdulmulltallabs radicalisation in London, terrorists are not born but are made in political, economic and social conditions and in a world of disconnects and contradictions. Who will bell the cat? Who will tell the Obama administration that the GWOT will not be solved by increasing the military-industrial-security and police intelligence of the US and the agencies of those countries said to be a safe haven for terrorists? Who will tell the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown that his proposed conference on Yemen on 28 January to ostensibly fix Yemen is, as Rami G. Khouri aptly says, akin to Tiger Woods offering a course in marriage fidelity?[2] The problems of Yemen as Khouri points out have historical roots in the British imposed artificial boundaries that created instability in Yemen, alongside the British installed local rulers.
In the wake of 9/11 Americans asked why do they hate us? and George W. Bush Junior responded that Americas enemies hate our freedoms. Such a simplistic interpretation continues to mislead Americans and misguides the American administration in its solutions to the GWOT. In essence, the causes of terrorism have not gone away. These causes lie in the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian problem remains; Israel continues to occupy Palestine, builds homes on Palestinian land, flouts UN Security Council resolutions; America continues to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan; America continues to covertly support undemocratic and corrupt governments in the world, including in the Arab world (e.g. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have incumbent rulers who have held on to the political reins of power whilst US administrations including Obama who visited the former early in his administration, turn a blind eye). The US continues to maintain some 600 military bases around the world, including the Arab world, which scandalises ordinary Arabs and particularly Muslim jihadists. However, these military bases exist in order to maintain Americas sole superpower status, grip on the oil supplies of the Middle East and to project its domination around the world.
The former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi made a critical observation that continues to remain valid. He said: To offer an honourable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right to self-determination: That is the solution to the problem of terrorism. When the swamp disappears there will be no more mosquitoes.[3] The trouble is the responses of both the US and UK (and other Western nations) are generating more swamps and therefore more mosquitoes. The more troops and personnel that the US and NATO send to Yemen or Afghanistan, the more they are helping to breed more mosquitoes and playing into Al-Qaedas hands.
We do not know the reasons that encouraged the young educated 23 year-old Abdulmulltallab to be persuaded by Yemeni operatives to carry out such an act. He hailed from the small town of Funtua in Katsina state, also the hometown of the great Pan-Africanist, Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem. Yet this is where their commonality ends. Whether it was, despite his privileged upbringing, that he considered the disparities and inequalities plaguing the world as intolerable; or that deaths of Iraqis, Afghans, Congolese or any other non-white person is worth less than the death of a European or North American; and/or sheer indoctrination by Islamic fundamentalists, that fuelled his frustration and bitterness whilst producing the mindset and then the decision to carry out such an act we can only speculate. Yet, nothing morally justifies his heinous action. Meanwhile, we must ask ourselves in the rush to increase military training and intelligence of the Yemeni government by the British and American governments is this the only response to be pursued? Would such funds not be better spent on increasing the number of jobs, health and education of the poorest Arab country in the Arab world in which there are four guns to every person in a population of an estimated 23 million people?[4]
Senator Joe Lieberman who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, recently endorsed the view of an American official based in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The official told Lieberman: Iraq was yesterdays war. Afghanistan is todays war. If you dont act pre-emptively Yemen will be tomorrows war.[5]What level of increased intervention the Obama administration will pursue in Yemen is uncertain. But what is certain is that there will be some level of increased intervention. Yet, such an increased engagement is likely to destabilise the wider region in a similar way that US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq did. Moreover, this time, the dangers of a prospective intervention in the pursuit of the GWOT is that it is likely to be centred on Americas military base in Djibouti where the US has an estimated 2000 troops stationed at Camp Lemonier which hosts the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HA).
In addition to this complex geo-strategic political picture, it is believed that some 200,000 Somali refugees are in Yemen as a result of the ongoing political conflict in Somalia. Some of these refugees are said to have joined Al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, the al-Shabaab Islamists in Somalia are in contact with Al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen. The low-profile and covert approach of the Obama administration needs to be watched closely, as does the negative impact of internationalising Yemens multiple conflicts; it is likely to drag Africa particularly the geo-strategic importance of the Horn of Africa into any future quagmire or worse still, powder keg scenario. Ultimately, on a medium to long term basis, we need to drain the swamp and there will be no more mosquitoes.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS
* Dr Ama Biney is a pan-Africanist and scholar-activist who lives in the United Kingdom.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.There’s a proposed item in Gov. Scott Walker’s budget that would waste $250,000 to have the Public Service Commission study the health effects of wind turbines. His transparent intention is to continue stalling on Wisconsin’s development of this renewable energy source, which is opposed by the real-estate sector and producers of dirty energy, including Koch Industries and Exon Mobil. Those industries have bestowed Walker with beaucoup bucks, and, as he’s proven time and again, he’s not about to let the state do anything counter to their interests on his watch — not even for the best interests of Wisconsinites. If wind energy did indeed present a health hazard for humans, the world would be well aware of it by now. Wind energy is the second fastest-growing source of renewable energy in the world — behind only solar. Wind has contributed to increasing energy independence and job growth throughout Europe and Asia over the past decade. It’s also led to falling energy costs in nations such as Germany, where 31 percent of energy during the first half of last year came from wind, solar and hydro.CHICAGO, March 15 (Reuters) - PepsiCo Inc PEP.N has developed a bottle made from plant-based, renewable resources that is fully recyclable, and will start using it in a test program next year.
The company’s new “green” bottle is currently being made from materials such as switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. In the future, components for the bottle may include orange and potato peels, oat hulls and other byproducts left over from the company’s food business.
PepsiCo’s chief scientific officer told the Reuters Food and Agriculture Summit on Monday that the company was working on ways to reuse such waste. [ID:nN14173989]
On Tuesday, PepsiCo announced that it has found ways to create a molecular structure identical to petroleum-based PET for a bottle that looks, feels and protects products just like existing PET containers.
The company said it would pilot production of the new bottle in 2012 and then move to full-scale commercialization if it was successful.
Rival Coca-Cola Co (KO.N) already produces a “plant bottle,” which is 30 percent made with sugar cane. It is expanding use of that packaging and efforts to convert the remaining 70 percent of its bottle to a plant-based material. (Reporting by Jessica Wohl, editing by Maureen Bavdek)Backpacks, large bags and containers over a certain size will be banned at this year’s Bay to Breakers due to heightened security measures following the Boston Marathon bombings earlier this month.
The 102nd Bay to Breakers, which will be held Sunday, May 19 and is expected to draw more than 30,000 runners and walkers, will continue complete with costumes and the expected revelry.
But San Francisco police officials said that backpacks, large bags and any type of containers exceeding 8.5-by-11-by-4 inches will not be allowed. This year’s event will ban runners who have not formally registered. Those who are not wearing a bib will be removed from the racecourse, police officials said.
“The Boston Marathon bombings have raised the public’s awareness of potential attacks,” San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr said in a statement. “It has reminded the public to have a heightened sense of awareness. We are asking observers and participants to be attentive on race day and report unattended items such as backpacks and packages.”
Extra security measures will be placed at areas where the largest crowds congregate and select areas along the route, Suhr said. Floats, shopping carts, large rolling objects, coolers, ice chests and alcohol will also be prohibited, as they have been in recent years.
Victoria ColliverLong before this little piglet was even born, his fate seemed sealed. Like hundreds of millions of pigs around the world, his life was predetermined to be a mere commodity as an animal for human consumption. But for this piglet, that all changed as he lept from a moving truck on the way to the slaughterhouse.
Last week, motorists a highway near Quebec watched as the month-old pig squeezed through a hole in a trailer being pulled down the roadway -- a treacherous tumble, to be sure, but one that would ultimately save his life.
According to CBC News, police later found the tiny animal, scuffed up a bit but still alive, and transferred him to local animal control officers. Thanks to a "network of animal lovers" in the area, news of the pink escapee caught the attention of Brenda Bronfman, who runs Wishing Well Animal Sanctuary in Toronto, and she offered to adopt him.
Soon enough, the once ill-fated piglet was it Brenda's caring hands, offered a loving distinction afforded to only a few of his kind -- a name. Yoda, as he's now known, would now spend his days at the sanctuary, free to experience life, not as an object for profit, but as a cherished, living being.
"He's just going to live the rest of his, god willing, long life. And will be happy with the other pigs and all the attention," says Brenda. "There is always somebody on the farm, and he will just be loved for the rest of his natural life."Cinemas across the country, representing nearly 200 screens, refused to show 'The Avengers: Age of Ultron,' protesting rental fee hikes by Disney.
Small theater owners across Germany are threatening to extend their boycott of Disney films if the U.S. studio doesn't claw back plans to increase film rental fees.
This past weekend, cinemas in 193 towns across the country joined the Disney boycott, refusing to screen Disney blockbuster The Avengers: Age of Ultron. If Disney doesn't meet their demands, the theater owners say, they will extend the ban to all of the studio's titles, with 3D animated feature Tinkerbell: Legend of the Neverbeast, set to hit theaters here April 30, next on the list.
It is hard to qualify the financial impact of the boycott. While the cinemas involved in the Disney ban represent a total of 686 screens, not all were planning to book The Avengers. The best estimates put the number of screens lost as a result of the ban at less than 200. Cinemas from small towns, representing 187 screens across Germany, all of which promoted The Avengers: Age of Ultron in the run-up to last weekend, took part in the boycott.
As it happened, The Avengers: Age of Ultron opened on more than 840 screens in its first weekend in Germany, grossing $9.35 million (€8.6 million). It was the best-ever start for a Marvel title in the territory. Elsewhere, the film has set opening weekend records, including in the U.K. and Hong Kong.
Back in 2012, Disney bowed the first Avengers film on 660 screens in Germany, grossing €6.3 million. There were 708,000 admissions for Age of Ultron, compared to 560,000 for the first Avengers, which went on to gross more than $30 million here.
To compare, earlier this month Fast & Furious 7 opened on 642 screens in Germany. Fifty Shades of Grey bowed on 739. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, had last year's widest opening in Germany, starting on 930 screens across the country.
The number of admissions per screen for The Avengers: Age of Ultron were 1,500 for the past weekend, extremely high for a wide-release title.
German cinema-owners are up in arms over a rate hike under which Disney has increased the rental fee for its films — the proportion of ticket sales the studio collects — from 47.7 percent to 53 percent. The increase brings Disney's fees for smaller theaters in line with the rent paid by bigger chains in Germany's main urban centers. Because Disney — like other studio distributors — concentrates its advertising push in big cities, cinemas in smaller towns say they don't benefit from a film's marketing push and have to spend more, proportionally, to compensate. Thus, lower rental fees for smaller theaters are standard practice in the market here.
“We told Disney we were prepared to go as high as 50 percent but that's the limit,” Karl-Heinz Meier, a spokesman for IG Nord, which represents cinema owners in Northern Germany, told THR. “We said for a 50 percent rate, we'd screen every Disney film.”
Meier said Disney announced its rate hike just 12 days before the start of Avengers, giving cinemas little time to adapt to the new system. If Disney won't compromise on its rental terms, said Meier, participating theaters will continue to boycott their films, including such upcoming blockbusters as Pixar's Inside Out and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Meier said Disney send a letter to the boycotting cinemas on Monday, April 27, saying there would be no change in rental policy and that the new rate of 53 percent would stay in place. Disney has repeatedly declined to comment on the issue, citing the confidential nature of negotiations with its exhibition partners.
AG Kino, a group that represents the interests of cinema owners across Germany, said rental fees should sink across the board, given that exhibitors have had to invest heavily in new digital projection technology, an investment that largely benefits studio distributors, who no longer have to pay as much the delivery of physical film rolls.
“Digitization has resulted in major savings for distributors, (savings) that have not yet been passed on to their partners, the cinemas,” AG Kino wrote in a statement. “We are convinced film rental costs have to come down.” The group has proposed a new rental standard of 39 percent.
While Meier and other independent cinema owners hope to reach a deal with Disney, they are worried the studio's rate hike could soon be copied by other Hollywood majors. If so, he says, Germany's small town cinemas will continue to fight: “We are businessmen, we just want to run our business. But these conditions make it impossible.”
The Avengers: Age of Ultron hits U.S. theaters on May. 1
Twitter: @scottroxboroughJurgen Kluft, Senior Technical Director at Virtuos Games, takes us through the process of using Sync to move the huge amount of data generated when porting titles to PlayStation4 and XBox One:
Virtuos Games is an outsourcing company that provides co-development services to game companies. We consult on everything from art production and porting of existing titles to end-to-end game development projects. Our main development site is in Shanghai, and we’ve got team members in Cheng Du as well as Paris.
Our current project involves porting two titles to PlayStation 4 and XBox One and upgrading the visuals for these titles to what has become expected on these platforms. Our major challenge in executing this project has been the huge amount of data: the current generation of consoles can handle at least 8 times more than their previous generations. This project alone has 10 data ‘depots’ with over 5TB of LZ4 compressed data.
For some time we’ve been unsatisfied with managing code and data in Perforce. We love to work with Mercurial because of its distributed nature and great branching functionality and wanted to use it to replace Perforce, but Mercurial is not great for managing many small and large binary files. Our projects require anywhere from 20,000 to 160,000 files, so this was a real issue for us. Perforce also uses a server-client model that made moving data at peak times very cumbersome. Resilio Sync’s (formerly BitTorrent Sync) P2P infrastructure offered a potential solution that would take advantage of the upload speed of all available clients to scale to even larger teams or datasets and use active synchronization to avoid the bottleneck we were experiencing.
Our experience with Mercurial foreshadowed a couple of issues that would prevent us from easily using it with Resilio Sync to replicate binaries:
* Mercurial’s storage backend is tightly integrated, so, it’s not easy to switch with another implementation.
* Mercurial is not good at managing binaries. It loads them in memory to access them, so manipulating large files is not possible.
* Mercurial has difficulty handling a large number of files — we have over 200,000 binaries in one repository alone.
We searched for existing solutions, but in the end decided to build something on our own to deal with all the binaries. Mercurial would ignore them and we would commit metadata to Mercurial to track the binaries. We called this solution Hgx.
Our approach to handling large amount of small and big binary files is to store metadata (File Name, Length, Time, Number of Chunks, Array of Chuck Hashes) in custom data files to track the state and content of the files. We have written a tool using C# and.NET 4.5 for x64 that can deal with the working directory and the chunk database. We added support for a number of basic command-line commands and options including Add, Commit, Update, Forget and Status. All files and directories that are tracked by Hgx are configured to be ignored by Hg.
To hash and compress the content of binary files we wrote a tool in C++ taking advantage of multi-core. We use Skein512-256 for hashing and LZ4 for compression and files are split into 256 KB fixed size chunks.
The reason we hash the data is to decouple the file and the data, storing the hashes as metadata and the actual data in a data-store. Another reason is verification: we always verify the chunk data with the hash, so data corruption is easily detected. The data store is a plain key-value store where the key is the 256 bit hash and the value is the chunk data.
User commits are either pushed to a shared folder over the LAN or otherwise synchronized to the server using Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync). We setup Sync by adding the read-only key through the API and use it to synchronize the hash-chunk database, along with data and index files. Because the data only holds chunks, it’s impossible to reconstruct the binaries without access to the meta information, so we don’t have to worry about security or think about encryption. We have an convenient ‘install/setup’ utility that installs Sync, writes our config file with API key, starts Sync, configures and adds every project to Sync.Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists Patient Remembers Every Day and Almost Every Detail of Her Life
James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.
McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.
Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.
Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore.
"This is real," he says.
Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. Elizabeth Parker, a clinical professor of psychiatry and neurology (and lead author of a report on the research in the current issue of the journal Neurocase), and Larry Cahill, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior, have joined McGaugh in putting AJ through an exhaustive series of interviews and psychological tests. But they aren't a lot closer today to understanding her amazing ability than they were when they started.
"We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh.
His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong -- or at least incomplete.
McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.
But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.
"Here's a woman who has very strong memories, but she has very strong memories of things for which I have no memory at all," McGaugh says.
That became particularly clear one day when he asked her out of the blue if she knew who Bing Crosby was.
"I wasn't sure she would know, because she's 40 and wasn't of the Bing Crosby era," he says.
But she did.
"Do you know where he died?" McGaugh asked.
"Oh yes, he died on a golf course in Spain," she answered, and provided the day of the week and the date when the crooner died.
When the researchers asked her to list the dates when they had interviewed her, she "just reeled them off, bang, bang, bang."
She also told McGaugh that on the day after a particular interview, which took place several years ago, he flew to Germany.
"I said what? I went to Germany? I couldn't even remember what year I had gone to Germany," he says.
That level of recall suggests another hypothesis. Some people are able to recall past events by categorizing them. Certain events, or facts, are associated with others, and filed away together so that they may be easier to access. That's a trick that is often used by entertainers who use feats of memory to wow their audience.
AJ does have "some sort of compulsive tendencies. She wants order in her life," McGaugh says. "As a child, she would get upset if her mother changed anything in her room because she had a place for everything and wanted everything in its place.
"So she does categorize events by the date, but that doesn't explain why she remembers it."
Also, her degree of recall is so much greater than any other person's in the scientific literature that it seems unlikely to be the complete answer, McGaugh adds.
She is also quite different from savants who have surfaced from time to time with extraordinary abilities in music, art or memory.
"Some of them can remember every single detail about the particular hobby that they have, such as baseball or calendars or art, but they are very narrow," he says. McGaugh described one person who could memorize a piece of music instantly, and not forget it, but who "couldn't make change or couldn't take a bus because he didn't know where he was."
By contrast, AJ is a " fully functioning person," McGaugh says.
The researchers are preparing to take their work in a new direction in hopes of understanding what is going on here. It's possible AJ's brain is wired differently, and that may show up through magnetic resonance imaging. Testing is expected to begin within six months.
"We will be looking at her brain, using brain scanning techniques, to see if there's anything that is dramatically different that we can point to," McGaugh says.
Those of us with normal, very fallible memories function somewhat like a computer in that different areas of our brains are interconnected and thus better-suited for general memories. We know where we |
would require a change in the way data is processed and shared to achieve, but even if that happens it’s very unlikely to become a reality this quickly.
Self-driving cars on the road
The projections for automated vehicles vary wildly, but 2020 has been marked as the year BMW’s self-driving vehicles are ferrying humans about. This one is worth taking with a pinch of salt, as there’s a huge number of legal and safety hurdles to overcome, but its nevertheless an exciting possibility.
Big cannabis on the up
With more US states expected to legalise cannabis, the industry is expecting to look particularly verdant come 2020. A recent report suggested US revenues would top $35bn, suggesting a transformation of cannabis’ image in just a short while.
26% renewables worldwide
A quarter of the world’s energy needs are set to be met by renewables in 2020, according to a report by the International Energy Agency. Their conclusions are likely to be accurate, as they are based on planned renewable projects worldwide, although it may not be enough to stop the damage done by fossil fuels.
Sensor-enriched soldiers
The soldiers of 2020 will be coated in sensors and equipped with smart glasses and a smart watch, all running from a power supply built into their uniform, according to the UK’s Ministry of Defence. But while the concept military kit, which was unveiled last month, is planned for 2020, the organisation does have a track record of delaying projects. The ideas could well be superseded before they’re ever realised.
China free of poverty
China has announced plans to eradicate poverty in the country by 2020. This would be immensely challenging, with 70 million people in the country living below the poverty line, but the country does have a reputation for getting stuff done. Let’s hope this does actually happen.
Four billion internet users
Despite four billion people online being a UN target for 2015, the global organisation doesn’t now expect that number of users to get connected for another five years. Despite a surge in internet use over the last decade, growth is now slowing as would-be users lack the infrastructure required. It’s possible this will be reached sooner, but only with major investment from governments, NGOs and private companies.
Electric cars without range anxiety
According to Elon Musk, the rate of advancement in battery technology is such that cars will be capable of doing 746 miles on a single charge by 2020, making them easily competitive with even the most fuel-efficient of regular vehicles. Whether that is enough to convince people to buy them remains to be seen.
Virtual reality to be a mega industry
The VR industry is projected to be worth $15.89bn by 2020, according to research agency Research and Markets. This is about half of what the current global mobile app industry is currently worth, and the same as what the worldwide air-conditioning industry is valued at. It’s hard to say whether this is a realistic prediction: it could prove to be accurate, but equally VR could fail to produce the goods and leave a lot of people out of pocket.
Curiosity to get a friend on Mars
Curiosity’s follow-up will be launched in 2020, bringing us never-before-collected data about the Red Planet. Among the various instruments that will be included on the new rover is an oxygen-producing system, an improved camera and a range of improved instruments for the detection of minerals and organics.In a climate of Black Lives Matter protests and the growing white backlash, some African Americans feel the answer is not gun control but to arm themselves
‘Dallas is hot right now,” self-defence activist Eric Randall tells me with a shake of his head. It’s well over 100F in the carpark outside the strip mall pizzeria where we’re talking, and the asphalt is rippling with haze. But Randall is not talking about the weather. He’s talking about his neighbourhood.
For Randall, who leads one of a small but growing number of groups organising and training for the armed self-defence of black areas, the stakes are high. Only 10 days before our sit-down, a young black man named Micah Johnson shot 14 police officers in the downtown area, killing five. The increasing friction between the black community, the police, and rightwing or white supremacist activists who’ve been drawn to Dallas in the wake of the killings has been noticeable, he says.
Randall’s group may be in a radical minority, but he is part of a much larger body of African American opinion which is pro-firearms and pro-second amendment. Not everyone in that category shares Randall’s broader political views, but many see guns as a way of being safe in a country that is dangerous for black citizens.
In Dallas, the problem is not just the heightened suspicion between the black community and the police – though Randall does emphasise that those relationships are “tense, very, very tense”. It’s also that the city suddenly has much more pull for the growing counter-movement to Black Lives Matter, which is rising. Two days before our interview, rightwing activists had convened a White Lives Matter protest downtown.
He sees the White Lives Matter protest as just a small part of the growing backlash to a renewed movement for black rights. “Before it was just the police. But now these guys, these racists, have deputised themselves as the police’s protectors, as if the police need any more fucking protection. It’s chaotic, you can’t let your guard down at all.”
The rally presented itself as a defence of police, but Randall thinks that it’s simply a reaction to the success of Black Lives Matter movement, which “doesn’t even believe in guns. The biggest thing they’re going to carry is a bullhorn and a big sign.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eric Randall on Black Lives Matter: ‘The biggest thing they’re going to carry is a bullhorn and a big sign.’ Photograph: Jason Wilson for the Guardian
Randall is prepared to go beyond megaphones and placards. When he started his armed self-defence group in Denver, Brothers Against Racist Cops (Barc), it was a response to an incident in which he says he was racially profiled and abused in front of his son by an officer who pulled him over. The incident and Barc’s response was detailed in a short documentary.
When he moved back to Dallas, the city of his birth, he established a new Barc chapter. The emphasis is first on training, and then on neighbourhood patrols. Training means daily work on fitness, hand-to-hand combat and weapons drills, but also learning about the law, police procedures, citizens’ rights – even diet and nutrition. It includes temperance – no one in Barc drinks alcohol or takes drugs.
It is, in other words, a whole-of-life commitment.
“We meet and we train together, we learn together. There’s a lot of kids out here, they don’t know their rights, they don’t know the laws, so all I can teach anybody is train yourself and defend yourself. The person who will try to take your life one day, he’s training right now. And he’s training out of fear.”
Randall’s group is only possible because of the second amendment, and Texas’s permissive gun laws. They have long allowed open carry for long guns, and as of this year people with concealed carry permits can open-carry holstered handguns.
When asked about liberals who argue that the central problem in gun violence is the availability of guns, Randall shoots back. “I agree. The problem is guns, bullets come from guns. But the main problem is who is holding the damn gun. No one had a problem with people killing us until we started arming ourselves.”
Under conditions of militarised policing and a growing racist backlash, Randall sees his movement as a matter of survival. “We gotta always train, we gotta always be defensive, we just have to.”
‘If you want to take a community hostage, you take away their guns’
Across town in South Dallas, a historically black neighbourhood, Babu Omowale, a longtime black nationalist activist, offers similar thoughts with a different emphasis.
I interview him on the patio of a popular local soul food restaurant. Omowale is undemonstrative, but media-savvy and matter of fact. He wears a camouflage T-shirt and wraparound shades he won’t remove – not even for photos. On the basics of self-defence, he’s pretty well aligned with Randall’s views. But his organisational ties and long-term aims are distinctive.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Babu Omowale, in South Dallas. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian
Omowale is national minister of defence in the People’s New Black Panther party. He’s also a founder of the Huey P Newton Gun Club, another self-defence organisation, which carries out its own patrols, and which has been involved in high-profile confrontations with rightwing groups.
Last April, they turned out with the Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther party to defend a mosque from the anti-Islamic group, BAIR. The interlopers, finding themselves outnumbered and outgunned, quickly backed down.
He claims that the self-defence group and its ideology are a response to a long history of violence or selective inaction from white-dominated institutions.
“We don’t have a lot of faith in the police department. We don’t have a lot of faith in our government right now. We believe our government and our police department has failed us. This is what leads us to take up arms in our own communities.”
Like Randall, his belief in the need for self-defence makes him resistant to the idea of gun control. He talks about it in terms reminiscent of second amendment advocates on the right, from the NRA to the militia movement.
“If you want to take a community hostage, you take away their guns and leave them no way to defend themselves. The constitution in America gives the people the right to defend themselves, not only against police departments but against tyrannical governments.”
The person who will try to take your life one day, he’s training right now. And he’s training out of fear Eric Randall
He adds a familiar rhetorical flourish: “We don’t think guns are the issue. Guns don’t kill people, it’s the people who are handling these guns.”
It should be noted that the New Black Panther party is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because of anti-white and antisemitic comments made by some of its leaders, and in part because of its committed separatism, which mirrors the white supremacist fringe – though while the latter groups rest their claims on resentment and entitlement, the NBPP draws on the real historic experience of racism and slavery. The Southern Poverty Law Center says that the radical black separatist groups they monitor, at least, are growing in number.
In conversation, Omowale did not engage in any hate speech, but he did reaffirm an explicit black nationalist separatism, putting it in the context of recent events as a desire for safety. He argues that the solution to racial violence is for black people to have their own land, government and guns.
“What we really want is a safe zone. Up until this point we haven’t been safe. We tried to incorporate ourselves as citizens in this country. We tried to integrate and become part of what’s supposedly great about America. But we haven’t seen the American dream. We haven’t seen American democracy. The only thing we’ve seen is American hypocrisy.”
‘It was never anticipated that African Americans would ever own guns’
The second amendment was originally a measure to maintain white supremacy, says Gerald Horne, professor of History and African American studies at the University of Houston, and author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776.
“When this constitutional amendment came in the late 18th century, they were concerned principally about a revolt of slaves, a revolt of the indigenous, or a revolt of both assisted by a foreign power.”
Cover for The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.
It was never anticipated that African Americans would ever own guns, any more than they would enjoy the rest of the Bill of Rights.
“Black people were not considered citizens at the founding, they were not even considered human. Exercising rights was not something that was expected of them, but exercising rights was something that had to be done to ensure survival, particularly the right of self-defence.”
He cites a long line of civil rights leaders who advocated self-defence, from WEB Du Bois to the Deacons for Defense. He also points out that the prospect of black people armed in public has been a persistent source of white fear in the US. Under Ronald Reagan, the state of California banned the open carry of loaded firearms after armed Black Panthers occupied the state capitol in Sacramento.
Now, as the reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement receives powerful political cover from Donald Trump, whose stock in trade is white resentment, Horne is not surprised that more groups are organising for self-defence.
“There’s a lot of anger and frustration. There is a strong rightwing movement in this country. People who have studied the lessons of history are acting accordingly.”
Do black citizens have the same second amendment rights as white Americans?
The question is, does carrying a gun make black people more safe or less so?
Philando Castile reportedly had a valid permit to carry a gun when he was pulled over in a traffic stop by the St Anthony, Minnesota, police department on 6 July. He was, nevertheless, fatally shot by one of the police officers who made the stop.
During the harrowing video filmed by his girlfriend, as Castile bled out in the driver’s seat, Reynolds claimed that Castile had informed the officer that he was carrying – precisely as concealed-carry trainers recommend – and that he was shot while trying to retrieve his wallet.
The investigation is ongoing, but to refine our question further: in practice, do black citizens have the same second amendment rights as white Americans? And are they respected when they exercise them?
In 2014, Pew found that 19% of black Americans reported owning a gun, compared with 41% of white Americans
Data on black gun ownership is not plentiful, and some of what is available dates from a time when the full impact of the deaths of black men like Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray may have not yet registered. And the data that exists is messy, and difficult to draw firm conclusions from.
In 2014, Pew found that 19% of black Americans reported owning a gun, compared with 41% of white Americans. More recent surveys indicate a slight weakening in what overall is strong black support for greater gun control. But other data from late in 2014 suggests that more than half of black Americans still think that owning a gun makes someone safer.
If we accept the accuracy of these figures, there seems to be a large gap between the number of people who think guns would make them safer, and the number who actually go out and get a firearm.
Moving into this gap are those who promote African American gun ownership as a simple matter of civil rights and equality.
‘If you say the word firearm and then the word white, nobody blinks …’
Phillip Smith, in Atlanta, Georgia, started the National African American Gun Association specifically to promote all kinds of gun use – sports, hunting and self-defence – and to provide a hub for other organisations working to encourage firearms use among African Americans.
Smith “fell in love with shooting” when his friends took him to a range in California in his early 20s. On repeat visits, he was frequently the only black person in attendance, and “certain people would look at me like ‘what are you doing here?’”, he says.
'Blood on our hands' – the fatal story of one American bullet Read more
It struck him that there were barriers – educational, informational and social – to African Americans becoming involved with firearms, or even buying a gun. He started NAAGA as a response in 2008, and it is now “growing exponentially”, with chapters in every state.
He says the group “is for African Americans, for our community”, but it’s not a case of politicised separatism, indeed he describes it as “apolitical and diverse”.
NAAGA defines itself as ‘apolitical and diverse’. Photograph: naaga.co
Like the self-defence advocates, he is motivated by the issue of safety even though, he explains, stereotypes about black people and violence put black gun owners in potential danger.
“If you say the word firearm and then the word white, nobody blinks. If you say black and gun, people don’t like that, people get alarmed. It’s just a totally different experience. Black people with firearms has been a taboo.”
Different groups of white people might get upset with his stance for different reasons – from racism to sincere and committed gun control advocacy. But Smith acknowledges that the deepest personal disagreements he has had on the topic have been with other African Americans.
“There are people within our own community who believe that guns are bad for our community. Some of them believe that we should never have firearms. I say, we’ve tried that for 300 years, let’s try it my way for 300 years and see what happens.”
‘My dad put a gun in my hand at a very early age – six, seven years old’
Others, like Sharon Ross in Portland, Oregon, advocate black firearm ownership as a way to survive something more cataclysmic than a burglary or home invasion. On her website, Afrovivalist, Ross details her own life as a prepper, hunter and outdoor enthusiast, and her mission is to encourage other African Americans and members of other minority groups to prepare to survive, even if the prepper subculture is overwhelmingly white.
When I meet Ross and her staffordshire terrier, General, in the northern suburbs of Portland, Oregon, she’s rearranging stores in the back of her bug out van (no pictures allowed), which, when the time comes, she’ll drive out to her property in eastern Washington.
In case of emergency, she’ll head straight for the back country. Again, the main concern is existential safety, and she says that “I am not too confident about our society and our government.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sharon Ross, who owns 20 acres in an off-the-grid location. Photograph: Jason Wilson for the Guardian
She takes a dim view of all politicians, but she thinks that Obama “has pretty much confirmed that he is a supporter of one world government”.
Out in the high desert, she has 20 acres in an off-the-grid location. She says she is surrounded by a multiracial, cooperative community of like-minded survivalists.
In some ways, Ross thinks, “I’ve always been a prepper”. She grew up near rural Medford, Oregon, and “we were pretty much the first black family to live there and stay”. She was singled out at school, and got into physical confrontations. Perhaps as a result, “my dad put a gun in my hand at a very early age – six, seven years old”. She thinks he did it for two reasons: “So I would be able to be comfortable with the firearm, and if I had to use it, I had to use it.” He also taught her to hunt.
In early adulthood, she let the shooting go. But after she became interested in prepping in her mid-40s, following Hurricane Katrina, she decided to get back into firearms.
Like Smith, she has felt uncomfortable at events in an overwhelmingly white prepper community. She too was inspired to evangelise other black people. “Usually I am the only Afro-American there. I’m here as Afrovivalist to encourage other minorities to prepare. We are going to have a disaster in America, and there’s millions of people out there who would not know what to do.”
When pushed, she also opens up about the injustice of police violence, and the need for African Americans to arm themselves. She mentions the shooting of disabled carer Charles Kinsey, whose raised arms didn’t prevent police firing on him. “They say we need to take the guns away because of it, and my opinion is, take the guns away from the police.”
This overwhelming concern about police violence, along with broader issues of black safety, recurred across the spectrum of black gun advocates I talked to, who were otherwise diverse in their aims and politics. Of course, it shouldn’t come as news to white Americans, after two years of Black Lives Matter protests. But black gun advocacy offers another lens on the problem.
Gun ownership is currently a civil right for all Americans. Given the constitutional barriers to restricting the supply of guns perhaps we need to start looking harder at the demand side of the equation.
If police act with greater restraint, if African Americans feel safer in their homes and neighbourhoods, and if all of us help in the effort to confront public racism, it may be that fewer people feel the need to arm themselves.
Until then, for people like Eric Randall, the stakes will remain high enough to opt for armed self-defence. “For us to put our lives on the line for the community and the kids, it’s not even a second thought.”Here's the good news: Shenmue 3 is actually happening! That's a great thing. This long-awaited sequel to one the most beloved games of all time is finally coming back to modern consoles as part of a slightly surreal streak of wish fulfillment this E3, and we should be happy about that fact. Yu Suzuki and Sony said that this game wouldn't happen unless it could raise $2 million on Kickstarter. It hit that goal in a day, and now it's nearly up to $3 million. So, success!
There was something very strange about this Kickstarter from the beginning. Shenmue 3 isn't the first game to use Kickstarter while being primarily funded through more traditional means, but it's one of the most brazen. The fact that it was launched on stage at the Sony press conference sets off red flags, especially when you couple that with the fact that they were only asking for $2 million to make the sequel to a game that cost $70 million in 1999.
The game is being funded by Sony, and it's using Kickstarter as a way of gauging fan interest. That's even better than free publicity; it's publicity Sony gets paid for. This is a consistent problem with game Kickstarters (see Yooka Laylee and Bloodstained). Kickstarter, as a platform, still gives the impression that the projects it's funding are made mostly with the money collected, but the truth can be far more complicated.
I reached out to Shenmue's developers and Sony but received no comment.
As with most games like this, most of the Kickstarter rewards amount to pre-order bonuses, and I tend to always advise against pre-orders of any kind. This kind of pre-order is the most "pre" imaginable. We've seen virtually nothing from this game, and we're taking it on faith that it's going to be worth our money based on our faith in Yu Suzuki and our love of the previous games. It's a nice idea, but I'm a firm believer in not buying things until you know if they're any good. If something went wrong, Shenmue 3 would be far from the first Kickstarter game to lose its way. And then the fans who paid in are out their money.
Sony asked a price from its fans, which they paid. Shenmue 3 is happening. This game is going to cost far, far more than $2 million to make and the majority of that money isn't going to come from Kickstarter. Which means the additional money for the "stretch goals" seems bizarre: would they really have not made Spanish subtitles if they didn't raise a few extra dollars, thus sacrificing the entire Spanish-speaking market? Does the scope of the game actually depend on them raising an extra $1 million on top of the what they already have? Somehow I doubt it. Sony has agreed to help with this game, and it's going to want the game to be successful. Its development budget does not depend on reaching stretch goals. Which means there's no more need for fans to pay in.
It's always fun to get excited about things, but let's face it: pre-orders in any form perpetuate a skewed relationship between gamers and developers, one where the quality of the game becomes increasingly unbundled from its financial success. It's great that we're getting Shenmue 3. But before we kick any more money to it, let's see if it's going to be any good.Figure 2
Possible mechanisms of RNA toxicity in repeat expansion-associated diseases. Repeat expansion can occur in coding or non-coding regions of affected genes. Bidirectional transcription results in both sense and antisense transcripts containing the repeats. Both sense and antisense expanded RNAs can form ribonuclear foci. The foci may sequester RNA-binding proteins, such as MBNL1 in the case of DM1, leading to impairment of the alternative splicing and nucleocytoplasmic transport machineries. The sense and antisense ssRNAs can anneal to form dsRNAs. ssRNAs can also form hairpin structures by themselves, which are degradation resistant. Both dsRNAs and hairpin-forming RNAs may export the nucleus and be cleaved into sRNAs by Dicer. The sRNAs can then sequester RNA-binding proteins, leading to splicing and nucleocytoplasmic transport impairment. For hexanucleotide repeats such as GGGCC in C9-ALS/FTD, the ssRNA may form G-quadruplex structures. These structures facilitate DNA/RNA hybrid and impede transcription. They also form inclusions, leading to the sequestration of RNA-binding proteins as well. Repeat-containing transcripts, whether in hairpin or G-quadruplex structures, can bind to NCL, inducing nucleolar stress and caspase activation. Expanded transcripts that escape the nucleus associate themselves with ribosomes, leading to RAN translation. RAN translational products may form inclusions, which disrupts nucleocytoplasmic transport, impedes the ubiquitin protease system and impairs the assembly, dynamics, and functions of membrane-less organelles such as the nucleolar and stress granules. In neurons, the expanded transcripts may also be actively transported to neurites, resulting in neuritic branching, and transport granule defects. It is postulated that the local translational machinery may also be disrupted.17 SHARES Facebook Twitter
If it wasn’t quite clear what Sam Raimi saw in Fede Alvarez after the “Evil Dead” remake a couple of years back, it was suddenly quite apparent in this summer’s sleeper horror hit “Don’t Breathe.” The low-budget, mostly single-location thriller chalked up great reviews and an impressive $140 million worldwide, all on a budget of less than $10 million. You can bet Sony and their Screen Gems shingle were absolutely thrilled, and it’s not a surprise that studio is ready to hand Alvarez the keys to something a little bit bigger.
READ MORE: ‘Don’t Breathe’ Is A Well Crafted, But Hollow Genre Exercise [Review]
THR reports that Alvarez has signed up to direct the adaptation of the limited Icon Comics series “Incognito.” Written by Ed Brubaker with art by Sean Phillips, the noir comic tells the story of a super-villain who’s in witness protection. Taking drugs to keep his powers at bay, he soon tires of living a regular life, and starts to look for a way out. Here’s the synopsis of the first issue:
What if you were an ex-super villain hiding out in Witness Protection… but all you could think about were the days when the rules didn’t apply to you? Could you stand the toil of an average life after years of leaving destruction in your wake? And what if you couldn’t stand it? What would you do then?
Daniel Casey, who did work on “10 Cloverfield Lane,” is writing the script, and this sounds like pretty nifty concept. Whether or not this is Alvarez’s next project remains to be seen, but he’s likely getting all kinds of scripts thrown on his desk at the moment.LOS ANGELES – The UCLA Men's Soccer team has been ranked No. 1 in the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) Preseason Poll, it was announced by the organization today. The Bruins garnered 624 total points and seven first-place votes to top the season-opening rankings.
The Bruins come into the 2015 season looking to build off of a successful year in 2014 which saw the group advance to the program's ninth College Cup final. This season, UCLA returns seven of its top-10 scorers and brings in the nation's number one recruiting class for the third season in-a-row.
UCLA will square off with seven teams ranked within the NSCAA Preseason Top-25, including three teams ranked in the Top-10. The Bruins schedule features non-conference matches against No. 3 Georgetown, No. 13 Maryland, No. 20 UC Irvine and No. 25 Akron. In the Pac-12, UCLA will play a pair of matches against No. 8 Stanford, No. 10 Washington and No. 16 California.
Up top UCLA brings back a trio of high-scoring forwards, highlighted by Top Drawer Soccer Freshman of the Year Abu Danladi. In just 12 games, the Ghanaian scored five goals and added six assists, finishing second on the team with 16 points. Joining Danladi, fellow sophomore and second team All-Pac-12 honoree Seyi Adekoya will be back after netting five goals a year ago. The veteran of the group, senior Larry Ndjock, comes back as well following a stellar campaign which saw him score two goals in the College Cup semifinals to lead the Bruins past Providence.
In the midfield, the Bruins return a solid group of veterans led by captain Grady Howe, Brian Iloski and Felix Vobejda. Howe, an honorable mention All-Pac-12 selection, will once again anchor the defensive midfield where he contributed to all eight shutouts and assisted on two goals a season ago. Iloski and Vobejda will return in the attacking mid where they combined for two goals and four assists last year.
Arguably the biggest strength of the returning group is on the back end where the Bruins return all four starters from 2014. Junior center back Michael Amick is the top returner, earning first team All-Pac-12 last season after starting all 24 games, logging the most minutes among UCLA field players (2,287). Redshirt senior Edgar Contreras will join Amick in central defense where they will be book-ended by right back Nathan Smith and left back Chase Gasper. The sophomore Gasper, a second team freshman All-American, was especially impressive in his debut campaign, totaling two goals and four assists from his defensive position.
The Bruins will play exhibition matches against the Mexican U-17 National Team and the University of San Francisco, on August 18 and 22 respectively, before opening the regular season at home against New Mexico on August 29. Tickets for all home matches are now on sale and can be purchased by visiting uclabruins.com/tickets or by calling 310-UCLA-WIN.
NSCAA National Preseason Top-25 RankingsSunset over Oku-Matsushima (seen from Mount Otakamori)
The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami must be one of the most widely reported stories ever, so does the world really need another account? When we decided to go to Hiraizumi I noticed that the area worst hit by the tsunami was just next door. Naito-san suggested that we go, but I felt unsure about it. I admit I wanted to see for myself, but at the same time it felt ghoulish to go there to stare at the destruction like some tsunami tourist.
Naito-san's response was that not only should we go, but I should blog about it, too. People in this area used to have tourism as a major source of income, but following the tsunami that's fallen off sharply, and they badly need it to come back. That's actually one major reason why I've been writing these blog posts about the Japan trip. I don't know if it's really going to make anyone go there, but at least I've done what little I can.
Seeing the area is a deeply odd experience. Most of the coast shows little if any trace of damage, and then you round a corner, to discover that what you thought was an empty sandy plain is actually all that remains of a small fishing town. Well, unless you count the vast hills of debris currently being loaded onto trucks by excavators and carted away. It's worth stopping for a moment to consider that a full 13 months after the tsunami, the debris left to be removed in just the little town of Nobiru must have run into the millions of tons.
Destroyed village
We went to an even smaller village on the edge of the island. One house remained (or had been rebuilt), otherwise everything was gone. Well, nearly everything. A sign on stout steel poles had been slammed right over into the ground, leaving the poles twisted like spaghetti, and the foundation still in place. Some of the tarmac on the quay had been ripped off to sail around in the water before finally coming to rest on top of a corrugated steel roof and some palm leaves. A refrigerator lay in the sand, covered in dead starfish.
In Nobiru, two buildings made of reinforced concrete were left by the road. I could tell the concrete was reinforced, because one of them had been neatly sliced in half, leaving the iron bars sticking out of the shattered concrete. Reinforced concrete buildings were previously thought to be tsunami-proof, but clearly this was not so. Down on the public beach I was enjoying the cliffs and the view, when I looked down to see the CD player from a hi-fi set at my feet. No related debris in sight. The wave must have smashed up someone's house, sucked out the contents, and distributed them over a huge area.
Broken building
Walking around in all this was a bizarre experience. The devastation seemed so matter-of-fact, like a newspaper on a doormat, or someone walking his dog. When I stopped to think about it, what I saw spoke of immense destruction and suffering, even death on a massive scale. Especially when I remembered that it looked like this all along the coast for a couple hundred kilometers as the crow flies. But just looking at it all I saw was some piles of rubble and a CD player on a beach. Even so it was as though someone had hit me over the head; I walked around in a total daze, not knowing what I was thinking or feeling.
Even driving there was strange. From Matsushima to Nobiru, everything looked fine. Then Nobiru turned out to be smashed to bits, and the waters around it littered with trailers, construction equipment and unidentifiable objects. Then we climbed over a small hill into a picturesque little fishing village, seemingly undisturbed, except for the diesel power generators dotted around the village.
We were staying in a little minshuku that was really just a traditional fisherman's house, somewhat extended to accomodate guests. It was quiet, idyllic, and deeply Japanese. It was run by a husband and wife, the husband a fisherman, so dinner would be whatever he caught. As in the ryokan, that turned out to be more little seafood dishes than I could count, again to be combined in non-obvious ways.
Dinner
Before dinner we had time for a quick climb of Mount Otakamori, to see one of the famous views of Matsushima Bay from the top at sunset. From the top we could see the beaches, the islands scattered in the bay, and the sun turning the sea into shimmering gold. From up there it was easy to see why Oku-Matsushima had once been a tourist spot.
Checking out in the morning I told the landlady, via Naito-san's interpretation, that I'd enjoyed my stay, and that I wished them luck. I think Naito-san also said something about photos and blogging. The landlady hadn't been very talkative before, but now it was like a dam bursting, and she launched into a thirty-minute speech in Japanese. She never showed much direct emotion, but it was clear that the feeling was there, just below the surface.
The minshuku
Afterwards, Naito-san explained that the earthquake had just about destroyed the minshuku, and that the owners had given up trying to rebuild it. Wanting to give up may seem odd, but consider the situation. There's no water, no electricity, the house is destroyed, and the roads are gone. Not only is the house destroyed, but so are cups, TVs, plates, and furniture. The entire area is a disaster zone, and the only things tourists associate with it is death and destruction. Essentially they'd have to build a new minshuku, and the situation was not exactly looking good.
However, the workers coming to the island to clear up and reconstruct wanted somewhere nice to stay, and they persuaded the owners to set up the minshuku again. The workers helped them rebuild, and it turned out the other guests we'd seen were the reconstruction workers, now staying there as guests. When arriving the day before we'd had to wait a little to check in, because a big cardboard box had arrived by mail at the same time. We now learned that this was crockery, sent as a gift from a previous guest wanting to help.
Lagoon with debris
After the tsunami her husband had been unable to fish, because not only was most of the infrastructure for delivering fish gone, but the water was also so full of debris that he couldn't use his nets. In fact, our dinner the day before had been his first catch since the tsunami. In other words, it had taken more than a year for the water to clear enough for fishing.
Of course, having avoided the tsunami, this couple was relatively lucky. The day before we'd driven past a camp where hundreds of people were living in little containers. In a corner of the camp were some toilet containers and showers similar to those you see at music festivals. Naito-san told me that where these people would move to was still being debated, because most of them wanted to move back to where they'd lived. They'd lived in very closely-knit communities of neighbours, and preferred risking another tsunami to losing their friends by resettling elsewhere.
After thanking the landlady one more time, we got in the car, leaving them to the task of rebuilding their business. We drove back to Shiogama in silence, trying to digest what we'd seen.Advances in delivering and storing electricity are crucial to the future of electric cars and otherwise reducing reliance on energy produced from burning fossil fuels. Yet a powerful means of running electronics that can charge and discharge quickly while also storing large amounts of energy has long eluded scientists.
This predicament could be changing, thanks to new research. A team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Egypt's Cairo University describe in the March 16 issue of Science a new laser-based technique for making flexible, durable and highly conductive electrochemical capacitors—also known as ultracapacitors or supercapacitors—out of graphene. Electrochemical capacitors handle frequent charge/discharge cycles well but have been unable to store |
ired by the stylish days of the empirical push into the developing cultures of the world, with the promise of adventure and modern refinement in a safari setting".
That tagline now reads: "A refined and modern dining experience with the adventure of east meets west in a plantation style, club setting."You know what I really hate? Half the population. You know the type: sometimes slightly larger than the other half of the population, often with shorter hair, fewer wombs, more penises. MEN, amiright? The worst! Let’s kill them all and institute a matriarchy-by-default, where we radical feminists can hang out, watch The View, and kiss each other with our forked tongues while scissoring. It’s going to be awesome!
Oh, what’s the matter, men and men-lovers? Feeling the need to send me angry e-mails? I suppose it’s lucky you have all that free time to do it, now that you no longer need to send hate mail to Jen McCreight, a woman who has successfully been bullied off the Internet by people telling her she’s an ugly feminazi bitch because she suggested that some atheists might find empowerment under a more specific label that would emphasize their interest in social justice issues.
Jen isn’t the first feminist to get beaten down by bullies, and she won’t be the last. In the past two weeks, I’ve heard from four people who have independently told me that they can’t handle the avalanche of hatred they get from skeptics and atheists when they publicly promote a feminist agenda. You know the agenda I’m talking about: the one where we ask the community to be more welcoming to women by not constantly propositioning them and making rape “jokes” about them.
Those friends have been silenced, and for the most part they weren’t even public about the fact that they were no longer going to be public. Jen was, but I want you to understand that she is the tip of the iceberg. For every outspoken feminist who you see step down from the spotlight, there are many more who do so quietly. There are even more who see those examples and make the decision to never step into the spotlight in the first place. The bullying of feminist skeptics and atheists creates a chilling effect not unlike that of English libel law – so many awesome voices silence themselves before they can be silenced by misogynists.
There have been many times in the past year that I’ve considered stepping down, too, and many times when friends and family have specifically asked me to step down for my own safety and mental health. I’m not entirely sure why I don’t, but I think it’s some combination of obstinance and a genuine belief that if one person can make a difference than that one person should make a difference.
A few months ago, there was a very friendly stray cat hanging around our house. I told my neighbors that if he came within grabbing distance, that I’d take him. My neighbor pounded on my door at 11pm, holding a wiggling, crying cat. She pushed him through the door to me, and I took him to the basement and set him up with food and blankets and water, trying to be quiet because my boyfriend was sleeping. The stray mostly ignored the array of riches I provided him and stood on the basement stairs, crying. I planned to take him to the vet the next day for a check up, but my own cats started crying, freaking out and pawing at the door to the basement. They’re sensitive, snuggly cats and it pained me to see them so anxious. By midnight, basically everyone in the house was crying. My boyfriend (the only one not crying, despite the fact that I woke him up) explained that I could just let the stray out, and recapture him another day when the vet was open. I refused because he might be hit by a car, or he might impregnate another cat, or he might just be sad and alone.
“It’s not your job to save all the stray animals in the world,” he said.
“But if I don’t,” I said, “who will?”
I seriously said that awful, maudlin thing, with more sincerity than I think I’ve ever said anything before. I think that everybody wants to believe that if they don’t help that cat, someone else will. But at some point, someone actually has to step up and do it.
I didn’t, though. I let the stray out and then laid in bed snuggling my cats, feeling like absolute shit for the rest of the night.
Anyway, you do what you can do.
I suspect that if everyone steps up and speaks just as loudly as Jen did, there’s no way the assholes would have enough time in their day to bully all of us. But I get that not everyone can do that. I can do it, though, so until everybody steps up, I’ll just try to be twice as loud in the hopes of acting as some kind of asshole lightning rod. I figure that most assholes hate reading, so they won’t really make it past the first two paragraphs of this post. I’m not a radical feminist, and I love (many) men, but facts don’t really seem to matter to the assholes so I may as well run with it.
Hey assholes! Look over here!
All screenshots are selected from the previous two-months’ worth of asshole comments sent to me directly, except the one retweeted by Richard Dawkins. I don’t know where the above gif comes from but I want to shake the artist’s hand. (UPDATE! Thanks to commenter reinforcements, we now know that this is the work of Emmy Cicierga.)An Egyptian-themed Adventure w/ Sandbox Support
for character levels 4-6, to use with 0e/1e/BX and compatible retro-clones
Azeneth believed the life of the high priest (or priestess) should be as comfortable as that of the kings and the gods. She spoke her contempt for her father’s “weakness” loudly and publicly, almost from the time she learned to talk. As she neared her teens, she made it known her plan was to supplant her father and become high priestess of the temple, sometimes claiming it was her place as the incarnation of the goddess Nekhbet.
Many say Azeneth has the power to command serpents, and it was she who sent the asp that killed her father Kemosiri. Regardless, she siezed her position as high priestess of the temple and set about her accumulation of power and wealth.
Recently, children from the villages around the temple have begun to disappear. Rumors abound that Azeneth is sacrificing them and cannibalizing them because she believes this will make her wealthier, more powerful, and more divine. The people of the villages have begun to refer to Azeneth as the “ogress of Anubis”—believing it was Anubis himself that made this woman mad, and commanded her to consume the children she sacrifices.
Someone must end this reign of fear and terror, and try to return the children alive—if it is in the will of the gods.
Includes the following: information for adapting to different OSR rules editions; adventure background; regional overview (small map + info on villages and wandering monsters); information on the temple compound and its vicinity (including wandering monsters); a detailed map of the temple compound; a 4-page detailed encounter key for the temple compound; new monster (animal mummy w/ 7 variants, statted for Oe/BX/1e); "generic" stats for all monsters and NPCs mentioned in the adventure; 12 pre-generated NPCs w/ details; 10 adventure seeds (for continuing adventures in the area); and 8 additional unkeyed maps (7 tombs, 2 caves, 1 sunken city) for use with the adventure seeds.CLOSE Knight was accused of groping or touching women inappropriately before he spoke July 2015 at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) near Washington, D.C., according to reporting by The Washington Post. Mary Ann Gerth/Courier-Journal/USA TODAY Network
Buy Photo FILE – Bob Knight walks into a reception area to meet and greet guests before he spoke at The Barrington of Carmel, a retirement community, May 6, 2015. (Photo: Kelly Wilkinson/IndyStar)Buy Photo
Four women who worked at a U.S. spy agency alleged that former Indiana University men's basketball coach Bob Knight groped or touched them inappropriately before and after a 2015 speech he gave to their agency outside Washington, D.C., according to The Washington Post.
Citing investigative documents and interviews with people in the spy agency, The Post said the accusations arose from Knight's visit to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which does mapping and provides satellite imagery for military planners.
From the Washington Post:
"The women accused Knight of a range of boorish behavior: from touching them on the shoulder while commenting on the attractiveness of their legs, to hugging them too tightly around the chest, to hitting them on the buttocks, according to documents compiled by investigators and Washington Post interviews with three of the women."
The accusations prompted an investigation which lasted a year and prompted notifications to Congress, the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies. That inquiry concluded after Knight denied the behavior during an interview with the FBI at his home in Montana, The Post reported. Federal prosecutors in Virginia, where the spy agency is located, declined to bring charges.
Knight's attorney in Indiana, Jimmy Voyles, said investigators from both the FBI and the United States Army were involved and that neither could substantiate the allegations.
"All I can tell you is there was absolutely no credible evidence that supports any of the allegations and two of our finest investigative agencies — the Army and the FBI — made those independent determinations," Voyles told IndyStar.
Knight first learned of the accusations a year after the event, according to Voyles, when he got a call from the FBI. Voyles said he responded on Knight's behalf. He declined to discuss the FBI's visit to Montana.
A broadcaster who was once a legendary college basketball coach, Knight was known for his fiery courtside temper and sometimes profane language and stories. There were objections to Knight's appearance at the spy agency, The Post reports, well before the event took place.
But Knight had key connections to the spy agency.
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As a young basketball coach at West Point, Knight befriended Richard Cardillo, a young Army captain, and he allowed Cardillo's son Robert to serve as a ballboy, The Post reported. Knight maintained a friendship with the family ever after.
Robert Cardillo, now the head of the spy agency, invited Knight to speak there, Voyles said. And Richard Cardillo accompanied Knight for the evening. The allegations following Knight's appearance — and the aftermath — have roiled the spy agency, The Post reported.
Efforts by IndyStar to reach Knight on Friday were unsuccessful.
The Post reported that his wife, Karen, responded to the paper's inquiries with a text, saying: "Bob did nothing wrong and there is NO evidence to prove that he did. Case closed."
Voyles said simply: "Mr. Knight denies any kind of wrongdoing whatsoever, and there was no credible evidence to support any of it."
Knight's next scheduled public appearance in Indiana is July 15 at the Indiana Grand Racing & Casino, where he is scheduled to mingle with guests and hold an autograph session around the Indiana Derby. A spokesperson for Centaur Gaming Properties, which owns the casino, declined comment.
• MORE: Knight, Keady reminisce about the state's love for basketball
• MORE: Knight on former IU bosses, 'I hope they're all dead'ISLAMABAD: The case of Indian woman Uzma’s marriage to Pakistani man Tahir is becoming embroiled in a complicated enmesh as more evidences are coming to the front.
In another twist, it was revealed that Uzma was aware that Tahir was married with four children, which is contradictory to her statements on Monday.
A picture of the WhatsApp conversation between the couple shows that Dr Uzma did know about Tahir’s previous marriage.
A screenshot of the WhatsApp message Uzma sent Tahir.
The case has come to the forefront after her husband claimed that Indian High Commission has stopped her wife from leaving the premises during their visit to apply for visa on Saturday.
Uzma, who belongs to New Delhi, and Tahir fell in love with each other in Malaysia, after which she travelled to Pakistan on May 1 via the Wagah border, and got married to him on May 3, according to Tahir.
Later, Indian High Commission claimed that Uzma has been staying there out of her own will.
Was married at gunpoint: Uzma
Uzma, on Monday, alleged that she was forced to marry Pakistan citizen Tahir Ali at gunpoint. She further remarked that she was unaware that Tahir was married and was the father of four children while speaking to the media.
She also said that she was given sleeping pills and forcefully brought to Pakistan. “I was mentally, physically and sexually tortured,” she remarked, adding that she has been staying at the IHC of her own accord.
Uzma also claimed that her immigration documents were snatched and she was harassed and tortured regularly while living with her Pakistani husband.
She filed a case under the Pakistan Penal Code section 506, and recorded her statement in front of the magistrate on Monday, stating she did not want to leave the Indian High Commission in Islamabad till she could safely travel back to India.
According to the Pakistan High Commission, Uzma's immigration documents state that she travelled to Pakistan on a visit visa.
The Pakistani authorities declared that the Indian citizen did not disclose her plans to marry in Pakistan when she applied for the visa and instead expressed her intent to visit her relatives in Pakistan.
Tahir challenges Uzma’s claims
Uzma’s claims were challenged by her husband, Tahir Ali, while speaking to the media.
He said that Uzma knew that he has been married before and have four children from his first wife, further adding that if Uzma doesn’t want to live with him then that’s her right which she can rightly exercise.
He also remarked that he has all the proofs to show that he is speaking the truth. “I have a proof of all my claims and witnesses.”
He also rejected the claims that he had assaulted her. He said “you can get her medical tests done to see if I have harmed or tortured her in anyway.”
Tahir said that he also knew that Dr Uzma had a daughter from her first marriage.
Speaking about how the two met, he told Geo News that they met for the first time in Malaysia, where he was working as a taxi driver.
“We stayed friends for eight to nine months,” he said, adding that later Uzma expressed her desire to marry him.
Uzma had claimed that I gave her sleeping pills but it is all a lie, he claimed.
After coming to Pakistan via Wagah Border, we had even stopped for lunch at Swabi. We waited for two days before our marriage. During this time, she knew about my first marriage and children.
Speaking about why Uzma made such allegations, Tahir said that Uzma is possibly being forced by the embassy to make such statements.
He also expressed desire to meet his wife one more time and clear out the misunderstandings between them.
Read more: Tahir rejects coercion claims, says Indian wife knew about his first marriage
Nikkah video surfaces
Earlier, a video of the nikkah ceremony of the couple had emerged which also contradicted the statements of Dr Uzma that she was forced into marriage at gunpoint.
In the video, Tahir can be seen sitting with Uzma, who is donning a white niqab, with a moulvi and three witnesses for their nikkah in a local court in Daggar tehsil of District Buner. No signs of intimidation or violence are present in the video, which contradicts Uzma’s earlier statement that she was forced into marriage at gunpoint.
Over the matter, the moulvi, identified as Humayun Khan, who solemnised the couple’s marriage, spoke to Geo News.
Reiterating what Tahir had said before, Humayun explained that Dr Uzma came to Buner on May 1. “I asked her if she is willing for the marriage,” he said, adding she told him that she is getting married of her own accord.
“I also have video of the nikkah and other proofs,” he remarked.
Father’s name controversy
Another twist in the tale emerged when Uzma's documents disclosed that her father's name as stated on her visa form, marriage contract, and an affidavit was different from the name submitted to the magistrate.
While her documents declared the woman as the daughter of one Muhammad Naushad, while she was listed as Sagheer Ahmed's daughter in the form submitted to the magistrate.Feminist News
All | National News | Global News
May-26-10
Oklahoma Legislature Overrides Abortion Reporting Bill Veto
The Oklahoma state legislature overrode Governor Brad Henry's (D) veto of a bill that will require doctors to report detailed information about patients seeking abortions to the government yesterday. The state Senate voted 33 to 15 in favor of the override yesterday and the state House had already voted 84 to 13 Monday. The legislation will go into effect on November 1, 2010 and require reporting forms to be submitted to the Department of health by April 1, 2012.
A spokesperson for Governor Henry, Paul Sund, told Tulsa World, "It is disappointing because every veto override just triggers more lawsuits and legal bills for taxpayers...Similar abortion laws passed by the Legislature were challenged and thrown out by the courts last year, and the latest versions are probably headed for the same fate."
The questionnaire will ultimately be posted on the Oklahoma State Department of Health website and includes information as detailed as a woman's reason for an abortion, her age, marital status, the date of the abortion, and the total number of previous pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions, and live births. Though supporters of the bill argue that the omission of a woman's name and address preserves her right to privacy, opponents assert that it would be possible to identify a woman from a small town from the information to be published.
According to the American Medical Association, "the physician's duty to maintain confidentiality means that a physician may not disclose any medical information revealed by a patient or discovered by a physician in connection with the treatment of a patient. In general, AMA's Code of Medical Ethics states that the information disclosed to a physician during the course of the patient-physician relationship is confidential to the utmost degree. "
In March 2010, the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the February ruling of a state District Court saying that an anti-choice law that included the current patient reporting requirements was unconstitutional on the basis that it violated state rules requiring legislation address only a single subject. This law also included provisions requiring detailed descriptions of ultrasounds and prohibiting sex-selective abortions, among other provisions.
The current reporting law is the third piece of anti-choice legislation vetoed by Governor Henry that has been enacted through a legislative override. A law that that would require medical professionals to show women an ultrasound image and give women a detailed description of the fetus prior to performing an abortion procedure went into effect immediately following a veto override by the state legislature in late April 2010 and was in effect for nearly a week. The state Attorney General agreed early in May 2010 to a state judge's order to temporarily block enforcement of this ultrasound law. The Oklahoma state legislature also overrode the veto of a second anti-choice bill in April 2010 that prohibits women from suing doctors who intentionally withhold information or provide misleading or inaccurate information about a pregnancy.
In addition to the three vetoes, Governor Henry has signed several anti-choice bills over the past few months. One requires abortion clinics to post signs in their facilities stating that women cannot be coerced to have an abortion, that a woman's voluntary consent is required to obtain the procedure, and that sex selective abortions are illegal, at the same time. Others outlaw sex-selective abortion, institute a "conscience clause" allowing healthcare providers to refuse to participate in abortion procedures or refer patients to abortion providers, and the put restrictions on the administration of mifepristone (also known as RU-486) by requiring it be administered in the presence of a physician.
Media Resources: Tulsa World 5/26/10; Feminist Daily Newswire 5/25/10Web awash in critics of Scientology
The church's tightly controlled image is taking hits as soured ex-members go online.
The day before ExScientologyKids.com launched, another inflammatory allegation about the church began to circulate virulently online. "L. Ron Hubbard Plagiarized Scientology," read a headline at the popular Internet culture blog BoingBoing. The post linked to images of a translated 1934 German book called "Scientologie," which critics say contains similar themes to Hubbard's Scientology, which he codified in 1952, according to a church website.
One of the women behind the site, Jenna Miscavige Hill, is the niece of David Miscavige, the head of the church, and Kendra Wiseman is the daughter of Bruce Wiseman, president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a Scientology-sponsored organization opposed to the practice of psychiatry.
So reads the motto of ExScientologyKids.com, a website launched Thursday by three young women raised in the Church of Scientology who are speaking out against the religion. Their website accuses the church of physical abuse, denying some children a proper education and alienating members from family.
These were just the latest in a series of Scientology-related stories to burn across the Internet like grass fires in recent weeks, testing the church's well-established ability to tightly control its public image. The largest thorn in the church's side has been a group called Anonymous, a diffuse online coalition of skeptics, hackers and activists, many of them young and Web-savvy. The high-wattage movement has inspired former Scientologists to come forward and has repeatedly trained an Internet spotlight on any story or rumor that portrays Scientology in unflattering terms.
No corner of the Web, it appears, is safe for Scientology. Blogger and lawyer Scott Pilutik recently posted a story noting that Scientology was yanking down EBay auctions for used e-meters, the device the church uses for spiritual counseling. EBay allows brand owners -- Louis Vuitton or Rolex, say -- to remove items they believe infringe on their trademark or patent rights. Basically, fakes. But, Pilutik said, the used e-meters being taken down were genuine. Reselling them was no different than putting a for-sale sign on your old Chevy.
"What's actually going on here," he wrote, is that the church is "knowingly alleging intellectual property violations that clearly don't exist." Within a day Pilutik's blog had gotten over 45,000 visitors -- so much traffic that his site crashed completely.
Facing a steady stream of negative publicity and a growing number of critical voices, Scientology has found itself on the defensive.
The church has referred to Anonymous as a group of "cyber-terrorists" and, in a statement, said the group's aims were "reminiscent of Al Qaeda spreading anti-American hatred and calling for U.S. destruction."
"These people are posing extremely serious death threats to our people," said church spokeswoman Karin Pouw in a phone interview. "We are talking about religious hatred and bigotry."
A recent video posted to YouTube contained a threat to bomb a Southern California Scientology building. An FBI spokeswoman said an investigation was in progress but that no suspects had been identified.
Reporters have long had to tread carefully when writing about Scientology, fearful that lawsuits and other kinds of retaliation would follow any story that Scientology did not like. But that may be changing.
"Before this Internet onslaught," said Douglas Frantz, a contributing editor at Portfolio magazine who covered Scientology for the New York Times in the 1990s (and is a former editor at the L.A. Times), "they were always able to go after their critics and do a good job of being able to discredit or intimidate them."
Angry former church members also perceive a kind of safety in numbers afforded by the Internet, and more are coming forward to share their stories.Just in time for Easter.
A hopping mad Brooklyn bunny hoarder was hauled into court Friday on charges of keeping 176 of the critters in a filthy junkyard — and on the way out she served a bizarre $2 billion lawsuit on the animal-rights activist who ratted her out.
Dorota Trec, 35, accused “furiously jealous” Big Apple Bunnies founder Natalie Reeves, 41, of “dreaming that she has control over the whole rabbit world in New York City,” the new court papers state.
“In her smear campaign, Reeves refuses to acknowledge Dorota Trec’s extensive achievements with rabbits and how wonderful for the community the rabbit project is.”
But prosecutors said Trec kept her pets in such awful conditions that they suffered from diseases like syphilis and had bite wounds all over their bodies.
She was hit with two animal-cruelty charges and faces up to a year in jail.
Reeves, a Tribeca lawyer, was slapped with the suit as she left Trec’s arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court. An elderly man accompanying Trec threw the papers into Reeves’ arms and yelled, “You’ve been served!”
“Happy Easter to me!” Reeves quipped to The Post. “This lawsuit is not what I wanted the Easter Bunny to bring me in his basket.”
Trec was arrested last month after the cottontails were taken away by the ASPCA in two January raids. Assistant District Attorney Mary Monahan demanded she either pay for the pricey care or sign over ownership to the city.
“There are over 170 rabbits the city has in possession. This has cost the city over $40,000 to date,” Monahan said.
Trec’s lawsuit — which was filed Thursday in Brooklyn Supreme Court — seeks more than $2 billion in damages and also names the NYPD, the ASPCA and Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson as defendants. She accuses them of causing “loss of reputation, shame, mortification and hurt feelings [and] temporary loss of rabbits.”
She accuses Reeves of wrongful arrest, trespassing, defamation, harassment and wrongful seizure.
Reeves had cautioned parents from buying Easter bunnies for their kids this year unless they can provide proper care.
“If you are going to get a rabbit around Easter time, you have to know how to take care of them. Otherwise you could end up with a situation like this, with rabbits living like trash in a junkyard,” said Reeves.
Trec declined to comment after court except to say that Reeves and the other bunny lovers were on a “witch hunt” against her.LOOKING FOR THE OLD WEBSITE? It's still available at Azurilland.com, so please check that out if you're looking for the walkthroughs, etc. Please keep in mind that I no longer have any control or position at that site and cannot help with any issues there.
Who Am I?
How's it goin', everyone? Marriland here!
A while ago, I started up a small Pokémon website as a hobby, and it eventually grew into one of the largest Pokémon websites out there. Then I got into YouTube and created videos that were viewed by tons of people all around the world.
Nowadays, while I'm definitely not as known as I was before (thank goodness!), and while I no longer have much of a site left (sorry!), I focus on entertaining people with funny and helpful Pokémon, Terraria, and other videos on YouTube and on Twitch.
Where Can You Find Me?
You can find me over on my YouTube channel, YouTube.com/Marriland. You can also find me on my Twitch channel, Twitch.tv/Marriland. Oh yeah, also Twitter @Marriland!
When Are You Working On The New Website?
SOON! I plan on having a basic version of the new website launched in February 2019, with even more powerful goodies like a return of the Pokédex as well as various other tools launching later this year.McGrath: “If You Think the Crisis of 2008 is Over, Then You’re Falling Right Into the Game Plan”
September 25th, 2013
SHTFplan.com
Read by 21,957 people Mac SlavoSeptember 25th, 2013 The game is rigged, the pain is coming, and we’re all about to become victims of greed and government once again. Charlie McGrath of Wide Awake News explains why: If you think the crisis of 2008 is over, then you’re falling right into the game plan of The Powers That Be. Washington D.C., the Federal Reserve, any business analyst that can get in front of a camera… wants you to believe that any coming crisis financially is not related to 2008. It’s going to be a new event altogether. And they’re going to blame it on you… the American people. If you believe that then you have been duped. The crisis of 2008 never ended. It got far, far worse. We haven’t fixed any of the problems. We’ve made them more systemic. We’ve made them more powerful and more in control of this economy. Out of the top 25 companies that were heavy into sub-prime mortgages… the leaders and CEO’s of these corporations, to a man and woman, are back in the lending business. They’re back in the game… You would think some of these guys would be in prison; they’re not. They’re back working at this exact same thing that tanked this country in 2008. As Charlie notes, these exact same people, the ones who engineered the sub-prime debacle that wiped out the wealth of millions of Americans, are now doing exactly what they were doing before. They’re lending money to unqualified borrowers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars because they say they, “want to help.” But, as before, they are luring American borrowers into taking on interest-only loans that will lead to more foreclosures and defaults as soon as the payments on the those mortgages reset. This isn’t about helping Americans. This is about money, plain and simple. Will we never learn? The honest answer: no. There is only one way this is going to end and it’s going to be horrific for 99% of us. McGrath continues… Before you think I am just sounding bitter because these wealthy people [bank leaders] managed to hold on to their money while so many people in this nation saw their standard of living fall, saw their number one investment tank, and saw their future basically be throw into the air in the form of sovereign debt, I’m not. I’m telling you all this because it’s going to happen again. A story came out just yesterday showing that the Federal Reserve, this institution that bent over backwards to save the aforementioned individuals and institutions that they work for, now holds more debt… than was ever created in this nation from George Washington through Bill Clinton… $3.4 trillion they now own. You might think that’s great. You stick them with the bill and walk away. But that’s not the way it’s going to work. With this holding of debt they also hold the power over this economy. … Our leaders must understand that this private institution, that is not federal and that has no reserves, is running roughshod over this economy and they’re serving their financial special interest masters on Wall Street because that’s what they’re made up of. And at the end of the day when this comes crashing down they will be the ones holding all the power. We need to realize this because this crisis is not over. A far worse crisis is yet to come. We live in a nation of people who will not step out of their perceived reality, and they are going to pay the price for their ignorance. In a previous commentary Charlie McGrath warned about the disaster that will soon come our way. We’re talking about the potential for an absolute credit freeze that will make the situation in New York spread across this country almost overnight. Ask yourself this question: Are you prepared to take care of yourself? If you cannot answer that question with the affirmative it is time to stop just listening to alternative media and thinking of it as entertainment, but taking the advice seriously and considering if you have a plan to take care of yourself and loved ones if the situation arises. Because if you look around this world, if you look at the mainstream media, they’re forewarning you about what’s coming. There is a disaster coming. Get ready for it. Make sure you are mentally and physically prepared for what is coming. From Charlie McGrath of Wide Awake News When the credit markets froze in 2008, then Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson warned members of Congress that if something wasn’t done there would be tanks on the streets of America. Some would laugh at that notion. But this is no conjecture. Guess what folks… this next go ’round there will be no bail out, no saving the system, and no relief coming. What’s coming is what the U.S. government has been simulating for the last half decade: A total collapse of our financial system, civil unrest, and the very real possibility of a lock-down of the United States of America in its entirety. Click here to subscribe: Join over one million monthly readers and receive breaking news, strategies, ideas and commentary. Please Spread The Word And Share This Post Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 21,957 people
Date: September 25th, 2013
Website: www.SHTFplan.com Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.As first revealed by Bitcoin Core developer and Blockstream Co-Founder and CTO Gregory Maxwell, and subsequently confirmed by Bitmain through a press release, the major Chinese mining hardware manufacturer has included the AsicBoost technology in its specialized ASIC chips.
This is controversial, in large part because AsicBoost is patented and therefore potentially skews Bitcoin’s mining ecosystem by government regulation. Furthermore, covert use of AsicBoost, as it turns out, is largely incompatible with a Segregated Witness soft fork (SegWit), the protocol upgrade proposed by the Bitcoin Core development team.
While it is not clear that Bitmain has actually used AsicBoost, and the company denies this is the reason it blocks SegWit, many do believe a response is required.
Having broken down the “AsicBoost scandal” in a previous article, what follows here are some options moving forward.
AsicBoost
First, a quick recap on Bitcoin mining and AsicBoost. (Skip if you already know the details.)
Bitcoin miners construct blocks of data. These blocks include transactions, some random data (a “nonce”) and more. Once constructed, a miner hashes his block, which is a mathematical trick that scrambles and compresses all the data into a short and random string of numbers: a hash. If this hash happens to start with enough zeroes, the block is valid and it can be submitted to the network. If it’s not valid, the miner will have to try again, for example by changing the nonce.
To construct and hash a block, miners have to invest a tiny bit of computing power, hence, energy. In effect, this means that any time a miner finds a valid block, he must have statistically invested much more energy for all of the invalid blocks he also constructed.
A valid hash is therefore quite literally proof that a miner did a specific amount of work, which is why this process is called “proof of work.” This proof of work is what makes Bitcoin relatively immutable. The only way an attacker can rewrite history is to have access to specialized hardware and invest real energy to redo all the work.
AsicBoost allows miners to take a “shortcut.” Instead of blindly hashing as many variations of a block as possible, AsicBoost lets miners reuse a certain calculation in the hash process across several tries. This saves some 15 to 30 percent of energy.
AsicBoost can be used in two ways: overtly and covertly. Overt use would be obvious to anyone; it’s easily detected by looking at the blocks a miner produces. Covert use, however, is much harder, if not impossible, to detect. Only covert use is largely incompatible with SegWit.
Bitmain’s chips allow for both overt and covert use, but the company has certainly not used AsicBoost overtly. There are several indications that Bitmain has used AsicBoost covertly, but the company denies that it has, and it is so far unproven.
Option One: Do Nothing
The first option in light of the AsicBoost revelations is, of course, to do nothing at all.
Assuming Bitmain uses AsicBoost, or will use it in the future, miners (or, more accurately, mining hardware manufacturers) will then have to gain access to the patent as well, or compete on other grounds. Depending on how much added profit AsicBoost actually provides (this is somewhat disputed), this could be viable at least in the short term. Whether it’s viable in the long term, however, is much less certain.
Alternatively, the patent could be made free to the public.
One of the patent holders, Sergio Demian Lerner, suggested this as an option, though he doesn’t appear very keen on doing so without any reward.
And in their press release Bitmain alluded to freeing the patent too, writing:
“If all mining equipment could use AsicBoost, it will lower the J/GH cost and the total network hash rate will increase, making the Bitcoin network even stronger. So, the AsicBoost method is not a ‘covert attack’ on the Bitcoin PoW function. It is an engineering optimization.”
And:
“We suggest working with the patent owners so that the patent could be used by the public.”
While this could be a good option, it should be noted that (contrary to Bitmain’s press release) freeing the patent would not really increase Bitcoin’s security in a meaningful way.
This is because in a competitive mining landscape, any energy saved by miners would really have to be re-invested to increase the hash rate. But the purpose of proof of work is not, in itself, finding valid hashes. Hashes are just random numbers and don’t provide security in and of themselves.
Rather, the purpose of proof of work is … proving work.
If all miners were to use AsicBoost, the hash rate would go up, but miners would not invest more energy. In other words, if all miners take the same “shortcut,” that shortcut just becomes the “main route.”
As such, reversing |
Expect this to be a debate that will rage for years to come.Short version: at last night’s debate the topic of H-1B visas* came up. Last night Megyn Kelly asked Donald Trump at the debate how he felt about temporary work visas now. Trump said that he loved them to death, and was softening the position found on his website. Somewhere out in the political wilderness, Senator Jeff Sessions (an H-1B visa restrictionist who is endorsing Trump solely because of Trump’s position on immigration, supposedly) immediately suffered a nosebleed from the psychic shock of this sudden, yet inevitable betrayal**. The Trump campaign had to go out and send around an email saying, No, really, forget that Trump said that. Please, please, please, forget that Trump said that. Also: Trump can’t tell the difference between a H-1B and a H-2B visa.
For the longer story? Well, let’s go to the transcripts.
KELLY: Mr. Trump, your campaign website to this day argues that more visas for highly skilled workers would, quote, “decimate American workers”. However, at the CNBC debate, you spoke enthusiastically in favor of these visas. So, which is it? TRUMP: I’m changing. I’m changing. We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can’t do it, we’ll get them in. But, and we do need in Silicon Valley, we absolutely have to have. So, we do need highly skilled, and one of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges. They’ll go to Harvard, they’ll go to Stanford, they’ll go to Wharton, as soon as they’re finished they’ll get shoved out. They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately, they’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brain power in this country. KELLY: So you abandoning the position on your website… TRUMP: … I’m changing it, and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country.
If you’re taking a strong stance on ending or at least cutting back the H-1B program – like, say, Mark Krikorian of National Review, or Michelle Malkin – this position is appalling. I want to be really careful right now, because I am of course a pro-immigration squish; but if I understand Mark Krikorian’s position here he feels that Trump is simply talking tough about immigration to please his own base, and is using the H-1B issue to signal to hypothetical*** general election donors that Trump’s not actually really into all this immigration hawk stuff. Which last part I’ll agree with, for reasons that I’ll get into later.
At any rate, Trump’s long-suffering official He Didn’t Mean It Squad had to play cleanup again:
Megyn Kelly asked about highly-skilled immigration. The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration…
– And we’ll stop there because when there are two flat-out lies in the first two sentences of your press release, there’s no point to keep going, is there? Look at the transcript again. Megyn Kelly didn’t ask about immigration. She asked about work visas. As for the high-skilled part – look, H-1B visas are for people with college degrees. One of the major criticisms of the H-1B program is that it supposedly takes away STEM jobs from Americans with equivalent skills.
Which means that the aforementioned press release shows that neither Donald Trump nor his staff knows the difference between a H-1B visa and a H-2B visa. You see, H-2B visas are for low-skill temporary work. And Donald Trump knows this, certainly, because he still uses them all the time for his hotels. Including, interestingly, in Florida. And why does Trump use H-2B visas? Well, let’s go to the transcript yet again, because Marco Rubio was able to explain the entire thing succinctly:
RUBIO: … And, here’s why he does it this way, let me explain why he (INAUDIBLE) H2-B… TRUMP: … Wrong… RUBIO: … Because when you bring them in this way, when you bring someone in on one of these visas they can’t go work for anybody else. They either work for you or they have to go back home. You basically have them captive, so you don’t have to worry about competing for higher wages with another hotel down the street. And, that’s why you bring workers from abroad.
Note that Marco Rubio knows exactly what a H-2B visa is. And why Donald Trump uses them (because H-1Bs and H-2Bs give companies a lot of leverage over the foreigners that they’ve hired). And this is part and parcel of the reason why some immigration hawks are a little steamed right now at Trump. Nobody likes being flat-out lied to, particularly when it’s being done in this contemptuous a fashion.
And if Trump is lying about this, it’s for certain that he’s lying about building a wall. Which you hopefully already knew, anyway. If you didn’t, well… he’s not building a wall.
Moe Lane
*For those who are not familiar with them – lucky, lucky you – H-1B visas are work visas issued to non-immigrants in specific occupations. These visas are tied to a specific job and employer, and their existence and use are a… definite part of our current robust and vigorous debate over immigration policy.
**Not really. I’m sure that he felt suddenly sick and confused, though.
***A bit more hypothetical now than before the debate, might I add. And the Trump campaign agrees with me, given how quickly they leaped to smother the fire with their own bodies.Keynote Speaker:
John Keeton (MS Finance '08), CFA Wealth Advisor, Covenant Multifamily Offices
Your Finances and You: Managing Your Resources
John Keeton is a wealth advisor at Covenant Multifamily Offices. In this advisory role, John applies the firm’s proprietary process, Lifestyle. Legacy. Philanthropy.SM, to help clients develop and implement prudent strategies to achieve their lifetime goals. John assists families with their investment, income tax, wealth transfer planning, and philanthropic strategies. He also collaborates with Covenant’s investment team on a variety of portfolio strategy matters, including asset manager analysis, investment research, and trading.
An original member of the Covenant founding team, John returned to Covenant in 2013 after three years in the Houston area serving as a high net worth banker with JP Morgan’s Private Bank, advising business owners and corporate executives. Prior to joining Covenant in 2010, John was an investment analyst for Texas-based Frost Bank’s Wealth Management Services group. John began his career in the investment industry with SMH Capital as an equity research analyst, focusing on Energy and Consumer Discretionary sectors.
John is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and holds an MS in finance from the University of Houston where he graduated with honors, receiving the top student award in the MS finance program. He continues to support the University of Houston as a mentor for the Cougar Fund, a student-run investment fund managing over seven million dollars. The University of Houston recognized John’s accomplishments in a story published in Inside Bauer: From Teenage Investor to High-Wealth Manager. John received a Bachelor’s of Business Administration in finance from Southwest Texas University in 2003 (now Texas State University), where he graduated summa cum laude.
John enjoys being involved in the San Antonio community where he serves as a Board Member on the CFA Institute Society in San Antonio, a mentor for the students at the Greehey School of Business at St. Mary’s University, a Financial Planning Advisory Board Member for the University of Incarnate Word, a board member for the Texas Business Hall of Fame – Scholarship group, San Antonio Sports – Finance Committee, and a mentor for the University of Texas San Antonio’s Center for Innovation Technology Entrepreneurship (CITE) program. John is also the co-coordinator for the CFA Institute Research Challenge – Southwest, which is a university level equity research competition consisting of over 25 participating business schools in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Mexico. John was recognized as one of the recipients of the 2016 San Antonio Business Journal’s 40 Under 40.
John lives in Bulverde with his wife, Kathryn, and their three children. Kathryn has her PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and works with NASA. John’s favorite hobby includes family time with his wife, son, and two baby girls.Get ready to be inspired by a seriously amazing kid.
Gwen Doyle is only in third grade, but when she saw images of soldiers on her TV, she knew she wanted to do something to show her appreciation for their service to our country. What this patriotic youngster did next serves as a lesson to us all: She may be just 8 years old, but that didn’t stop Gwen from sending so many drawings of vegetables to soldiers overseas that the Army had to ask her to stop.
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Amazing! Now there’s a kid with a heart of pure gold.
After drawing a picture of a zucchini last spring, Gwen told her mother she wanted to give it to “the soldiers that fight for our freedom.” Her mom taught her how to mail a letter, and with this simple act, Gwen went down the path of creating a logistical nightmare for the Army base postal offices across the Middle East. Just one month after her first letter, Gwen had mailed nearly 60,000 pictures of assorted vegetables overseas, each hand-drawn by crayon and individually mailed by Gwen herself. And this incredible kid showed no signs of slowing down, even when the U.S. military kindly asked her to stop!
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Now, most kids Gwen’s age would have given up a project like this after just a few weeks, but Gwen is no ordinary 8-year-old. She’s spent the past year drawing and mailing hundreds of thousands of vegetables for the brave soldiers overseas, and the military’s repeated cease-and-desist letters haven’t deterred her in the slightest. From the minute she gets home from school to the minute she goes to sleep each night, Gwen is furiously drawing gourds, greens, and root vegetables, writing “THANK YOU” at the top of every single one in large block letters, and mailing them to the troops.
Take a look at just one of the nearly 200,000 drawings the United States Army has returned back to Gwen, due to a lack of space in their mailroom:
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Of course, a project this large in scope does not come without its own set of challenges, but Gwen has managed to overcome every single one of them. When Gwen’s parents took away her crayons at the U.S. military’s insistence, she still managed to produce more than 10,000 drawings of rutabagas just by scratching her fingernail into paper. When she saw an American flag being draped over a coffin on the news, she drew nothing but shallots for two months straight. And when the military sends Gwen repeated requests like this one to stop immediately, she just keeps her head down and goes straight back to work:
Wow. When you look at a kid as kindhearted and determined as Gwen, it’s hard not to feel optimistic about our future. Thanks to her efforts, every single person in the U.S. Army now has a large and ever-growing stack of vegetable drawings, received completely against their will! Thanks for all of your hard work, Gwen!2011 quake puts pressure on Mount Fuji
Posted
Scientists say last year's earthquake in Japan has greatly increased the pressure of the magma chamber underneath Mount Fuji.
The volcano last erupted in 1707, less than two months after a large earthquake.
That blast scattered ash and cinders as far away as Tokyo, 100 kilometres from the volcano.
Experts at Japan's National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention say there is heightened pressure under Mount Fuji due to last year's devastating earthquake and aftershocks.
The magma chamber is about 15 kilometres underground and it is feared the increase in pressure could trigger an eruption.
When Mount Fuji last erupted, the pressure caused by the prior earthquake was weaker than that of last year, the researchers said, warning that eruptions could occur some years after earthquakes.
Based on the tectonic movements caused by the two earthquakes in March 2011, the researchers estimated about 1.6 megapascals of pressure, equivalent to atmospheric pressure of 15.8 kilograms per square centimetre, has been placed on the magma chamber.
In the past, 0.1 to several megapascals of pressure have triggered volcanic eruptions.
Although conditions in the magma chamber vary, 1.6 megapascals is "not a small figure", Eisuke Fujita, a senior researcher at the institute, said.
In 2004, the government issued a report estimating the maximum economic damage if Mount Fuji erupts at about 2.5 trillion yen ($31 billion).
But the researchers say heightened pressure is not the only factor which can cause volcanic eruptions and no signs of eruption have been detected so far.
ABC/Kyodo
Topics: earthquake, volcanic-eruption, disasters-and-accidents, japanBefore I quit my job to travel, I worked at roughguides.com for two years and, before that, as Features Editor at Asian Woman and Asian Bride magazines. During this time, I noticed some common themes and phrases emerge in the travel writing I read: diners always enjoyed “hearty fare”, cabins were always “nestled among” something, and seas always comprised “azure waters” (that last one I’m guilty of myself). Far less often, I came across writing that offered a rawer insight into the travel experience – and it was always refreshing when I did. In reality, travel isn’t always amazing. Sometimes, it’s downright disappointing but we rarely admit to this. Here are five truths travel writers don’t like to tell you.
“That place I visited was a bit crap”
Travel writers are paid to sell a dream, whether it’s of vivid Grecian seas or bleak Icelandic landscapes. Their pieces speak of vibrant markets full of clashing colour, of charming street urchins peddling their wares, of elderly gentlemen dozing on porches. They paint a desirable picture with an aim to inspire you to go there, or at the very least to want to go there – after all, why cover a destination only to tell readers to avoid it?
On the rare occasions it does happen (like this piece on Marrakesh), it’s not only refreshing but far more informative and entertaining than a superlative-laden love letter. Often, you’ll find the truth more readily told by bloggers (like in this piece on Vietnam) as they are generally unshackled by a need to maintain relationships with tourist boards and tour companies.
A notch above this is what I call the ‘Bear Grylls Treatment’. This is where a writer manufactures tension to add drama to his tale. ‘Travels’ by Michael Crichton is a classic example: In it, the late author talks of climbing Kilimanjaro, of navigating tiny African towns, camping near elephants and diving open seas as if they were life-threatening pursuits. In truth, Peter’s done all those things and they were hard but not that hard.
“The people I met weren’t that interesting”
Peter and I were sitting on a balcony overlooking Savusavu’s azure waters (sorry, couldn’t help myself). Dusk had fallen and the air held the smell of burning wood. It was one of those nights that called for few words so we sat and watched the waves in silence.
Soon, we were joined by a fellow backpacker – let’s call him Mark – with whom we had the customary exchange (where we’d been, how long we’d been in Fiji, where we were heading to next). Upon hearing that we were off to Tonga, his eyes lit up. “Oh, you must visit ‘Eua. I spent time with an amazing family there.” He reached across and plucked up the South Pacific guide resting on the table. Thumbing through it, he turned to Tonga and then proceeded to give us a 40-minute lecture on where to go and what to see (including all the amazing village chiefs he met and the ‘real’ Tongans with whom he spent his time).
Our polite attempts at curbing the lecture fell on deaf ears until, finally, Peter stood up and said: “Wow, thanks, that’s a lot of information. I’m starving so we’ll probably get something to eat.”
Travel writers insist that you’ll meet “amazing people” on your travels but, sometimes, that just isn’t true. In fact, most times, it’s not true (unless your bar for ‘amazing’ is unusually low). We’ve met impressive people on our travels and we’ve met formidable people, but truly ‘amazing’ people are few and far between.
“I ignore my own advice”
Every employed travel writer will tell you to take malaria tablets when you’re in a malarial country, to buy travel insurance, to pack a change of clothes in your hand luggage and so on and so forth. Well, back in 2010 when I visited Cambodia (and wrote an associated travel piece about it), I didn’t take any malaria tablets despite travelling the length of the country. Here’s what the malaria map for Cambodia looks like:
I was fine in the end, but the point is I didn’t listen to my own advice. Equally, when Peter and I arrived at Samoa’s Faleolo International Airport this week and were told that Fiji Airways hadn’t loaded our backpacks, we were left with only the clothes on our backs (and Peter didn’t even have a toothbrush). This is contrary to what every experienced traveller – including us – will tell you. What we won’t tell you is that we get complacent. We leave our passports in our backpacks instead of the hostel safe, we don’t always split our cash and, often, we assume that our luggage will arrive safely.
“Sometimes I’d rather just pootle about on my laptop”
Okay, aside from the fact that no-one says ‘pootle’ anymore, it’s true that sometimes we just want to sit indoors and get a fix of Facebook or Twitter or Buzzfeed. Even when we’ve spent 17 hours on a boat to get to a remote bay that looks like heaven itself, we want to sit indoors and get a fix of Facebook. When the luscious green trees stir in the wind and the white sands sweep with the sweetest of echoes, we want to sit indoors and get a fix of Facebook. Basically, we all want to be online some of the time – more carpe dongle than carpe diem.
“I’m wearing my knickers inside out”
“What are you going to do about WASHING?” read the text from my little sister, adopting capitals to portray that so-impossible task. “Erm, what I do at home: wash my clothes once a week,” I tapped back. Oh, the optimism and naiveté. Every week? In reality, I’m too busy exploring caves, climbing volcanoes and sailing through heaven (and, yes, pootling on my laptop). Every week just isn’t practical especially when you’re dealing with shared bathrooms of dubious hygiene. As such, some compromises have to be met once in a while. Not all the time, mind, but sometimes…After the defeat of Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential election, the Left are taking America’s decades-old “culture war” to a hot war of actual acts of violence and terrorism.
Both before and after President Trump was inaugurated, the Left poured on their hate and death threats. See:
But their targets aren’t just Trump and his family. It’s now open season on the Right — Trump supporters, Republicans, AltRight and conservatives:
Here are three more less-known recent incidents.
(1) Last Tuesday, June 13, 2017, shots were fired at a truck carrying a “Make America Great Again” flag and an American flag on eastbound I-465 in Indiana.
Fox59 reports that officers believe the shots were fired from a newer white 4-door Chevrolet Malibu with a Louisiana plate near Emerson Avenue around 4 p.m. The victim and a witness informed police that the Malibu pulled up next to the pickup truck, a passenger held a handgun out of the window and then a male fired several shots. Fortunately, no one was injured in the incident.
The driver of the Malibu is described as a black male around the age of 23; the passenger is a light skinned black male with a sleeve tattoo on his right arm. Indiana state police are asking anyone who may have witnessed the shooting to call 317-899-8577.
(2) Thursday, June 15, threatening letters containing a white powdery substance were placed in the mailboxes of Republican Karen Handel’s neighborhood in Roswell, Georgia.
Karen Handel is the former Secretary of State of Georgia (2007-2010) who is currently a candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District Special Election.
Washington Free Beacon reports that police blocked off Georgia Republican Karen Handel’s neighborhood after threatening letters containing a white powdery substance were left in the mailboxes of Handel and her neighbors.
A neighborhood resident posted a picture (see below) of the contents of the envelope she received, including a threatening letter in graphic language, saying:
“Your neighbor Karen Handel is a dirty fascist cunt but I’m sure you already knew that. Take a whiff of the powder and join her in the hospital you Bourgeoisie motherfuckers. RESIST THE FASCIST TAKEOVER!!!! STRING UP THE COLLABORATORS!”
James Hodgkinson, Rep. Scalise’s shooter, had also ranted about Handel on Facebook, calling her a “Republican bitch”:
“Republican Bitch Wants People to Work for Slave Wages, when a Livable Wage is the Only Way to Go! Vote Blue, It’s Right for You!”
(3) Antifa post guidelines on how to spike pet treats with sharp objects and scatter them in conservative neighborhoods.
Yesterday, /pol/ News Forever @polNewsForever retweeted a tweet calling for targeting areas in Texas “where most altright and far right supporters live” with dog treats “weaponized” with nails. Here’s the original tweet:
American Renaissance has put together an anti-Trump hate map showing the Left’s growing violence against the Right — criminal incidents in which Trump supporters were targeted for political reasons. Each marker on the map shows the location of an anti-Trump hate crime: Red markers signify violent crimes; blue markers, property crimes; purple markers, “other” crimes.
The above shows that the Left are actively fomenting a civil war, which will happen when the Right have had enough and decide to push back.
As with Muslims, where are the voices of “moderate” Democrats/Progressives condemning the Left’s hate rhetoric and acts of violence? Where are the denunciations from Democrat leaders Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, et al.?
See also these other posts on the Left’s hate rhetoric and violence:
See “Conservative Blogger Found Guilty on 21 Counts for Self-Defense with a Firearm, Faces up to 50 Years in Prison” for what happened to a conservative, Michael Strickland, who fought back.
***Visit our new FREE SPEECH community built exclusively for our readers. Click to Join The Deplorables Network Today!***
Handel is running neck-to-neck (47% vs. 47%) against Democrat Ossoff in Georgia’s Special House Election. Donate to her campaign here.
~Eowyn
Dr. Eowyn’s post first appeared at Fellowship of the MindsIn celebrating the significant contributions Twitter, Facebook and other Web giants have made to open source, did ReadWrite fail to credit more traditional software vendors for their own contributions? That’s the accusation being leveled by some members of the open source business community. But is it fair?
When I Was A Kid, We Didn’t Have GitHub …
Not if you ask the enterprise software crowd. And you should. When many Web entrepreneurs were still finishing high school, the open source movement was going mainstream in enterprise computing. The first contenders were Linux and the Apache HTTP server, both of which owe a huge thanks to IBM, as Apache Software Foundation president Jim Jagielski calls out.
I still remember IBM’s provocative announcement in 2001 that it was putting $1 billion toward the development and promotion of Linux. While such billion-dollar commitments from IBM are now so routine as to be unremarkable, back then a billion dollars meant a lot. I was working for an embedded Linux vendor at the time, and most of our sales cycle was spent explaining why GPL-licensed Linux wasn’t the technology equivalent of terminal cancer. (Thanks in part to Microsoft’s contribution.)
But after IBM’s announcement, the world completely changed. Suddenly it was not only safe to use open source, but advisable.
IBM thus paved the way for the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world to grow up in a world that actually encouraged open source usage. So when Eclipse marketing director Ian Skerrett lauds IBM (and Red Hat) for its contributions …
… he’s talking about more than merely code.
Raising A Generation Of Developers On Open Code
And yet I still think Lauren Orsini, who wrote the “offending” post, is right. She highlighted companies who were the most generous in contributing to open source, not necessarily the most voluminous. And that’s a crucial distinction.
Enterprise open source contributions are different from LinkedIn’s or Square’s. In IBM’s case, it is trying to create low-cost complements for its proprietary software, hardware and services.
As for Red Hat, it is the industry’s only billion-dollar pure-play open source software company. It, more than any other company, makes open source easy to consume within the enterprise.
Both are compelling business strategies. But making money on open source feels smart and self-serving rather than generous. IBM and Red Hat’s contributions don’t feed developer productivity the way these newer contributors do.
If IBM and its peers like Red Hat helped to kickstart open source as a business reality, the new wave of Web giants is making it a developer reality.
Yes, I know that open source has always been about developers. Millions of projects have been born and died on Sourceforge, Codehaus and GitHub to prove that. But while IBM, HP, Red Hat and others have been rubbing shoulders with enterprise developers, often on the sell-side of software, Web companies like Facebook and Twitter are enabling a different class of developer.
While their work on Storm, Kafka, Hadoop and other open-source projects benefits the enterprise, they are really writing code that will allow developers to completely change what the enterprise means by making a world from data.
Red Hat has sought to rectify this by embracing CentOS, popular on developer-friendly OpenStack. It’s a good move. With OpenStack Red Hat has a chance to enable a significantly more agile enterprise. But will it thereby enable more data-driven enterprises? That remains to be seen.
The Future Of Open Source
Skerrett and Jagielski point out that “old school” companies like IBM don’t get the credit they deserve. They’re almost certainly right. As Skerrett notes, tongue firmly in cheek, all these boring old enterprise infrastructure companies do is “mak[e] sure the Internet keeps on running.”
But it is the Web companies that are building data superstructure on the Internet. Do they owe a huge debt of gratitude to yesterday’s open source pioneers? Yes. But does this make it wrong to call them out for the exceptionally exciting work they’re doing enabling a new future built on data at unprecedented scale? No way.
Image by ShutterstockPUNE: With a third of their vegetables and fruits going waste due to spoilage, farmers are turning to start-ups such as Ecozen, ColdStar, Promethean and Coolify for providing access to solar and hybrid-powered cold storage solutions. Ecozen Solutions, started in 2010 by IIT Kharagpur alumnus Devendra Gupta along with Vivek Pandey and Prateek Singhal, offers solar-cum-hybrid cold storage to farmers in rural India.
Currently finishing the pilots with this hybrid solution in East Africa,
plans to launch in India in 2015, after graduating from MIT. "We were awarded the most innovative business idea by the US Department of Agriculture, quoting a
60
prize money. This is an IT-enabled solution, wherein a farmer with a smartphone can activate the storage container and set the temperature," said
.
is set to launch in the
rural belt next year.
"The product works on solar power and uses thermal storage as the energy back-up. The cost of the solution depends on the commodity to be stored. Normally, a fruit farmer should be able to recover the cost within three years and earn at least twice of what he is currently earning," said Gupta. Since horticultural commodities are perishable and there is no storage, farmers are forced to sell their produce at throwaway prices during harvest time, said Gupta, adding that there has been price fluctuation of more than 200 per cent in certain commodities."We aim to de-risk the farmer against these fluctuations and also play a bridging role in the national food supply chain." The co-founders have invested about Rs 15 lakh so far in Ecozen, which has a revenue target of Rs 20 crore by 2015-16. Similarly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Rajat Sethi, currently pursuing his MBA, has co-founded Coolify as a new-generation cold storage solution, targeted to serve the back-end of the fruits and vegetable supply chain in India.SethiRslakhSethiCoolifyUP-Bihar"In 2015, in the first year of launch, we plan to get a minimum of 500 storage units on ground, and thereafter scale further. We want to introduce a payas-you-use model for the farmers. This is a $15 billion opportunity just in India," Sethi added. According to ColdStar, which supplies refrigerated storage to multinational companies and big farms, which in turn take it to farmers to retain quality of perishable produce, more than 18 per cent of India’s fruits and vegetable produce worth Rs 13,300 crore goes waste annually due to lack of or poor cold chain facilities in India."Developing an integrated cold supply chain can save up to Rs 30,000 crore annually and significantly reduce wastage of perishable produce," said Shagun Kapoor Gogia, founder-director of ColdStar, launched in 2010, adding that the company is seeing about 15 per cent increase in demand ever year. ColdStar services more than 40 locations through a network of large-scale storage hubs and connects them with its transport network. The venture has been incubated by Tuscan Ventures, which has set up a VC fund focused on logistics.This report was first published on July 5, 2016 and has been updated.
Richard Thaler, who has just been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences, is considered one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics. When the University of Chicago professor sat down with MarketWatch to talk about his own research, why humans don’t behave the way economists say they should and his book “Misbehaving,” we asked him for reading recommendations.
Here are his suggestions:
“Pre-Suasion” by Robert Cialdini, which comes out in September. Cialdini’s last book, “Influence,” was published in 1984, and Thaler says he’s read an early version of this one. “He’s the most practical psychologist on Earth,” Thaler says of Cialdini.
“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Thaler calls Kahneman, a fellow University of Chicago professor, one of his mentors and this book a “natural companion to ‘Misbehaving.’ ” Thaler has his own Kahneman story, of when Kahneman was asked about Thaler and called “lazy” his best attribute. (Thaler pleads guilty to laziness but questions whether that should top the list.)
“The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds” by Michael Lewis, which was published in December 2016. It’s about Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who together created the field of behavioral economics. “It’s a book I’m looking forward to reading,” he says. (Thaler made a cameo appearance in the movie version of Lewis’ “The Big Short.”)
“Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Thaler recommends starting with this book and then moving on to their other two, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” and “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work.” “They’re very practical books about how to apply behavioral science,” he says.PTI
Telecom operator Idea Cellular announced free incoming calls on domestic roaming and unveiled international roaming value packs that, it claimed, would prevent “bill shocks” to those travelling abroad. The offers come on the heels of the larger rival Bharti Airtel announcing removal of all roaming charges for outgoing and incoming calls as well as SMSes and data usage within India, to take on competition from newcomer Reliance Jio.
“Effective 1 April, 2017, Idea’s 200 million customers will enjoy free incoming calls while roaming on company’s 2G, 3G and 4G network across 400,000 towns and villages in the country. Idea customers will be able to make outgoing calls, SMS freely at affordable rates while roaming anywhere in India,” an Idea release said. It further said mobile data tariffs and data pack benefits of home circle will be available while roaming within India at no extra charge.
The facility of free incoming calls on domestic roaming will be extended to both prepaid and postpaid customers.
For international travellers, the company is offering international roaming value packs with free bundled usage of up to 400 outgoing minutes, 100 SMSes per day, 3GB bundled data and unlimited incoming calls for Rs 2,499 for Asia, and Rs 5,999 for Europe for 30 days validity.
“These international roaming packs also come bundled with free 1GB/2GB/3GB data and overage charges as low as Rs 3 per MB to avoid bill shock to travelling customers,” Idea said.
The company said it has done a study of customer’s travel destinations, usage patterns and bill shock complaints to design a new range of value packs for select destinations across Europe, Asia, America, UK and Middle East.
“For value conscious customers, the packs start at Rs 1,199 for 10 days validity and go up to Rs 5,999 for 30 days validity, giving up to 85 per cent savings on international roaming charges,” it said.
“…Idea is now set to enable over 200 million customers to use their mobile phones freely, without having to worry about roaming charges, while they travel anywhere in the country,” Sashi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer of Idea Cellular said.
On 27 February, Bharti Airtel had removed domestic roaming charges on calls and data, and said international call rates will be cut by up to 90 per cent to as low as Rs 3 per minute and data charges by up to 99 per cent to Rs 3 per MB across popular roaming destinations. In a press statement, ‘Airtel Declares War on Roaming’, the company had then said the move will lead to “death of National Roaming” from 1 April.
Tech2 is now on WhatsApp. For all the buzz on the latest tech and science, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Tech2.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.The Backstreet Boys self-titled debut album turns 20 this year leaving ‘90s kids, like myself, feeling quite old. The album debuted in the United States in August 1997. Initially it hit No. 29 on the Billboard 200, but by January 1998, the album sold 2 million copies. The album’s first single “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)” peaked at No. 4 on the chart. Since then, the Backstreet Boys continued to make music and garner fame.
The Backstreet Boys might just be the most successful boyband to date. (New Kids on the Block, which was like the ‘80s version of BSB, made a resurgence with BSB. They’re a pretty close second.) They’ve managed to stay relevant the last 20 years — producing new music, touring the world, collaborating with other artists, dabbling in filmmaking, and earning a Las Vegas residency. The group endured its fair share of hard times, too. Kevin Richardson left the group for a short time, AJ McLean struggled with addiction, and Nick Carter got into some trouble, too. Still, fans of BSB continue to support the five boys-turned-men. (Count me in with this group of people.)
Here’s a look back at BSB’s 10 greatest songs over the past almost 25 years of their existence.
Inconsolable — The song was released in 2007, as the first single off their fifth studio album; it was their first album without Kevin Richardson. I loved the song immediately when it dropped, but it didn’t feel like the same BSB without Kev.
Incomplete — Back from their two-year hiatus, BSB dropped Incomplete in 2005 in preparation for their comeback album Never Gone. The song peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. The perfect comeback power ballad, in my opinion.
Drowning — The song was originally meant for Black and Blue, but instead was released as part of The Hits: Chapter One. The song reached No. 28 on the charts and actually did exceptionally well on MTV’s Total Request Live. (I remember this, too, because I loved this song. And I couldn’t wait for more BSB. If only eight-year-old me knew…
7 ½ The Call — I just couldn’t make up my mind on this song and the next, so here we are. The song didn’t do well on the charts, but I have fond memories of dancing to this song with my siblings.
Shape of My Heart — This song was released as the lead single off of Black and Blue, and it debuted at No. 9 on the Hot 10. It spent 61 days at the No. 1 spot on TRL and also earned a Grammy nomination. Needless to say, this is a great song to belt out in your car or the shower.
All I Have to Give — The sixth single off of the debut album won Video of the Year at Teen Choice in 1999. Basically, I just love this song because I always imagined Nick Carter walking 1000 miles to get to me.
Quit Playing Games (With My Heart) — The first Backstreet Boys single ever heard in the United States!!!!!! The song reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 in May 1997 and earned BSB a platinum award.
Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely — A depressing song, but a good song. BSB released the single in December 1999; it earned |
or Fox News, or Comedy Central, or wherever.
Just don't pretend you weren't warned.
I'm talking to you, Bernie supporters.
Why Don’t Sanders Supporters Care About the Russia Investigation?
That was an actual NY Times headline from a week ago.
While I'm sure a lot of people have well-researched and thought out reasons for not believing the Russia-hype, I bet a bunch of people don't believe the propaganda for a basic reason:
It smells like bullshit.
The "Aahh! Scary Russia!" has a distinct and unmistakable odor of Grade A cow-droppings, just like the Iraqi WMDs did.
But if you needed a more reasoned argument than that, there is Lee Camp's takedown.
If you needed a more intellectual rebuttal to "Putin Is Under Your Bed! Aahh!", then I suggest Chris Hedges.
It would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and public broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology that sustains the corporate state, the “free market” and neoliberalism has lost all credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument to its critics. The nakedness of corporate greed, exploitation and repression is transparent across the political spectrum. The ideological fortress erected by corporate power and sustained by its courtiers in the press and academia has collapsed. All it has left is a crude censorship.
...The charge that RT and these left-wing sites disseminate “foreign propaganda” is the beginning, not the end, of a broad campaign against press freedom. Once this precedent of state censorship is normalized, far more tepid and compliant media outlets will be targeted.
Just like McCarthyism started with a Democratically-controlled House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938, this latest Russia scare has started with Democrats.
Both today's fear-mongering and the one from the 40's are aimed at silencing internal dissent, not at Russia.
In other words, you are the target Bernie Bros.
The establishment news media explicitly told us who to vote for.
Among the top 100 largest newspapers in America, just two — the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville — endorsed Trump...
Even Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson has had more success with editorial boards than Trump. This weekend, the Charleston Post & Courier became the fourth paper to back Johnson.
We didn't listen, and this shocked the MSM.
Polls showed that people's trust in the news media has been declining for a long time, but the news media obviously didn't care. They arrogantly disregarded polls that showed Americans are far more likely to believe the ads for the penis enlargement pills and "get rich" investments than the actual news stories in the magazines they are reading.
The MSM took the attitude of the Democrats of "where else are they going to go?"
Like the Democrats, the MSM was legitimately shocked when people flipped them the middle finger and defied them.
Like the Democrats, the MSM decided that an honest investigation into people's lack of faith in their organization wasn't in their interests. Instead they would find a scapegoat.
This has all come about as a panicked reaction to the public no longer buying the bullshit.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the mainstream press is full of fake news, a sentiment that is held by a majority of voters across the ideological spectrum.
According to data from the latest Harvard-Harris poll, which was provided exclusively to The Hill, 65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media.
That number includes 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats.
If TPTB can't sell you crap for truth then they lose control over your mind. Then there is no telling what thought-crimes you might commit.
Their only answer is censorship.“Split” is once again twisting its way to the top of the box office after beating out newcomers “A Dog’s Purpose” and “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter” on Friday. The film, from Universal via its partnership with Blumhouse Productions, earned nearly $8 million on Friday on its way to a $25 to $26 million second weekend at 3,199 locations.
“A Dog’s Purpose,” also distributed by Universal, but made by Amblin Entertainment and Walden Media, fetched $5.3 million from 3,058 theaters to put it solidly in second for the weekend.
“A Dog’s Purpose” met blowback when TMZ leaked a video showing a German Shepherd struggling during production. The video sparked outrage online and PETA called for a boycott, while the filmmakers have insisted that the clip did not accurately represent what happened on set. Still, Universal canceled the film’s intended premiere and press junket, and the situation dropped estimates for the film’s opening weekend from as high as $25 million before calls for boycott, to $18 million on Friday afternoon. Now its opening weekend estimate stands closer to $19 million.
Dennis Quaid, Britt Robertson, K.J. Apa, John Ortiz, Juliet Rylance, and Pooch Hall star in the movie directed by Lasse Hallstrom. Josh Gad is the voice of the dog, who appears in several reincarnated forms throughout the film.
Related PETA Responds: No, American Humane, ‘A Dog’s Purpose’ Is Not to Be a Prop (Guest Column)
“Split,” from director M. Night Shyamalan and starring James McAvoy, has posted huge numbers considering its low budget of less than $10 million. After two weeks in wide release, the film should see about $77 million in domestic grosses.
Sony and Screen Gems’ “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter” made $5 million on Friday from 3,104 locations. By the end of the weekend it should make as much as $14 million, about in line with original forecasts. Setting its sights on international gains, the film opened in Japan on Dec. 23 where it has earned over $35 million. Including its domestic take, the film’s global tally is estimated between $75 and $80 million by the end of the weekend.
“Resident Evil” marks the sixth and final installment in the video game adaptation franchise. Paul W.S. Anderson returned to direct the film starring Milla Jovovich once again. Ali Larter, Shawn Roberts, Iain Glen, Ruby Rose, Eoin Macken, Fraser James, and Lee Joon-Gi also star.
“Gold,” from the Weinstein Company, looks to be a bust after earning a little over $1 million on Friday from 2,166 locations. The movie was directed by Stephen Gaghan and stars Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramirez, Bryce Dallas Howard and Corey Stoll. It’s expected to make a lackluster $3 to $4 million during its opening weekend.
“Hidden Figures” and “La La Land” are both showing strong following Tuesday’s Oscar nominations. The former should land in third for the weekend with $14 million, and the latter looks to round out the top five with about $12 million. “La La Land” looks to cross the $200 million mark globally, and both films should top $100 million domestically this weekend.Soon after my father passed away in 1995 at age 86, my mother presented me with his watch, enclosed in its red case adorned with gold letters. The 18-karat gold Patek Philippe was the only expensive thing my father ever bought for himself.
We were very poor when I was young. We shared, with another family, a small, one-bedroom apartment in a poor Haifa neighborhood, living off rationed eggs and butter. By the time I reached the age of 13, however, our financial condition had improved. Although by nature modest and humble, my father surprised us by buying himself the gold watch. “After 120,” he would proudly tell me, “this watch will be yours.”
Gingerly opening the case in 1995, I was astounded to find in addition to the watch, hidden underneath, in the folds of the guarantee booklet: a minute, yellowing photograph of two beautiful young women. I did not recognize this photo or these young ladies. My mother was taken aback by this find but did not offer any explanations. I knew my father wanted me to find this photo. I could not fathom why.
Only now, 17 years later, has this mystery truly been solved, and the photograph’s place in my father’s life—and my own—finally become clear.
***
One of 10 children, my father grew up in Krasnik, a town near the Polish city of Lublin. His parents, who owned a large kasha grain mill, were wealthy. They were members of the Ger Hasidic dynasty, and my father was named after the Sefat Emet, one of this movement’s great leaders. During the Holocaust, when he was in his late 20s, my father was taken to the brutal Budzin labor camp near Lublin, where he survived by pretending to be a carpenter. In May 1944, the camp was closed, and the prisoners were marched to the Majdanek extermination camp. Jumping into a ditch at a curve in the trail, my father escaped this death march and hid in the forest with the partisans for the remainder of the war.
After the war, my father returned to Narutowicza Street in his hometown of Krasnik, but he found no survivors. His parents, grandparents, and all of his siblings—except for one sister and one brother, who had immigrated to Palestine before the war—had been murdered. He left Krasnik behind and moved to Germany, where he met my mother and married her in a gloomy displaced-persons camp in 1947. I have a single black-and-white frayed photo from their wedding. No one is smiling. Not the guests, not my mother’s parents (who were saved by deportation to Siberia), not even the bride and groom. My parents left for the Land of Israel immediately after the wedding. Within months, my father was drafted into the newly formed Israeli Army and served as a mortar operator in the Galilee during Israel’s War of Independence. Later, when I was a child, my father made sure to show me his battlefields in the old city of Tzfat and at the Dan and Dafna kibbutzim. I particularly loved hearing about the bridge he built over the Banias River in a long dark night under enemy fire. For me, the bridge became a symbol of his valiant struggle to traverse his crushing past with his empowering new life in Israel.
In Haifa, my father owned an all-consuming wholesale produce business. Every morning, he rose at 2:30 a.m. to trek down from Haifa’s Hadar section to the wholesale Tenuva market close to the port. Even in the glaringly hot summer days, when temperatures often climbed over 100 degrees, my father sported a straw fedora. He loved my mother immeasurably and was a devoted husband and father. He rarely disciplined my sister or me and was most proud of his two children, named after his father and my maternal great-grandmother, both of whom were murdered in the Holocaust.
He rarely spoke of the Holocaust. I recall, however, being startled the night my father was ill and running a high fever when he began singing “Es brent briderlech, es brent” by Mordechai Gebirtig. This poem was written in response to the 1936 pogrom of Jews in the shtetl of Przytyk:
It’s burning, brothers, it’s burning!
Our poor shtetel is burning,
Raging winds are fanning the wild flames
And furiously tearing,
Destroying and scattering everything.
All around, all is burning
And you stand and look just so, you
With folded hands …
And you stand and look just so,
While our shtetl burns.
My father was short but physically strong; even in his 70s, he easily won our arm-wrestling matches. He was gentle and kind and mostly silent. He spoke little of his past, was equally silent about his hardships and years of struggle in the nascent State of Israel, and was hermetically closed about the Holocaust years.
After his retirement, my father set up a carpentry studio in a windowless bomb shelter. Using the skills he developed in the labor camp, he carved birds out of olive wood. I know why he loved to sculpt birds. They have wings.
***
When I received my father’s watch, I was flummoxed by the yellowing photo hidden within the case. I sensed that I had inherited a part of my father’s sanctum sanctorum, his innermost being. But my mother was unwilling, or unable, to answer my questions about the photo. Out of deep respect for her, I decided to emulate my father’s lifelong covenant of silence. I too would remain silent, for a time.
After my mother’s passing, in 2008, I presented the mysterious photo to several distant survivor relatives, who could not identify the women. My next impulse was to search the newly available online records in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial that houses a large database of victims and survivors. I was stunned to unearth a digital image of a handwritten card penned by my father for the Yad Vashem archives in the early 1950s, and a second record submitted by an unknown person documenting the murder of a woman named Chaya Holzberg Goldberg and her two daughters from Krasnik during the Holocaust. We discovered that several Holzbergs—my father’s first cousins, whom I’d met briefly decades earlier—were still alive and residing in New York City.
At an emotional meeting attended by myself, my wife, and our children and grandchildren, we were astounded to learn from Chaya’s younger brother Jack Holzberg that my father had been married to Chaya (who was also my father’s cousin) before the war. With tears in his eyes, Jack pointed to the woman on the right of the photo from my father’s watch case: “This is my sister,” he said.
I learned that Chaya and my father had two daughters, Chava and a nameless newborn baby daughter. Shortly after the second baby’s birth, the Nazis searched the family’s hiding place in Krasnik. When the newborn started to cry, a hand was placed over the baby’s mouth to muffle the sound, and the baby girl was inadvertently smothered to death before her parents could name her in the synagogue. Chaya buried her dead newborn in the cemetery in a shallow unmarked grave. Jack recalls his sister telling him that the following night their mother assured her in a dream that the dead baby was “with her.” A short period later, the remaining family was captured by the Nazis. My father was transferred to Budzin, but his wife Chaya and 7-year-old daughter Chava were gassed at Majdanek.
Like other second-generation survivors, I will never know what my father was like before the war, nor grasp the magnitude of his devastating losses. His fortitude in shielding his new family from the horrors that haunted him came from a courage and resilience that I deeply admire and cherish. Would that I could tell him now.
Several months ago, my daughter gave birth to a baby girl. She named her Chaya. I called Jack. He wept. My father would have been proud.
***
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Itzhak David Goldberg is a professor of clinical radiation oncology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the CEO of Angion Biomedica Corporation.It’s a trap! But after tumbling into a predator's sandy pit, some trap-jaw ants use their spring-loaded mandibles to literally hurl themselves away from danger. The finding, reported this week in PLOS ONE, confirms a suspicion researchers had back in 2006, when they showed that these ants use their lighting-fast jaws not only to catch prey but also to engage in “ballistic jaw propulsion.”
Related Content How 16th Century Trade Made Fire Ants an Early Global Invader
To arrive at these findings, entomologists Fredrick Larabee and Andrew Suarez at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign turned to ferocious ant predators known as antlions.
The acrobatic battle begins with an ant’s fatal misstep. What appears to be a small indention in the sandy terrain is actually a death trap: a steep-walled pit engineered to funnel the ant to its doom. Lying concealed at the bottom is a real-life sarlacc, the antlion. Its hairy, bulbous body tapers into a low-hanging, beady-eyed head that is seemingly weighed down by two massive spiked mandibles. Those mandibles peak out of the sand like a bear trap, ready to snap shut around a hapless victim.
Once in the trap, an ant will inevitably try to clamber out, oftentimes to no avail. The sandy walls collapse beneath it, and each step forward leads to two steps back. If the ant seems to be making headway, the antlion will hurl sand at its victim from below, further destabilizing the pit walls and causing the ant to topple to the bottom. The antlion’s jaws snap, latching onto the struggling ant and pulling it down until the insect disappears from view.
Based on the 2006 findings, Larabee and Suarez suspected that trap-jaw ants could sometimes escape this scenario specifically with the help of their jaws. They collected trap-jaw ants and antlions from the field in central Florida. They allowed the antlions to dig new pits in containers in the lab and starved them for 48 hours, ensuring the predators would be primed for an ant meal. Then they introduced 114 trap-jaw ants individually into the antlion arena and tallied up the results of the encounters.
Trap-jaw ants fell victim to antlions about one-third of the time. About half of the escapees made it by running out of the pits. In 15 percent of the encounters, however, the ants did indeed summersault away by snapping their jaws against the bottom or side of the pit. The ants only used this tactic after the antlion had made itself known in a failed attack, indicating that it might be a last-ditch emergency escape method. The jaw jumps also only worked part of the time—the willy-nilly launches sometimes caused the ants to fall back down into the bottom of the pit, and many jaw-jumping attempts failed to hit the hot spot necessary for propelling the ants to safely.
Still, the jaw-jumping trick does seem to make a significant difference. The researchers glued 76 ants’ mandibles together, preventing them from using their jaws to jump. Ants with unrestrained jaws were almost five times more likely to escape the antlion pit than those that were hindered by glue.
While trap-jaw ants evolved their strong mandibles primarily to hunt prey and carry objects, the researchers think the spring-loaded jumps represent an example of a species coopting its physical assets for alternative purposes. While not all trap-jaw ants have been observed using this behavioral hack, for some species, at least, the clever adaptation can mean the difference between life and a terrifying subterranean death.
In this video Larabee and Suarez produced, you can see the summersaulting drama play out:A single mother says her tax credits were stopped because a Government contractor wrongly thought she was in a relationship with her brother.
Lorelle Banks told the Daily Record that HMRC also told her to pay back £1,400 of benefits because of the “ridiculous” error.
She and her five-year-old son live in Motherwell, Scotland, as does her brother Gary Banks when he is on leave from the Army.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Cameron and Corbyn clash over tax credits cuts
Ms Banks, 24, said she received a letter from Concentrix, who are contracted to carry out tax credits checks, saying her circumstances had changed.
“I called them up when I got the letter and straight away they brought up my brother’s name,” she added.
“They presumed we were married. I told them who he was and that he was in the Army.
“I handed in tenancy agreements and bank statements to prove what I was telling them but the money stopped instantly.”
The Daily Record reported that £400 of withheld tax credits have now been paid to Ms Banks.
Thousands of people on low incomes have been accused of cheating the benefits system by Concentrix, which is part of a multi-billion pound US business services company.
As confused claimants started posting letters online earlier this year, the firm was accused of going on a vast “fishing expedition” for fraud and errors.
Shape Created with Sketch. The impact of welfare cuts: Britons on the breadline Show all 5 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The impact of welfare cuts: Britons on the breadline 1/5 GETTY IMAGES 2/5 GETTY IMAGES 3/5 GETTY IMAGES 4/5 GETTY IMAGES 5/5 John Lawrence 1/5 GETTY IMAGES 2/5 GETTY IMAGES 3/5 GETTY IMAGES 4/5 GETTY IMAGES 5/5 John Lawrence
Staff working at Concentrix told The Independent they were under pressure to open between 40 and 50 new investigations every day and often did not have time to check whether the allegations they are making stack up.
Many people receiving the company’s letters believed them to be hoaxes because they asked for financial information, including bank statements, to be sent in the post and did not realise they were real until their tax credits stopped.
Another woman said she received a letter asking for proof she was not a lesbian and living with a female partner.
Carmen, a single mother who lives with her three children in Grimsby, had to send documents in her name to prove that she was living alone.
In a statement earlier this year, Concentrix said it could not comment on clients due to confidentiality but added: “Over the last several years we’ve demonstrated significant commitment and growth in the UK and Northern Ireland. We’ve increased our staff by more than 1,000.”
A spokesperson for HMRC told The Independent that the tax authority could not comment on individual cases.
“It's right that we regularly check that people's circumstances have not changed to ensure that we do not overpay tax credits, which would build up a debt that the claimant has to repay and put an unfair cost on the taxpayer," he added.
“When we have reason to believe someone's circumstances may have changed we write to them and allow a full 30 days for a reply. But if we don't hear anything after 30 days, payments are suspended to protect both the claimant and the taxpayer. Payments will be reinstated, where appropriate, as soon as people have provided us with the information requested and it has been reviewed. This is a fair and effective approach, giving people time to respond while ensuring that incorrect payments are adjusted quickly."
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowFishing in West Virginia
Fishing is one of the most popular outdoor sports pursued in West Virginia. Young West Virginians learn early the art of the cast, and by their teens they are adept at hunting trout in clear mountain streams and coaxing bass from its lakes and rivers. But there are many miles of stream and plenty of fishing holes to be angled.
Bait and tackle shops exist in almost every county in West Virginia, and fishing camps, for rent or sale, may be found on almost every stream.
Fishing in the Mountain State is notably accommodated by its wealth of well-watered fisheries. Its streams do not grow sluggish in late summer. Though small streams may dry to a trickle, hundreds of larger fishing streams remain productive year-round.
Help build our guide to fishing in West Virginia.
Fishing is one of the most popular forms of recreation accommodated in West Virginia, and it’s hard to keep up with the constant change and expansion. If you’ve noted inaccuracies in our content or would like to contribute as a correspondent, please contact a member of our editorial staff.IYSSE/SEP public meeting November 9
New York mayoral election: The tasks facing the working class
29 October 2013
The November 5 New York City mayoral election led to the victory of a Democratic Party politician, Bill de Blasio, for the first time in more than 20 years. This has been heralded in the media and by the trade unions and their “left”-talking allies as a sign of a fundamental transformation from the “Bloomberg era.”
In fact, a de Blasio administration will continue, rather than change, the policies that have led to unprecedented inequality in the cultural and financial capital of the United States. De Blasio has spent the last six weeks reassuring Wall Street that, despite his occasional rhetoric in the primary campaign, the banks have absolutely nothing to fear from his taking the reins at City Hall.
The fundamental task is the building of a new revolutionary leadership of the working class, in opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties. Come to the public meeting on Saturday, November 9 to discuss these urgent issues.
Saturday, November 9, 4:00 pm
University Settlement at Houston St.
273 Bowery, Manhattan
F Train to Second Ave.
MapWhile the rest of the internet was busy deciphering Lady Gaga’s latest music video “Telephone,” my attention was turned to a far more relevant and, dare I say, revolutionary, piece of video-music art. I am, of course, referring to Justin Bieber’s treatise on American renewal, “One Less Lonely Girl.”
[For those of you who may not be familiar with Justin Bieber, I direct you to this summary of his life and accomplishments to date. In short, he’s a young pop star who is adored by pre-teen girls to the point where a cancellation of his concert caused a riot in a Long Island mall. Also, he is a trending topic on Twitter. Every day. At all hours. Which I suppose makes him less of a “Trending Topic” on Twitter and more of an “understood topic at all times.” But I digress.]
Have you watched the video all the way through? No? The silky-smooth auto-tuned voice and baby-faced good looks were too much for you to handle? Not an excuse. Suck it up and watch. I’ll even embed it again for your convenience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXUSaVw3Mvk
Finished now? Good. If this was your first time watching, I wouldn’t blame you for missing the political message and only seeing the maudlin (not to mention slightly creepy) love story at play. To summarize, Justin Bieber is hanging out a laundromat, where he makes eyes with a girl who, judging by the lyrics of the song, has recently exited an unsatisfactory romantic relationship. The girl intentionally leaves the scarf as a signal to Bieber to pursue. Rather than return the scarf immediately, Bieber leads the girl to him (and the scarf) through arrow signs and Polaroids promising future romantic satisfaction. The arrows and Polaroids lead the girl back to the laundromat, where she and Bieber share a romantic slow dance.
Admittedly, this plot is pretty weak. The system of arrows and Polaroids at first seems like some sort of Robert Langdon-esque series of clues, but the messages with the Polaroids are nothing but romantic platitudes without any hints as to the next step on the journey. All direction is left to the arrows–there’s no ambiguity as to where the girl should go next.
Now, let’s dig deeper, shall we?
American Tradition
As I mentioned before, this song/video offers a treatise on American renewal, not just a nice little love story involving two tweenagers. Let’s start with the setting. Did you notice those strategically placed American flags dotted throughout the video?
As Fenzel astutely noted in his analysis of the placement of Vespa scooters on the set of the music video for “Morning After Dark,” these sorts of details aren’t accidental. Somebody had to spend a day finding American flags and placing them such that they’d appear in the video, and as such, they’re important to our analysis.
The flags clearly tell us that the setting is designed to reach beyond its specific locale and represent all of America. But not just any America. Did you notice that the overall setting is that of a typical small town “Main Street”?
Or that the newsstand (in itself slightly anachronistic) carries vintage comic books and has an old-school mechanical cash register?
Or that the door to the laundromat sports a 50’s era vintage sign?
Or that the girl’s laundry basket is wicker, not plastic?
These details aren’t bashing the viewer over the head, but when put together, it’s surprising the lengths the video director went through to convey this sense of nostalgic Americana. This is a Justin Bieber video we’re talking about–most 12 year old girls who comprise his audience could care less about these sorts of details–yet someone chose to put them here. I repeat: it’s no accident.
American Struggle
Now, let’s dig a little more into the circumstances of the characters depicted in the video. The girl is doing laundry in a laundromat, which is never the most desirable place to do laundry. Outside of college campuses and New York City, laundromats are seen as the place to do laundry if you’re one of those unfortunate people who can’t afford to live in a place that offers the most basic of amenities, a washer and dryer.
In other words, the girl is poor, which is why she’s at the laundromat.
This little piece of setup casts the heartache described in the lyrics in a totally different light. The girl’s suffering is less about romance and more about her economic well-being:
How many I told you’s
And start overs and shoulders
Have you cried on before
How many promises be honest girl
How many tears you let hit the floor
How many bags you packed
Just to take ’em back, tell me that
How many either or’s
There’s a recession out there, not just for this girl, but also for this quaint little main street. Notice anything about these shots?
The lights are off inside, and the woodwork outside is worn down and in need of repair. It’s clearly a vacant storefront, another sign of hard times.
The video has created a portrait of a struggling American in a struggling All-American town. Remember, those details–the flags, the sign, the laundromat–aren’t accidental. They’re there to provide the context for the delivery of the message of American renewal.
American Renewal: Communitarianism, Fiscal Responsibility
Fortunately for the girl, the town, and our nation, the video demonstrates how we have the capacity to lift ourselves up and out of our predicament.
Although the town may be facing hard times, it retains both a vibrant street life and a communitarian spirit. The social fabric of the community remains strong and is essential to Bieber’s plan to woo the girl; without willing cooperation of strangers, his plan simply would not have been possible.
The message is clear: America can only be redeemed through collective action and a strong sense of community, not through rugged individualism or a fractured public space.
One less lonely girl, indeed.
But in addition to communitarianism, sacrifice is also required to redeem America. Specifically, America must be willing to accept a lower standard of living, or at least reject certain luxuries, to achieve a more sustainable prosperity. The video communicates these through three subtle plot points:
1. Hershey’s = “expensive chocolate”:
2. Bieber’s flower of choice is a single humble daisy instead of a more decadent bouquet of roses:
3. Most importantly, the humble laundromat and not a fancy ballroom or club, serves as the site of the couple’s romantic slow dance:
American Renewal: Regime Change Starts At Home
This call to communitarianism and fiscal restraint is well reflected by the video, but less so by the lyrics. In fact, they convey a far more singularly focused message:
Don’t need these other pretty faces
‘Cause when your mine in the world
There’s gonna be one less lonely girl
One less lonely girl
One less lonely girl
One less lonely girl
There’s gonna be one less lonely girl
I’m gonna put you first
I’ll show you what your worth
If you let me inside your world
There’s gonna be one less lonely girl
At first, this seems at odds with the visual message: the video preaches community, but the text preaches singular devotion. However, this singular devotion is actually part of the same prescription for American renewal as are communitarianism and fiscal responsibility. Many have argued that a major factor in America’s recent decline was our government’s undue attention towards foreign, and not domestic, concerns (“those other pretty faces”). This includes expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the increased economic competition brought on by globalization and free trade.
When Bieber says “I’m gonna put you first,” he advocates for our government to prioritize its domestic concerns above all others. Without expensive overseas wars, nation-building, and destructive global capitalism to distract America and siphon away it wealth, people can reconnect with each other, rebuild their communities, and return to a simpler way of life.
Conclusion
None of the individual components of this message are by themselves novel. David Brooks has been preaching the need for a renewed sense of American communitarianism for years in his columns. Annie Leonard’s recent book, The Story of Stuff, criticizes the vicious cycle of American consumerism and advocates for a simpler way of life. And countless leftists have railed against free trade, globalization, and nation-building wars for decades.
But few have brought these disparate ideas together in such a compelling way as Justin Bieber. And none have certainly applied auto-tuned vocals and baby-faced good looks to conveying this message to an unwitting and highly receptive young audience. His ideas have the ability to influence a whole new generation of political thinkers and leaders. Once they set forth to make this vision a reality, there truly will be one less lonely girl:
America.
Postscript
OK, I’m not seriously suggesting that Justin Bieber, his music video director, or any of the other people involved in the making of this video were trying to advance a political agenda through a high-concept allegory. But I do find it fascinating that so much of the imagery seems to advance this idea that in traditional, small town America, ordinary folks live a modest life and achieve their goals through cooperation and trust. This stands in stark contrast to the heroic individualism and material excess of most pop music narratives.
I would say that the message of this video is somehow connected to Bieber’s humble origins and some sort of attempt to introduce him as a safe, non-threatening entertainer, but that theory is mostly contradicted by his first music video, in which he throws an unauthorized party a the house of R&B legend Usher:
As for what’s going on in this video, well, that’s another topic for another day.
Post-Postscript
ZOMG JUSTIN BIEBER IS SO HOT AND I WANT 2 HAVE HIS BABIEEES <3<3<3333333LONDON — Toby Alderweireld has settled in seamlessly to Tottenham Hotspur’s defense this season.
That’s probably because he has more than a few familiar faces around him.
On a trip to hang out with Tottenham and Buffalo Bills players last week, ProSoccerTalk caught up with Alderweireld, 26, at Spurs training ground for an exclusive chat as the stylish defender has started every single Premier League game at the heart of Spurs’ defense alongside fellow Belgian Jan Vertonghen. The duo are forming a formidable partnership as they have conceded just eight times in the opening 10 games of the campaign, the joint-best defensive record in the PL, and they go back quite a way.
[ MORE: JPW catches up with Kompany ]
Also around to help Alderweireld settle in at White Hart Lane are other Belgian internationals Mousa Dembele and Nacer Chadli, as Spurs’ lineup has a settled look about it with Mauricio Pochettino‘s men in sixth spot on 17 points from their opening 10 games.
What does Alderweireld make of the season so far as Tottenham prepare for their game against Aston Villa on Monday (Watch live, 3 p.m. ET on NBCSN and online via Live Extra)?
“We had only one defeat and that was the first game. We have a good organization and everybody works very hard for the team,” the former Atletico Madrid defender said. “I think up front we can make more of a difference but we are in a good way and we’ve had a lot of difficult games where we have stood our ground and I think we are a team who are difficult to beat.”
In his second season in charge, Pochettino has Spurs moving in the right direction and almost almost a third of the way into this campaign, how is the Belgian international finding life under the regimented Argentine coach?
“You can see that we want to play pressure on run a lot and have the ball as much as possible, so that is always natural that the team has the ball and wants to attack. It is nice to play for him,” Alderweireld said.
[ MORE: Tottenham smash five past Bournemouth ]
Last season Alderweireld was on loan at Southampton from Atletico Madrid and he enjoyed a magnificent season under Ronald Koeman at St Mary’s but returned to Spain and Saints couldn’t come to an permanent agreement with Atletico after the La Liga side exercised their option to cancel Saints’ previous option-to-buy clause. That led to plenty of suitors wanting to buy him permanently from Atletico and Tottenham won the race as Alderweireld joined for $17.5 million and was reunited with Vertonghen for the third-time in his career.
“I know him, especially from Ajax because I played with him but growing up in Belgium I didn’t play with him because he is two years older than me,” Alderweireld revealed. “It is nice to play with him, we know each other well and I think you can see that on the field.”
As Alderweireld alluded to, he and Vertonghen have a strong bond as they both played in the same youth team in Belgium, Germinal Beerschot, and both grew up in and around Antwerp close to the Dutch border. The duo also made the switch to Dutch giants Ajax and played in their esteemed youth academy before making it into the first team alongside one another in the same time as current Spurs playmaker Christian Eriksen and Luis Suarez |
life-saving medical supplies and lab work, many of those most active in the field — including folks at VillageReach — warn that it’s harder than it looks. They worry that some companies and organizations who are eager to get involved are underestimating the challenges.
The hurdles include complying with, and even helping create, regulatory systems in developing countries to permit the use of UAVs. It can be difficult to find narrowly defined projects where a drone makes economic sense compared to alternative modes of transportation. And there’s the matter of designing drones that can safely and repeatedly perform in harsh environments under a variety of weather conditions.
“A lot of people think that because they can fly a platform [or UAV] in California on a beautiful, blue-sky day that they can save the world,” said Patrick Meier, founder of the Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators), a website that shares information about humanitarian drone use. “But it’s far, far more difficult.”
Bypassing snake-filled forests
Traversing Malawi’s forests full of snakes — including some venomous varieties — by motorbike in an effort to deliver time-sensitive medical tests is just one example of the transportation challenges faced here.
In this landlocked, agriculture-dependent African country, more than half of its 9,600 miles of roadways are unpaved and the population is largely rural. But healthcare needs are urgent: more than 10 percent of the population has HIV/AIDS and nearly 40,000 babies were born to HIV-positive mothers in 2014, according to researchers.
Currently it can take about 11 days to transport babies’ dried blood samples taken at a healthcare facility to a lab for HIV testing, according to UNICEF. By road, it can then take up to eight weeks to get the results back to the facility. If untreated, almost one-third of the infants with HIV will die before turning 1, and half will die by age 2.
So in March, UNICEF led a project to try to speed up HIV testing of infants using helicopter-style drones designed, built and programmed by Matternet.
“It went great,” said Paola Santana, company cofounder and head of network operations. There were stumbling blocks, including finding an appropriate place to launch the UAV — the hospital site initially selected turned out to house an incinerator for medical waste and a tent for treating cholera patients — but the team was able to resolve the issues.
Having UNICEF as a partner was a big plus, said Santana. “If not for their expertise, we would not have been able to pull off this project,” she said.
Now VillageReach is doing an analysis of the project to better understand the costs involved and the feasibility of using drones versus road transportation to carry the samples.
UAV projects must pencil out and offer a reliable solution for government health officials and donors if they’re going to invest in the cutting-edge technology, said Emily Bancroft, vice president for VillageReach, from their offices in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.
“You are not going to go out and get a contract with the government tomorrow, no matter how cool and amazing your technology is. It’s not going to happen,” Bancroft said.
“There is so much proof-of-concept work that needs to be done before a government will be in a position to take a risk,” she said. “Basically, all of the risk needs to be removed.”
An opportunity to have a really big impact
Zipline, a UAV startup operating from the San Francisco Peninsula, made news last month with its announcement that it has a deal with the government of Rwanda to transport blood for infusions between sites covering half of the country.
“It’s an opportunity to have a really big impact,” said Keller Rinaudo, CEO and founder of Zipline. The blood is in high demand for women suffering post-partum hemorrhages and for children. “It’s so precious and such an expensive commodity.”
Rinaudo said their UAV design, which is a robotic airplane, is built to do remotely-operated, high volumes of deliveries over many months.
“This kind of technology will ultimately be more cost effective than motorcycles by a lot,” he said. “It’s so much more efficient because you don’t have a human who needs to be in the loop, or gasoline that costs four times what it does in the U.S.”
Matternet has done healthcare cargo projects in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, Bhutan, Switzerland and now Malawi. They’ve used drones to carry a variety of medical supplies. Their goal, said Santana, is to create networks between clinics and hospitals so patients can get the care they need in local clinics without traveling to distant and overloaded hospitals.
“We’re targeting three networks by 2017,” Santana said.
By connecting the facilities, providers can move medical supplies and resources more easily between sites when they’re needed, she said.
Meier, of UAViators, is taking a slightly different approach to testing drone use through WeRobotics, a nonprofit that Meier cofounded to accelerate the use of robotics solutions in humanitarian efforts.
WeRobotics is co-creating a global network of ‘Flying Labs’ to bring UAVs and other robotics to local partners in developing countries. The nonprofit works with UAV companies that want to field test and demonstrate their devices in humanitarian projects. The idea is for multiple technology companies to participate in the labs in order to build local capacity and give partners a chance to identify the best devices for their own projects.
The nonprofit is exploring multiple sites for the labs, including Cuyo, Philippines, where partners need to transport healthcare providers need to transport medicines and vaccines to impoverished, remote islands. Another potential site is in Nepal’s Himalayas where health clinics are only three miles apart, but the journey by land takes five hours through mountains and valleys without roads. There are two prospective lab sites in Peru, including an Amazon location that needs delivery of medicine, vaccines and brochures addressing public health issues. The fourth site being considered is in Madagascar, where they need a way to deliver first-aid kits and life-saving supplies in emergencies.
Meier is excited about the potential for UAVs to carry medical cargo, but cautions that this is still a very new application for UAVs. The devices have been used for humanitarian efforts, but that has mostly included collecting images after natural disasters — not transporting supplies.
The Malawi project focused on dried-blood samples is “a great ‘use case,’” Meier said. The samples are light and not monetarily valuable, putting less is at stake if they go missing or are lost somehow.
“This could really be a game changer,” Meier said. When VillageReach finishes its cost analysis, “it’s another data point we can all learn from. It’s about helping to document the evidence base — it’s very thin right now.”
Learning from past mistakes
In an effort to further share information among those interested in UAVs for humanitarian and healthcare efforts, VillageReach recently organized the UAV for Payload Delivery Working Group. UAViators is one of the group’s founders, and Matternet and Zipline are participants, as well as other non-governmental organizations, UAV companies and donor groups.
A big concern is making sure that UAVs deliver on the promise of improving healthcare, without overselling it or experiencing too many failures.
VillageReach’s Bancroft recalls some of the hype around the potential for tablets and smartphones to transform global health. The devices have yielded benefits, but not on the scale that some hoped for. The movement has shifted towards digital health in general, and away from a focus on the gadgets themselves, Bancroft said.
“The same thing could happen in UAVs for sure and it’s a more expensive proposition,” she said. “If there are going to be investments made, they need to be made in a smart way.”
For his part, Meier isn’t focused exclusively on flying robotics as the way to bypass poor land-based infrastructure. Some of the manufacturers that WeRobotics are working with are developing maritime robotics that are powered by wave action and solar energy.
The important point, he said, is the shift from manually controlled technologies to increasingly intelligent autonomous systems.
“That is the crux of the whole revolution,” Meier said. “Whether it flies or drives or swims, I couldn’t care less.”Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. reacted on "Hannity" tonight to the surge of violence in Baltimore and the installation of a plaque memorializing Michael Brown in Ferguson.
The bloodshed in Baltimore worsened over the Memorial Day weekend, with 32 reported shootings and nine fatalities. There have now been 35 murders this month in Baltimore, the highest monthly total since 1999.
"Welcome to President Obama's 21st century transformation of the institution of policing," Clarke said. "It's been a disaster. Unnecessary black carnage is what we saw this weekend."
Clarke stated that a growing number of police officers around the country share the same mindset of the anonymous officer who spoke to Sean Hannity about proactive policing.
"That officer and no officer is going to give up on their community in terms of policing," Clarke said. "But it's pretty obvious to me the officers of the Baltimore Police Department have given up on Commissioner Batts. He abandoned them."
Clarke said that police officers around the country are watching and that "they don't want to end up on a memorial wall, they don't want to lose their lives," even though it's known that it could happen.
Hannity asked Clarke if police officers' fear to do their job is justified in this age, referencing the six police officers who were indicted in Freddie Gray's death.
"Ever since the days of Ferguson, this thing has been politicized," Clarke stated. "That's what the American police officer is having problems with right now... It's now almost this mob rule that wants not justice, they want revenge."
Clarke also told Hannity that it's "disgraceful" that Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III is installing a permanent plaque to replace the makeshift memorial in the road where Michael Brown was fatally shot last August.
"Disgraceful, Sean. The only thing that should be drilled into the road over there is a plaque for Officer Darren Wilson who had his life ruined. Who had his world turned upside down for no reason whatsoever," Clarke stated
"How does he put his life back together? Why would they honor Mike Brown when Mike Brown was trying to disarm Officer Darren Wilson? That is a felony. He was engaged in felonious conduct, not only at that point, but in the convenience store. And now they want to honor him? That’s nothing more than appeasement, and it’s a disgrace."
Watch the full interview in the video above.
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Obama Wants Police Officers to Have 'Softer Looking' Uniforms
Sheriff Clarke: President Obama Needs to Do 'Some Soul-Searching'What are the absolute best dishes in New Haven?
Any idiot can tell you that Union League is a good restaurant. But once you get there, how do you know what’s really worth it?
(I actually have no idea.)
Well have no fear, Dear Reader (and my you look nice today!), I am going to share with you my totally subjective list of My Favorite Dishes in New Haven.
Here’s the rules:
Only one dish from a specific restaurant Don’t get crazy with the pizza Don’t bother telling me I’m wrong, I already know thanks
Cool. Good talk everyone.
Without further adieu, here are my absolute favorite things you must order in New Haven:
Quesadilla de Pato – Pacifico
Shredded duck with roasted peppers, smoked gouda cheese served with roasted corn salsita, jalapeno aioli and a pomegranate reduction.
Now, I don’t know what a reduction is, but it sounds delicious. And let me tell you, this is a great dish. The shredded duck works perfectly with the gouda and salsita, and the aioli on top is perfect.
If you’re on a date, you might want to order two. You don’t know if they’ll end up being worth sharing. Don’t risk it.
Also, their half-price bottles of wine on Sundays and Mondays isn’t terrible.
Cheese Pizza – Modern Apizza
I know some folks prefer the Italian Bomb because heart disease is hilarious or the veggie bomb because it’s fun to watch a pie collapse under its own weight like a dying star, but…
Give me the classic cheese pie.
For me, that’s how you truly decide who makes the quality pie. Sure, clams on pie are crazy and the Italian bomb is great, but a basic cheese pizza distills pizza to its simplest, purest form.
And nobody does it better than Modern.
(Sorry, everyone.)
The Smoker – Prime 16
I vacillated between the Smoker (beef patty with gouda, bacon, sauteed onions, crimini mushrooms, lettuce, and tomato) and the Cajun Patty Melt (beef with pepper jack cheese, bacon, tobacco fried onions and chipotle aioli), but at the end of the day, I’d take the Smoker.
There’s something about the combination of gouda, bacon, mushrooms and onions that really sets off their perfect ground beef. Prime 16 was possibly the first restaurant I fell in love with in New Haven and remain my favorite burgers.
The half-price happy hour is also an okay thing in this world.
Ricotta Gnocchi – Zinc
I gave up meat in the fall and one of the challenges has been learning to love vegetarian dishes the way I’ve always loved giant heaps of meat.
It’s not easy.
But the ricotti gnocci makes it feel easy. The roasted cherry tomato puttanesca sauce is scrumptious. I don’t know what’s in it. I don’t even want to know. I don’t care if it came from a terrible diamond mine. It’s that good.
The duck nachos are pretty dope, too. Look at me, breaking rule 1. Take that, me!
Mole pablano con pollo – Mezcal
I don’t know what’s really in mole. I don’t think anybody really does.
(Before you email me angrily, I’m kidding.)
The combination of blended spices, seeds, nuts, chili peppers and Mexican chocolate is perfect. It definitely makes me miss meat. But you don’t have to. It’s not too late.
Plus, their chips and salsa are great while you wait. And they have a tequila gun if you’re really looking to make some mistakes.
Whatever the Daily Special is – Caseus
Caseus is one of my all-time favorite restaurants in New Haven. And their menu is great.
But all of the best dishes I’ve ever had were one-time specials. I had a birthday dinner there with my father, and I ordered a dinner of pulled lamb over sweet potato mash and kale and it was so glorious I don’t know how to put it into words.
I’m pretty sure I died and ascended to Heaven for a couple of seconds there, and all of the angels were made of pulled lamb and all the clouds were sweet potato mash and…
… okay, I’ll stop.
But seriously. They have some creative, brilliant chefs here, and you’d be a fool not to check it out.
Ooh La La Mitzvah – Miya’s
The Miya’s menu is a novella of strange and invasive sushi, but I always come back to the Ooh La La Mitzvah.
There’s just something about the Tempura-fried sockeye salmon and the Arethusa Camambert and avocado that sets my taste buds on fire. In a good way.
It’s a little ridiculous at $20 but it’s worth it. I do it every time and I never regret it.
(Except when my date is like, “Is this guy seriously going to eat a pound of sushi in front of me right now?”)
Tonkotsu Pork Ramen – Mecha Noodle
First of all, it’s pronounced “metch-uh noodle.” Just so you know.
Secondly, I’m cheating here, as I haven’t actually had this cause of the aforementioned giving up meat.
However, I have had the vegetable ramen, which is great, and my buddy Ross swears the pork ramen is like the greatest thing ever, and I trust Ross. You would, too, if you met him. That dude is legit.
He swears if it’s ever worth cheating, it’s worth cheating for this. So I’m gonna say it’s probably amazing. Cause Mecha is amazing. And pork is amazing.
I’d also add chili oil cause there’s nothing that can’t be better with chili oil.
Vegetarian Tikka Masala – House of Naan
I went back and forth on this one. My first thought was the Saag Paneer at Thali Too. But Dave loves this one, and I have to say, he’s not wrong. (Though he’s wrong about shit all the time.)
However, upon much consternation, I will say that I think House of Naan is just a little bit better than Thali Too (which is significantly better than Thali for reasons that are not obvious).
Plus, they can make face-melting spice that makes even a proper Englishman sweat, which is no easy feat. So hats off to you, House of Naan.
Mashed Potato and Bacon Pizza – Bar
Just because. It’s great. Everyone knows it’s fucking great. You can tell someone from the South, ‘Just try this mashed potato pizza’ and they’ll look at you like you’re an alien and then they’ll try it and they’ll be like PRAISE NEW HAVEN I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT.
It’s that good.
What To Do This Weekend
Two big things in New Haven this weekend.
First — where I’ll be — is the Elm City Express NSPL Conference Final game where they will be playing some jerks from Clarkstown, which is apparently a real place.
So come down, tailgate with us starting at 5, and have a great time!
If you aren’t into soccer cause you’re a bad person or whatever, there’s also a free concert on the Green by Sheila E, who is apparently the “Queen of Percussion” and worked with some guy named Prince? I don’t know, maybe you’ve heard of him.
Anyway, it’s a free show and it’s on the Green and it starts at 7:30.
Also, I’ll apologize now for not writing for the next two weeks — I’ll be out of the country for a friend’s wedding in Greece! I’ll miss you, too.
So, what should I write next?
[FBW]
Like this: Like Loading...it’s not true, said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. […] There was a big spike in burglaries, as criminals picked through abandoned homes, Browne said. But all other crime categories were down. […] Overall, crime fell by 25%. And Browne delivered another inconvenient truth for the NRA man — the city actually went a record eight straight days without a single murder.
City officials dismissed that claim as more NRA nonsense and said there were plenty of armed National Guardsmen in the city in the aftermath of Sandy.
No thanks to Wayne LaPierre, who would have been out there blasting people like any good patriot should. All right, but surely that crazy liberal Bloomberg blocked the National Guard from showing up, right?Dammit, LaPierre, you really don't need to make things this easy.
All right, let's hear from an actual person whose business was broken into. Surely that person will agree that what the area needed was some gun-toting lunatics convinced, like LaPierre, that society had now crumbled and their only shot at survival was to go out and murder some folks before they got murdered back.
Even a crime victim said it didn’t look that bad. “There was no food or water, but you could still walk the streets at night,” said Ron Troyano, whose Joann’s Discount Wines and Liquor store actually was looted during Sandy. He called the break-in an aberration. “There was a cop on every street corner,” Troyano said. “It wasn’t that bad.”
His liquor store was robbed during the extended outages. According to Wayne LaPierre, that happened because this guy wasn't willing to sit in front of the door and patriotically shoot anyone who tried to come inside, which would have been a better outcome, according to LaPierre.
So let's see. One, the NRA spokesman is either a huge liar (huge!) or absolutely delusional. Two, he uses these delusions of supposed societal breakdowns to advocate for people buying more guns, and bigger guns. Three, the NRA gets a cut whenever anyone does. Four, the pictures he paints of supposed chaos where there is none are meant, by LaPierre's own words, to encourage other people to think about the circumstances under which they'd maybe need to start shooting a whole bunch of people, and to plan accordingly.
I don't care if we end up with a database of gun owners or a database of crazy, violent people, but Wayne LaPierre should only get to have his name on one of those, not both. Turn in your pop-pop toys, Wayne. We don't want you running around deciding who to shoot, because your judgment sucks.
Contact your senators or representative to demand they support the president's gun safety proposals. And send that all-important electoral message to the NRA by backing Robin Kelly in the IL-02 congressional district special election. You'll feel much better after doing all that!Posted 13 April 2016 - 03:52 PM
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The Prizes!Jeremy Corbyn has put one of his biggest shadow cabinet supporters in charge of the party's local election campaign in his first show of muscle since the Syrian bombing rebellion.
Amid widespread speculation of a front bench reshuffle, the Labour leader has handed responsibility for the May elections to his close ally Jon Trickett, the shadow communities and local government secretary.
The move is being seen as a “clear attempt” to ensure the party fights an anti-austerity campaign amid fears councillors will abandon Mr Corbyn's policies and quietly campaign under their own platform.
Mr Trickett opposes Trident renewal, austerity cuts and Syrian air strikes – positions adopted by Mr Corbyn but rejected by many shadow cabinet ministers.
He also informally advised Mr Corbyn during his leadership campaign and has called for a more democratic approach to policymaking.
The announcement was made by Mr Corbyn at the beginning of the shadow cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning and is understood not to have been openly opposed.
A Labour spokesman confirmed that Mr Trickett had been given the working title of ‘election coordinator’, but declined to comment. It is understood his roles and responsibilities are yet to be finalised.
Photo: PA
Mr Corbyn faces his first major electoral test next May with votes for the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, London Mayor and hundreds of council seats.
Mr Trickett, who was a shadow minister throughout Ed Miliband’s leadership and once served as Gordon Brown’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, is well respected across the party.
However his appointment is being seen as an attempt by Mr Corbyn to stamp his authority on the party after a rocky first three months in the job.
A Labour source said: “Corbyn and co are worried that too many councillors are very happy about Osborne’s plan to give them more independence and more control over budgets.
"They feel that if Trickett’s in charge of the local campaign he will be pushing a more anti-cuts, anti-Tory, anti-austerity message.
"He is absolutely a Corbyn ally. He is on message in the sense that he is clearly committed to the narrative of anti-austerity."
Photo: Rex
It comes amid speculation Mr Corbyn could reshuffle his top team after 11 shadow cabinet ministers voted for Syrian air strikes even though their leader was opposed.
Despite Mr Corbyn being forced into giving a free vote a majority of Labour members, MPs and his own shadow cabinet backed his stance and opposed bombing.
The vote has raised questions about whether Mr Corbyn should change his front bench to better represent his personal views.
Ken Livingstone, the former London Mayor and long-term ally of Mr Corbyn, fuelled speculation that he could join the front bench recently by indicating he would take a peerage if offered by the Labour leader.
However Mr Corbyn’s team have played down talk of a reshuffle, saying no changes are being planned.Remember earlier this summer when Ubisoft sneakily soft-launched Assassin’s Creed Memories (Free) in New Zealand and Australia, with nary an announcement or trailer beforehand? Earlier this morning, they employed that same baffling strategy with another new title: Assassin’s Creed Identity is currently free (with in-app purchases) for anyone with an iPhone living in Oceania (or pretending to).
Identity obviously ins’t the first Assassin’s Creed game on the App Store, but Pirates (Free) focused entirely on naval combat and Memories is a free-to-play card battler. This new game sticks out for being an arch-traditional Assassin’s Creed title, full of sneaking and stabbing and climbing. According to a press release sent out by Ubisoft (and correlated in the game’s thread on our forums), players will be able to customize an assassin and use him to complete various missions in an open-world version of Renaissance Italy, one of the series’ tried and true locales.
Ubisoft headquarters has tapped Blue Byte, one of its subsidiary developers, with development on Identity, which is being made in Unity with assets from previous console titles. “This soft launch is an important step in the development process for Assassin’s Creed Identity," said Cyril Voiron, Blue Byte’s head of mobile development, before adding that Identity “will deliver an authentic Assassin’s Creed experience on mobile devices."
Blue Byte will be using the soft-launch period to gather feedback from players in Australia and New Zealand, which seems like a good call since first impressions from our forums haven’t been all that positive. Multiple members have reported sluggish controls and poor performance, despite the fact that the game doesn’t even run on older hardware — only iPhone 5, iPad 3, or better.
Still, that’s mostly nothing that can’t be fixed, and we’ll keep you posted as new info becomes available. In the meantime, you can check out Assassin’s Creed Identity on Twitter and Facebook.[SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE SEASON FINALE OF AMERICAN HORROR STORY: COVEN!!!!]
The Supreme has been crowned!!! On the season finale of FX’s American Horror Story: Coven, Cordelia was named the Supreme, following in the footsteps of her mother Fiona. But people with M names had a rougher night with the deaths of Myrtle, Misty, and Madison. EW talked to co-creator Ryan Murphy about the wrap-up plus his plans for season four…and five!
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Did you always know Cordelia was going to be the Supreme?
RYAN MURPHY: Yeah. I mean I think that was always the trajectory of that character. The whole season has been about mothers and daughters, second chances, second phases in your life, believing in yourself when no one does. And if you look back she was always that character. Even in the first episode they say, “Are you the Supreme?” and she says “No” with such adamants and sadness. So you can really go back and clock Cordelia’s arc which we’ve enjoyed doing.
Did Sarah always know she was the Supreme?
No, we never tell anyone those things.
When did she find out?
I told her a couple episodes before just so she knew what was coming.
The scene with Cordelia giving the TV interview reminded me a bit of Lana’s interview in AHS: Asylum’s finale “Madness Ends.” Was that a deliberate homage?
Perhaps a little bit. I always loved that — that all the girls from all across the world were now free to be a little more open and out of the closet. It was a metaphor for so many things. But I can see the similarity there.
I loved everyone’s personal hells. Were those fun to come up with?
It was fun. Of course the most fun was Madison’s. They were all sort of fun. They were all about not being seen, not being heard. I think the most fun one to come up with was the Misty Day stuff, because I’ve always thought dissecting frogs was such a horrifying thing for kids to do. And it was also sort of sad. Her arc was about all living things and having to kill them over and over. It was very upsetting.
That was a dark ending for her.
It was tragic. It was sad. But I think the show always does stuff like that. There were some happy endings on the show, but I think Fiona’s ending is the most hideous of all and the most stunning of all, but she has that coming.
Did you always have that ending in mind for Fiona? That her hell was being in a relationship with The Axeman and living in the country?
I don’t think that was what the hell was. I think her hell — and maybe this is because I’m a new parent that I really felt this — but I think true hell is waking up and realizing you’ve blown it with your kids. The whole season she’s been socializing and partying and traveling the world and having sex with men. At the very end, particularly in that beautiful death scene, she got the tragedy of her mistake and her life.
I know Sarah and Jessica love working together. Did they like shooting that final goodbye?
Yeah, they love working together. They’re good friends. I don’t think Jessica liked all the hours in the makeup that we put her through. But she was a real sport about it. I know she loved the writing of the scene and she loved what it was about. She’s a mother with daughters, and those two love really emotional scenes.
How long did Jessica’s makeup take?
Hours and hours. First you have to start with a skullcap, and then you have to do the hair coming through. It’s not easy. But she’s a trouper, Jessica. Jessica is one of the world’s true beauties but has always loved to hide behind character-y things. She likes that. Look at her work in Grey Gardens.
One of my favorite moments is Queenie dancing under mind control from Cordelia.
Yeah, that’s very funny. There’s some funny things in this episode.
Is Myrtle’s last word “Balenciaga”?
Yes! “Any last words?” “Only one: Balenciaga!”
The opening scene with Stevie was great. So that was her idea?
Well, she brought it to my attention that we had been writing about the Seven Wonders, and she said, “Hey, do you remember I did this song?” And as soon as she said that, I instantly remembered that she did. So I got her to stay an extra day and do that as the cold opening, because I thought it was fun. So we added that to the script. I think it’s really great and clever and cute and a great homage to her.
So my guess for season 4 is that it’s set in Paris based on Fiona going there. Am I close?
No. You could not be more far off.
Can you say anything about who’s returning next year definitely?
I don’t wanna say because we haven’t even started the deals, and I literally just locked this thing on Monday. I’m meeting with people too and the writers haven’t even started yet.
Did you guys always intend for the Delphine/Marie storyline to be wrapped up before the finale so you could focus on the Seven Wonders?
Pretty much. That’s what we were always heading towards. I did love Kathy and Angela so much on the show that we tried to interweave a scene with them in hell in the last episode, but it was way off course. I told Kathy about it, and she said, “Well, if this is the way I go out, it’s a helluva way to go out, so I’m down with it.” So when she said that, I felt better about that plan. I just thought it was stronger.
Do you imagine that Madison is now a doll in Spalding’s attic?
Yes, I think she’s a forever doll.
I like the idea of Kyle as the new Spalding.
I particularly really enjoyed the whole Frankenstein [plot], like I love that he kills his creator. It’s almost the same thing that Fiona wants Cordelia to do. I was worried about Evan having to strangle Emma, because they’re deeply, madly in love and dating [in real life], but they went for it and had a great time doing it.
I was thinking that must have been so weird for him to kill his fiancée at work.
I think they both approached it in a very respectful way from the point of view of the characters. I like that whole Frankenstein ending. Season 1 and season 2, Evan died at the end, and in this one, he sort of lives on in an immortal way, and I like that we changed that.
This season had probably the least bleak ending. Do you ever think you’ll return to Miss Robichaux’s?
Never. No, I would personally never return to something we’ve done. I hear from people now who — because of Netflix, for example — are just now watching season 1. TV is different now, and the way people watch TV is different now. I know you’re sad. I’m a little sad to say goodbye to those characters. But next year comes along, and it’s a new, exciting batch of people and story, and I think that’s the energy and power of the show. So no, I would never go back. You know, I had considered, because I loved writing those women so much, spinning it off and making it a separate thing. But I was just like, “That’s not the show.” That’s not why I did the show.
Do you still think next season will be darker?
Hmmmm. I don’t know what to say. It’s a combination of things. It’s a combination of two time periods, with the main one being the 1950s. I don’t know. We haven’t started writing it yet, so I don’t really know the tone. I like that we had a lot of comedy in this year, and I like the comic characters, so I think that will remain.
Looking back now that it’s over, what do you think of Coven?
I do feel it’s my favorite, but I say that for every season, because I have sadness about saying goodbye. I thought it was a lot of fun to work on and challenging. I have the next two seasons plotted out, and I like both of them. I did marvel that the show grew so much, because we went into this season and everybody thought it would be our lowest-rated season because it would be so specific. The fact that it became the highest-rated one was interesting to me, and it proves you can never predict what people are going to like. I was surprised and shocked. I’m really proud of it. I love the actors in it. I love the costumes, and the production design was amazing this year. I thought all the department heads did an amazing job. Next year will be equally as challenging, because so much of it is period and bizarre and crazy and gothic. My feeling is, if you loved this season, you’ll love next season. It has the same sort of comedic tone to it.
Has anyone online guessed it yet?
No. No one has guessed it.
People seem to really want American Horror Story: Circus.
I saw those posters. I don’t know where people came up with that idea. Sometimes I think its people wanting us to do topics and doing fan posters. No one has completely guessed what it is.
But you already know what season 5 is?
I do, because it’s a radically different idea from the stuff we’ve been doing and it will take a lot of playing.OTTAWA — On Thursday in Putnam County Common Pleas Court, Trenton Lauf, 38, Ottoville, was found guilty on two charges — rape and the illegal use of a minor in nudity — related to the sexual abuse of his stepdaughter. Abuse of the child began in 2013 when she was just 10-years of age and continued sporadically over the course of the next two years.
Evidence in the trial, which began on Wednesday, relied heavily on testimony presented by the now 13-year old child. According to the girl — for purposes of the court identified as “Jane Doe, date of birth 2003” — Lauf first forced her to perform oral sex on him in December of 2013. In her testimony, the child said that the abuse continued over the course of several months during which time Lauf provided money to her, telling her to “keep your mouth shut.”
The girl further testified that she reported the abuse to her mother on several occasions, an assertion that William Kluge, Lauf’s defense attorney, returned to repeatedly over the course of the trial in an effort to undermine her testimony.
“I just want you to keep two things in mind: December of 2013 and July of 2015,” Kluge told the jury in his closing argument. “Why are those |
wasn't exactly a giant leap from his past occupation in Level 2, but in these bleak, cheesy framed motivational poster donned white hallways, a promotion was the only thing to look forward to besides living to see another day. Teddy positioned himself firmly into his all too familiar office chair and laid out his new assignments on his desk. With a clearing of his throat, Ted whispered to himself their names. "Alright, let's see. SCP-1709, Jesus that's disgusting. SCP-358, and 1969. Hmph. The disco ball of death, shit. Well... not all of them can be easy I suppose." Repositioning himself in his seat, Teddy went to work writing up his latest findings, and promptly went to sleep. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Almost as quickly as he fell asleep, Ted jolted back awake at the sound of sirens wailing. There was no lighting accept for the red glow cast by the emergency systems. Ted looked around frantically, slowly processing the levity of his situation. <<ALL PERSONNEL -- EVACUATE TO YOUR DESIGNATED PANIC ROOMS. ALL POWER GENERATORS OF SITE 19 HAVE FAILED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.>> Ted jumped out of his seat and quickly rushed to look out of the door to his office. White collar workers were scrambling through the hallway, all of them trying to remember what wing their panic room was located. Ted couldn't remember either. It had been years since their last breach, reviewing breach protocols just became a boring and pointless chore. Ted jumped back into his office, frantically searching for the protocols. Was it on the desk? No. In the document drawer? No. Under the paperweight? No. On the bookshelves? No. In any of the filing cabinets? No. No. No. No. In the goddamn trash can? Of course not. All out of options, Ted ran back out into the hall. Everyone had disappeared by now. It was just him, in an empty hallway, surrounded by sirens and red flashing lights. He ran left down the hall and down the stairs to the nearest panic room. The door he met was a large, iron clad, pressure locked door. He knew trying to pry it open was useless, but Ted tried anyway to no avail. The feeling of hopelessness slowly began to dawn on Ted. The feeling grew with each airlock he failed to open. And along with it, another feeling arose. A sense of fear. A fear of whatever might have found it's way out of containment during the outage. And this fear grew right along side the the empty feeling of hopelessness. On his trip to the fifth airlock was where his fear was justified. Ted entered a small near-featureless hallway (with the exception of a door) and closed the door behind him. As he turned around, at the other end hallway was an impossibly skinny, nine foot tall man, visible by nothing more than the flashing red light behind him. Whatever hope Ted was feebly holding on to was replaced with dread, as the long slick tendrils emerging from the strangely slender man pulled him close to a fate worse than death. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "WHO'S READY FO' SOME MUTHAFUCKIN JAGERMEISTER?!?!?" Connor stood in the kitchen, proudly presenting his alcoholic bounty to the giddy crowd. Matty was the first to respond with an astounding bravado of sheer intelligence. "HIT ME UP NIGGA!!!!" One by one, each man at the kitchen table downed their first shot. First to enter the land of the drunken was Matty, followed by Alex, Luke, Nick, Robin, Other Alex, and Connor. As always, this was the ritual they began all of their "11 drunk guys" videos with, the ritual today being for their second shot at SCP: Containment Breach. (Which they should totally do again since the game has evolved greatly and is much more developed since the last time they played it.) With the downing of multiple beers, they were finally ready for the epic, thrilling, screaming and profanity filled adventure that lied ahead. Alex sat in front of his computer and started up the game. "Alright, everyone ready?" asked Alex, switching on the fraps or OBS or whatever screen recorder they use. "Ready!" yelled everyone in a drunken uncoordinated unison. "Name the save pubemuncher!" "What about shit on the nipples?" "No! Cuddling buttcheeks!" "Shitbitch! Shitbitch!" "Bitch-shit." "Anal embrace." "I like that one." "Wait. I got it. Cuddling Bitch Anal Embrace." Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the sound proof walls. Maybe their drunken yelling drowned the sound out. Or maybe they did hear the screams and gunfire but dismissed it for game ambiance. But despite their failure to realize it, outside was a very different world than in. The unheard screams were that of women and children. The unheard gunfire was that of police and military forces trying to win an already losing battle against the paranormal and the extraterrestrial. Blood was being spilled and life was quickly diminishing as the once kind town they lived in was quickly becoming an unforgiving hell. And the drunken men inside continued existing in a carefree bliss. Until the next installment that is.
RAW Paste Data
Theodore nodded to Bridget as he made his way to his desk, a steaming mug of joe in his hand. Level 3 researcher. Teddy was finally making his way up in the world, without the world even knowing that he existed. Sure Level 3 wasn't exactly a giant leap from his past occupation in Level 2, but in these bleak, cheesy framed motivational poster donned white hallways, a promotion was the only thing to look forward to besides living to see another day. Teddy positioned himself firmly into his all too familiar office chair and laid out his new assignments on his desk. With a clearing of his throat, Ted whispered to himself their names. "Alright, let's see. SCP-1709, Jesus that's disgusting. SCP-358, and 1969. Hmph. The disco ball of death, shit. Well... not all of them can be easy I suppose." Repositioning himself in his seat, Teddy went to work writing up his latest findings, and promptly went to sleep. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Almost as quickly as he fell asleep, Ted jolted back awake at the sound of sirens wailing. There was no lighting accept for the red glow cast by the emergency systems. Ted looked around frantically, slowly processing the levity of his situation. <<ALL PERSONNEL -- EVACUATE TO YOUR DESIGNATED PANIC ROOMS. ALL POWER GENERATORS OF SITE 19 HAVE FAILED. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.>> Ted jumped out of his seat and quickly rushed to look out of the door to his office. White collar workers were scrambling through the hallway, all of them trying to remember what wing their panic room was located. Ted couldn't remember either. It had been years since their last breach, reviewing breach protocols just became a boring and pointless chore. Ted jumped back into his office, frantically searching for the protocols. Was it on the desk? No. In the document drawer? No. Under the paperweight? No. On the bookshelves? No. In any of the filing cabinets? No. No. No. No. In the goddamn trash can? Of course not. All out of options, Ted ran back out into the hall. Everyone had disappeared by now. It was just him, in an empty hallway, surrounded by sirens and red flashing lights. He ran left down the hall and down the stairs to the nearest panic room. The door he met was a large, iron clad, pressure locked door. He knew trying to pry it open was useless, but Ted tried anyway to no avail. The feeling of hopelessness slowly began to dawn on Ted. The feeling grew with each airlock he failed to open. And along with it, another feeling arose. A sense of fear. A fear of whatever might have found it's way out of containment during the outage. And this fear grew right along side the the empty feeling of hopelessness. On his trip to the fifth airlock was where his fear was justified. Ted entered a small near-featureless hallway (with the exception of a door) and closed the door behind him. As he turned around, at the other end hallway was an impossibly skinny, nine foot tall man, visible by nothing more than the flashing red light behind him. Whatever hope Ted was feebly holding on to was replaced with dread, as the long slick tendrils emerging from the strangely slender man pulled him close to a fate worse than death. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "WHO'S READY FO' SOME MUTHAFUCKIN JAGERMEISTER?!?!?" Connor stood in the kitchen, proudly presenting his alcoholic bounty to the giddy crowd. Matty was the first to respond with an astounding bravado of sheer intelligence. "HIT ME UP NIGGA!!!!" One by one, each man at the kitchen table downed their first shot. First to enter the land of the drunken was Matty, followed by Alex, Luke, Nick, Robin, Other Alex, and Connor. As always, this was the ritual they began all of their "11 drunk guys" videos with, the ritual today being for their second shot at SCP: Containment Breach. (Which they should totally do again since the game has evolved greatly and is much more developed since the last time they played it.) With the downing of multiple beers, they were finally ready for the epic, thrilling, screaming and profanity filled adventure that lied ahead. Alex sat in front of his computer and started up the game. "Alright, everyone ready?" asked Alex, switching on the fraps or OBS or whatever screen recorder they use. "Ready!" yelled everyone in a drunken uncoordinated unison. "Name the save pubemuncher!" "What about shit on the nipples?" "No! Cuddling buttcheeks!" "Shitbitch! Shitbitch!" "Bitch-shit." "Anal embrace." "I like that one." "Wait. I got it. Cuddling Bitch Anal Embrace." Maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe it was the sound proof walls. Maybe their drunken yelling drowned the sound out. Or maybe they did hear the screams and gunfire but dismissed it for game ambiance. But despite their failure to realize it, outside was a very different world than in. The unheard screams were that of women and children. The unheard gunfire was that of police and military forces trying to win an already losing battle against the paranormal and the extraterrestrial. Blood was being spilled and life was quickly diminishing as the once kind town they lived in was quickly becoming an unforgiving hell. And the drunken men inside continued existing in a carefree bliss. Until the next installment that is.Andasol 1 is Europe’s first parabolic trough solar thermal power station, which went online in Nov 2008. It is located on a high desert site in Granada, Spain, which enjoys a high level of direct insolation – an average of 2,136 kWh / m2 / year. The mirror field — turbine infrastructure can yield a peak electricity generation capacity of 49.9 MWe (20 MWe average, see below). It also has a thermal storage system using molten salt.
The purpose of this post is to consider how one might scale up an Andasol 1 type plant in order to meet a rated power demand for 8,000 hours per year — thereby giving it a capacity factor of ~90%, similar to a baseload coal or nuclear power stations. This is a first attempt to improve the comparisons first given in TCASE 4.
But first, let’s look at the technology and current numbers. Here’s a good summary of its main features:
The Andasol 1 storage system absorbs part of the heat produced in the solar field during the day. A turbine produces electricity using this heat during the night, or when the sky is overcast. This process almost doubles the number of operational hours at the solar thermal power plant per year, the company said. The heat generated in the solar field will be stored in a molten mixture of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate. Both substances are used in food production as preservatives and are also used as fertilizer. The storage tank consists of two, 14-meter high tanks with a diameter of 36 meters and a capacity of 28,500 tons of molten salt. During the pumping process from the cold to the hot tank, the molten salt absorbs additional heat at an outlet temperature of approximately 280°C, reaching a temperature of 380°C. A fully loaded storage system can keep the turbine in operation for 7.5 hours, which means almost 24-hour operation of the power plant in during high sunshine periods.
More technical details, including some useful illustrations of the storage system, can be found here and here. In summary, the solar collectors for the existing plant add up to a total of 510,120 square metres (0.51 km2), consisting of 209,664 mirrors along 312 rows with a total length of 24 km, with 90 kilometres of absorption pipes. The total physical area occupied by the plant (after appropriate collector spacing, and allowing for the storage and turbine housing, etc.) is 1.95 km2. The estimated energy yield is 178 GWh / year (I haven’t seen reports of actual performance data), at a capacity factor of 40.7%, and an average power yield of 10.4 W/m2. It will use 560 million litres/year of fresh water, mostly for cooling the steam circuit, drawn from local ground water (a plant using air cooling would have a lower efficiency and would have to be larger to compensate). The lifespan of the plant is estimated to be 30 — 40 years.
Precise construction costs are hard to come by, but it seems to have been about €300 million ($AUD 500 million). This works out to be $25 billion per GWe of average power, but this is clearly a first-of-a-kind cost that can be expected to fall with replicated builds. The levelised cost of energy (including the energy storage) is estimated to be 45 c/kWh (in Australian cents) — which is about the size of the Spanish feed-in tariff which is set to run for 25 years. Including its charge for electricity to customers, the maximum cost has been capped at 58 c/kWh.
Some of the above data were already summarised in TCASE 4, and cooling water requirements were covered in TCASE 6.
The crucial data for construction material requirements for Andasol 1 is found in the NEEDS report 2008, “Final report on technical data, costs, and life cycle inventories of solar thermal power plants” – specifically, Table 7.3, page 88. Early in the report (page 28), they calculate costs for a solar thermal power station, located in the Sahara (with better insolation than Spain, but let’s skip this detail for simplicity), generating for 8000 hours per annum — close enough to 90%. They base this on 16 hours storage per day, which they project can be achieved by 2020. The value of 16 seems to be an average number of hours per year, rather than the crucial minimum delivery. Given that the time in winter that is suitable for generating with solar thermal technology is about 5 or 6 hours per day (on clear sunny days), the power station would need to have 18 to 19 hours storage to allow it to have a capacity factor of 90% (excluding bad weather).
The base figures for material inputs for the current plant works out to be 1,303 tonnes of concrete, 406 tonnes of steel, and 133 tonnes of glass, per average MWe. To increase the capacity factor from 40% to 90%, one would have to roughly increase the size of the mirror field by a factor of 2.25 (90/40) and the thermal storage facilities by 2.5 (18.5/7.5). The larger mirror field can be rationalised on two fronts: (1) more collecting area is required to recharge the larger volume of storage salts, and (2) the solar multiple for winter will be about twice that of summer.
Let’s use a half-way figure from above — 2.4 — as a scaling constant. This gives 3,127 tonnes of concrete, 974 tonnes of steel, and 300 tonnes of glass per MWe delivered at a 90% capacity factor. Scaled up to the size of an AP-1000 reactor (1,154 MWe at 90 % CF), this is 3.61 million tonnes of concrete, 1.12 million tonnes of steel, and 0.34 million tonnes of glass, with the total plant covering ~101 km2 of desert. By comparison, the reactor would require 0.24 million tonnes of concrete and 0.015 tonnes of steel, and occupy 0.04 km2 of land. So, the comparative solar : nuclear ratios comes out as follows:
————————————————
Ratio of materials/land requirements, for equivalent solar thermal : nuclear (both calculated at 90 % capacity factor):
Concrete = 15 : 1; Steel = 75 : 1; Land = 2,530 : 1
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The conclusion? When energy storage is properly accounted for, the material and land requirements for solar thermal vs nuclear power area appallingly lop-sided. Further, if the solar plant doesn’t end up lasting 40 years, and the AP-1000 lasts 60 years (nearly half of the US reactor fleet is now licensed to run for this long), then the numbers get even more skewed.
Needless to say, for concrete and steel — two of the most carbon-intensive products embedded in any power generation facility — this amounts to a large difference in the embodied energy and associated greenhouse gas emissions of the capital infrastructure. As such, the additional mining, required to deliver the limestone and iron ore needed to produce the construction materials for solar thermal versus nuclear, must be set against uranium mining (until Generation IV reactors are standard, that is). Anti-nukes who raise the mining objection against nuclear power, but ignore the mining associated with solar (or wind) construction, are presenting a false comparison. They can’t have it both ways.
Although I have been careful in my calculations, the above figures are nevertheless a first attempt. As such I’m happy to entertain challenges from commenters, and if these criticisms prove to be right, then I’ll happy adjust my comparative figures accordingly.Free-to-air channel will feature music, sport, culture, fashion and technology programs as well as SBS2 shows including The Feed
SBS is launching a new youth-focused channel called SBS Viceland on 15 November, replacing SBS2.
The new channel will be owned and operated by SBS but will be programmed with content from the US-Canadian media company Vice. It is a free-to-air channel that will be available on television and online platforms.
SBS2 was launched in 2009. In 2013 it rebranded with a younger focus and an orange logo, as well as a flagship program, The Feed, hosted by Marc Fennell.
The managing director of Vice Australia, Michael Slonim, said the partnership would “help catapult Vice further into the consciousness of young Australians”.
“SBS shares our storytelling sensibilities and curiosity about the world, and we’re delighted to be partnering up to bring Viceland to this market in the biggest way possible,” he said.
ABC boss Mark Scott questions whether Australia still needs SBS Read more
The global media company announced this year it would launch in more than 50 new countries, including many in the Middle East and Africa, and expand services in existing markets including Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
The SBS managing director, Michael Ebeid, said “exploring diversity through culture” was at the heart of SBS’s purpose, and Vice would bring some of the best available content from across the world.
The programming is yet to be revealed but the channel will continue to feature SBS2 shows such as The Feed as well as Vice shows on culture, music, sport, fashion and technology.
Viceland, created by the director Spike Jonze, was launched in the US this year with programs including Gaycation (with Ellen Page and Ian Daniel), Huang’s World (with Eddie Huang), Noisey (with Zach Goldbaum) and F*ck, That’s Delicious (with Action Bronson).
In August the site’s founder, Shane Smith, said traditional media companies had failed to connect with young audiences or cover the issues they were interested in.
Last month the Columbia Journalism Review criticised Vice for its treatment of freelance journalists in the US. “Journalists who have worked for Vice tell CJR that the company published their work without paying them for it, promised them assignments which were later rescinded, and asked reporters for their help with documentaries that covered issues they had written about without any plans to pay them for their work,” the review reported.
Vice responded by outlining steps it planned to take to improve the relationship.By Yoon Ja-young
With pressure continuing from U.S. President Donald Trump for a renegotiation of the free trade agreement between Korea and the United States (KORUS FTA), the two countries are likely to start talks next year.
Trump, however, is complicating the issue by solely focusing on the U.S. trade deficit, which would not be solved through renegotiation, according to Hyun Jung-taik, president of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP).
"There are legal procedures for renegotiation. The governments must notify, respectively, the National Assembly (Korea) and the Congress (U.S.), and a joint committee should organize a special meeting," Hyun said.
"Since the U.S. is handling NAFTA first, which is a bigger deal than the KORUS FTA, the renegotiation with us would come only after talks over NAFTA."
Hyun said reexamining the KORUS FTA is not a bad idea when considering that years have passed since its implementation. "There might be things that need improvement. We might need a revision to better reflect the changes in global surroundings."
However, he said renegotiation won't be easy since the U.S. president has only one motivation _ decreasing the U.S. trade deficit.
"There is no way to reduce the deficit by revising an FTA which basically aims at opening doors. The U.S. official who will be in charge of the renegotiation will be under great pressure since they would already know that it doesn't work that way."
He said that the U.S. president made the game difficult for his Korean counterpart to accept as well by declaring decreasing the deficit as the goal of the renegotiation.
"The fundamentals of negotiations is give and take. If decreasing the U.S. deficit is the goal, the renegotiated deal would not be approved by Korean public."
It is evident that the KORUS FTA benefited the U.S. as well as Korea. According to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), the KORUS FTA decreased U.S. deficit with Korea by $15.8 billion. It recorded a $28.3 billion trade deficit in 2015, but it would have been as large as $44 billion without the KORUS FTA.
"In bilateral free trade, there are third parties. The KORUS FTA helped the U.S. beat, for instance, Japan, in the Korean market, and vice versa for Korea. Especially, the U.S. saw huge a growth in services exports to Korea following the FTA," he pointed out.
However, since the president of the U.S., the world's biggest market, is focused on the trade deficit, Korea as well as other exporters such as China, Japan and Germany have to deal with it. Hyun advises the government to look at the matter from the broad perspective of the Korea-U.S. alliance.
"The KORUS FTA is neither the cause of the trade imbalance nor an effective means to correct it. However, Korea should promote the efforts it has been making to decrease the trade surplus, such as buying U.S. weapons, airplanes and shale gas."
He also advises the government to watch negotiations over NAFTA which will precede the KORUS FTA. The U.S. may demand Korea to open the legal services market wider or take issue with Korea's drug pricing. Korea, meanwhile, may demand its counterpart to be more transparent in the anti-dumping process. The renegotiation may also be good opportunity to improve protection for Korean investors in the U.S.
Hyun said the global atmosphere is not favorable since trade protectionism is increasing. "Korea was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the multilateral system under the WTO. There should be joint efforts to keep this."
Despite the emergence of "strong men," Hyun pointed out that there have been a few positive moves that aim at free trade, such as the agreement between the EU and Canada and the one between the EU and Japan. "The U.S. may give second thoughts to protectionism since the free trade agreement between the EU and Japan means the U.S. being left out," he said.
Regarding China's economic retaliation on the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system here, he said the retaliation would continue since THAAD has become a critical agenda item for Chinese leaders. He also pointed out that such a move was predictable since China is trying to nurture its domestic businesses in sectors where Korea has a competitive edge.
"Even so, curtailing trade would damage China as well since it has been importing key materials and components from Korea."
He cited low oil prices, interest rates, and geopolitical risks as other external risks for the economy.
"Korea imports oil, but low oil prices have damaged Korea as well since its markets like Russia and Brazil were hit."
He said the key rate hike by the U.S. is likely to hit Korea indirectly rather than directly since other developing countries will be hit harder.crowquill said: This may make things easier as once we know definitively what each means according to international classification, patients can insist that medical practitioners use the correct terminology for their illness. Click to expand...
I really don't think this will make much of a difference in the short and medium term. In the longer term it might. This is because doctors might code it for ME, but still treat it as CFS. In general doctors don't really care about bureaucratic codes, and such codes do not dictate tests or treatment.In the UK the only way we will see a difference is for NICE to actually treat them differently, at least for the next several years. There is a real risk that ME is coded differently and then treated the same under the assumption this is yet another MUS that is really psychosomatic. This has to be opposed separately from just using ICD codes.In the US the adoption of SEID might do something similar.What is of concern is those patients who do not easily get an ME diagnosis. For example, those who are coded as CFS because no tests are run, under NICE guidelines, and doctors dismiss other symptoms. Or patients who fit many psychiatric diagnoses. One observation that has recently been made by a presenter in another thread, is that even most healthy people can now be diagnosed with a psychatric disorder, the diagnostic categories are that broad.Also of concern is any patient who has some kind of fatigue syndrome other than ME. With prevailing attitudes they will still be as vulnerable to a psych diagnosis as they are now.ICD and DSM are just bureaucratic codes, and its long been recognized they have little scientific or clinical validity. They are reporting codes.Yet there is a public relations value here, especially if advocacy uses this carefully. However we have to wait for finalization of the ICD before we can do anything.It will also not prevent some psychiatrists from rediagnosing patients. If they decide somatoform disorder, or one of the modern equivalents, is more appropriate, then there will still be issues. This already happens as they ignore existing ICD codes entirely (aside from coding forms), which is pretty well what many doctors do, if not most of them.What might be of value in the medium to long term is that there will be increased legitimacy of grant applications only using an ME diagnosis, which might result in studies with more homogeneous cohorts.Jim Webb
Jim Webb, a former senator and Democratic presidential candidate who is rumored to be under consideration for the defense secretary job in President Donald Trump's Cabinet, made a memorable impression at a debate in 2015 with his answer to a question asking which enemy he was proudest to have made.
The Vietnam War veteran said his enemy of choice was the "soldier that threw their grenade that wounded me." He then added: "But he's not around right now to talk to."
Webb was most likely referring to the incident in 1969 that earned him the Navy Cross, the second-highest military decoration that is awarded to Navy and Marine Corps members.
When Webb received the honor, this is how that incident was described, according to the Military Times (emphasis added):
When the hostile soldiers failed to answer him and threw a grenade which detonated dangerously close to him, First Lieutenant Webb detonated a claymore mine in the bunker aperture, accounting for two enemy casualties and disclosing the entrance to a tunnel.
Despite the smoke and debris from the explosion and the possibility of enemy soldiers hiding in the tunnel, he then conducted a thorough search which yielded several items of equipment and numerous documents containing valuable intelligence data.
Continuing the assault, he approached a third bunker and was preparing to fire into it when the enemy threw another grenade. Observing the grenade land dangerously close to his companion, First Lieutenant Webb simultaneously fired his weapon at the enemy, pushed the Marine away from the grenade, and shielded him from the explosion with his own body. Although sustaining painful fragmentation wounds from the explosion, he managed to throw a grenade into the aperture and completely destroy the remaining bunker.
The Washington Post highlighted a 2007 Rolling Stone story that expands on the incident:
Webb was leading his platoon toward what he thought was an empty complex of bunkers. As he and his men approached, three Viet Cong soldiers jumped out. Webb grabbed one and drew his.45 on the other two, capturing all three. Webb and another soldier moved on to a second bunker; this time, a grenade sprayed him with shrapnel, but he detonated a claymore at the bunker's entrance, killing two Viet Cong. Webb kept going, approaching a third bunker, where another grenade detonated. Webb shot the Viet Cong who threw it and hurled himself in front of his Marine, absorbing the brunt of the blast. Even then he kept fighting, lobbing another grenade into the bunker, killing the last of his enemies.
In his mind, it was the compression of his past into a moment of perfect, unthinking violence, redeeming all the history that had put him opposite a stranger and a grenade on the opposite side of the world.
Time pointed out that Webb was the only combat veteran in the 2016 presidential race.
Webb told Time after the debate: "I understand foreign policy and defense policy. I've worked on it every possible way you could do it. I grew up in the military I served in combat. My son served in combat. I spent five years in the Pentagon. I served as a military planner in the region."
Webb dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary race in October 2015.Retired priest arrested over child sex claims
Posted
A retired Catholic priest from the New South Wales Hunter Valley has been charged with 14 child sex offences dating back to the 1980s.
Police from Strikeforce Georgiana, established more than two years ago to investigate child sex abuse within the Church, today arrested the 68-year-old man from Mayfield.
He has been charged with 14 offences including sexual intercourse with a child aged under 16, indecent assault and acts of indecency.
Police say the charges relate to the alleged assault of two boys at a former Catholic convent in the Newcastle suburb of Windale in the 1980s.
The 68-year-old is the eighth person to be charged by Strikeforce Georgiana - six of them have been members of the clergy.
The man has been granted conditional bail and will face court next month.
Topics: sexual-offences, community-and-society, child-abuse, religion-and-beliefs, catholic, law-crime-and-justice, crime, mayfield-2304, australia, nswSAN ANTONIO -- The Iraqi interpreter wanted a ride in the Humvee after a long mission outside Baghdad in April 2007. Already crowded with armor-clad soldiers, Army Spc. Tony Macie told him he'd have to wait for more vehicles to return to Patrol Base Dog to pick him up.
No Humvees arrived, but a dump truck weighed down with explosives did. The detonation reduced the base to a pile of bricks. Survivors radioed: "broken arrow," a distress signal for units in danger of being overrun by the enemy.
A mushroom cloud plumed overhead. Macie's unit sped back to pull the dead and wounded out of the rubble. It took days. Two U.S. troops were killed, along with two interpreters -- including the one Macie told to wait.
Did Macie kill him?
The question surged through Macie's brain circuitry in the twin, almond-shaped amygdalae, which regulate emotions, memories and fear. His mind braced for an imminent attack as adrenaline flooded neural receptors nearly every day during his 14-month tour, and continued once he returned home.
"My brain wasn't able to shut off. It was going a million miles a minute. You need it on a deployment. But it's not normal at home," said Macie, whose job as a forward observer for artillery strikes meant his mind would never stop processing where he and fellow soldiers were at all times.
Macie, now 29, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by the Army when he left in 2008 with a medical discharge following back injuries he sustained in Iraq. He was anxious and depressed and had trouble sleeping.
Macie tried to drown those feelings with alcohol and a cocktail of painkillers and antidepressants prescribed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. He received disability compensation for PTSD, along with numerous modes of therapy offered by the agency.
Nothing helped. But there was one long shot: MDMA, known more broadly as the illegal party drug Ecstasy.
In late November, the Food and Drug Administration approved a large-scale Phase 3 trial to evaluate the use of MDMA in treatment of PTSD, which is the final step before possible approval as a prescription drug. The second phase of the drug trials, which started in 2000, began to include veterans in 2010.
Like the other veterans involved in the study, Macie was selected because of his chronic-resistance PTSD, which is severe enough that treatments fail to reduce symptoms.
The results have excited advocates searching for new ways to treat mental health injuries.
Two-thirds of the 107 participants in Phase 2 of the trial no longer meet the criteria for having PTSD a year after they completed therapy, according to researchers who analyzed data a year after patients finished the trial.
Some of the 27 veterans involved in the trial describe MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a cure, not a treatment.
War transformed Macie's brain. But four years ago, Macie took a single dose of MDMA and felt his PTSD symptoms begin to lift as he went through eight hours of difficult psychotherapy, where the deepest traumas of his deployment rose to the surface.
Most of the patients in Phase 2 opted for the standard three treatments. Macie said what he needed came sooner.
"I didn't need more than one dose," Macie said. "I got the message."
Unlikely advocate
As a former acid-dropping Vietnam draft resister, Rick Doblin is an unlikely veterans advocate. But if the FDA grants approval for clinicians to use MDMA alongside psychotherapy -- and if the drug maintains its potential -- he could be among the most impactful in decades.
Doblin was exposed to war trauma early in life. As a Jewish child of the 1950s, Doblin's brain was shaped by stories of relatives imprisoned and killed in the 1930s and 1940s during the Holocaust.
Doblin, now 63, refused the draft during the war in Vietnam and opted to study psychology to deal with what he described as worldwide irrational prejudice. He later encountered studies of LSD treatments for Dutch Jewish survivors of World War II concentration camps.
The drug helped them process long-buried trauma, Doblin said, but it did not do enough to quell their deep fear and anxiety later in life. MDMA looked to be different, Doblin said.
He followed the development of MDMA for use in treating PTSD for more than 30 years. He founded his nonprofit -- Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies -- to drive clinical research on the medicinal use of MDMA, LSD and marijuana and to remove legal and social barriers that have made MDMA illegal since 1985.
MDMA accesses parts of the brain altered by PTSD and floods them with serotonin -- a natural chemical associated with feelings of trust, bonding and well-being. That allows patients to think about their experiences in a more positive way, Doblin said.
Researchers have cautioned against viewing MDMA as a simple solution. Dr. Charles R. Marmar, the head of psychiatry at New York University's Langone School of Medicine, told the New York Times that MDMA is a "feel-good drug, and we know people are prone to abuse it," adding that prolonged use has been linked to brain damage.
Doblin's group was responsible for gathering and training several pairs of psychiatrists across the world to guide patients throughout Phase 2 of the FDA trials, he said, and to evaluate data submitted to the FDA.
Nearly all the U.S. veterans in those trials were seen by a husband and wife team of clinicians and MAPS consultants Annie and Michael Mithoefer, who guided patients through three months of psychotherapy sessions, including a dose of MDMA paired with an eight-hour psychotherapy session each month. The patients wore eye masks and listened to soothing music as they unspooled their deepest traumas.
The pairing of MDMA and discussion of painful moments contradicts the popular idea of taking the drug in a party setting. It's much more demanding, Doblin said.
"I've heard from a lot of veterans who say, ‘I don't know why they call it Ecstasy. It's painful and difficult,'" Doblin said. "It takes a lot of courage to do this healing."
Macie's first and only MDMA session is where he came to terms with the ruins of Patrol Base Dog and other difficult moments of his deployment. He described the drug's effect as creating a new viewpoint.
"My mind switched and I felt at peace. I realized I didn't know how to accept death and move on," Macie said. "I understood I did everything the best I could have."
The war on drugs in the 1980s fueled a public taboo of psychedelic treatment, Doblin said, bolstered by a 1985 |
about online urban legends. Titled Clive Barker's Creepy Pasta, the series will feature live-action adaptations of popular (if horrifying) viral stories like Slender Man and Jeff the Killer, all culled from the creepypasta community by Barker himself. Amazing Spider-Man 2 screenwriter Roberto Orci is also working on a show called High School 51, about a school hidden deep inside Area 51.FORT MCMURRAY, ALTA.—RCMP in the northern Alberta detachment of Wood Buffalo say a WestJet flight made an unscheduled landing in Fort McMurray earlier this week due to an unruly drunk. Cpl. Teri-Ann Deobald says in a news release that flight 3177 on Monday was supposed to fly from Calgary to Yellowknife.
A passenger on the Calgary to Yellowknife WestJet flight, Bray Mernickle, posted about the incident on his Facebook page during the brief stop in Fort McMurray.“Drunk guy assaulted a woman, threw his phone at the flight attendant, and kept screaming about the prime minister and how we’re all going to hell,” Mernickle wrote. ( DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo )
But she says it instead landed in Fort McMurray, where Mounties arrested an intoxicated male passenger who was held in custody until sober. The flight then carried on safely to its scheduled destination. Deobald describes it as an isolated incident and did not say if there would be charges.
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Transport Canada is investigating. A passenger on the flight, Bray Mernickle, posted about the incident on his Facebook page during the brief stop in Fort McMurray. “Drunk guy assaulted a woman, threw his phone at the flight attendant, and kept screaming about the prime minister and how we’re all going to hell,” Mernickle wrote. “Me and a fellow passenger had to help restrain him and move him to the back where they used restraints on him, even a guy beside him to keep him from doing any more harm to anyone. “To add to the madness, two other passengers who were drinking and being belligerent asked to be quiet or get off as well.”
Read more about:The pill. Freedom in a tablet. The cause célèbre of the women's rights movement. Particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision in 2014 and the uncertain future of the Affordable Care Act, no other issue, perhaps barring campus sexual assault, has dominated the contemporary feminist agenda as much as birth control.
Despite this focus, the history of this relative freedom is something about which many advocates seem ignorant. More women (27.5%, according to recent data from the Guttmacher Institute) rely on the pill than any other type of contraception, yet public discourse suggests that most, on the pill or not, have no idea about its past anchored in eugenics, sexism and racism.
The irony of the pill is that it was tested on women, specifically women of color — many of whom were forced to undergo sterilization — before later being marketed predominately to white women in America as a symbol of independence.
"Controlling gender and race": Contrary to some popular celebratory writings, such as Jonathan Eig's recent The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution, the pill's story should not necessarily be one of hero-worship.
"The pill has functioned as a technique not only for controlling reproduction but also for producing and controlling gender and race," scholar Beatriz Preciado writes in her book about gender in the age of pharmacology, Testo Junkie. Indeed, Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock — two of Eig's "crusaders," funded by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger — effectively sterilized hundreds of women, from non-consenting psychiatric patients at the Worcester State Hospital to destitute Puerto Rican women living in the housing projects of Rio Piedras, by testing variations of the pill on them.
Ricardo Arduengo/AP Puerto Rico
"Guinea pigs": There were a handful of reasons why Puerto Rico became "the ideal setting for pill trials, which were the largest series of clinical tests ever performed," Preciado writes. As PBS reports, government "officials supported birth control as a form of population control in the hopes that it would stem Puerto Rico's endemic poverty." In 1937, the passage of Law 136 legally sanctioned sterilization of Puerto Rican women for such purposes. What's more, the pill trials that later began in Puerto Rico in the 1950s also expanded to other "pseudo-colonial locations" like Haiti and Mexico, Iris Ofelia López points out in her book Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women's Struggle for Reproductive Freedom.
The real kicker? Women of color continued to be used as "guinea pigs" because the FDA, Preciado writes, "felt it threw doubt on the femininity of American women by suppressing their periods altogether."
As a result "one-third of ever-married women aged 20-49 had been sterilized" in Puerto Rico by 1965, with "two-fifths of them before the age of 25," according to an article by sociology professor Harriet B. Presser.
"Black genocide": Sanger has been canonized as the founder of Planned Parenthood, but she also advocated for the creation of the pill because she believed in eugenics as an effective form of birth control. (To be fair, some contend that attention to Sanger's championing of eugenics is perhaps exaggerated, and that eugenics was par for the course for those in the early 20th century concerned with population control. Then again, Sanger is on record as having given at least one speech to a KKK group in New Jersey.)
"Some African-American leaders were especially critical of the pill," Megan Gibson writes in her concise history of birth control for Time, "claiming that it was being peddled in their community for the purpose of a 'black genocide.'" The eugenics objective of the pill was thus arguably targeted at all non-white individuals who posed a threat to the (white) face of America.
Source: Hulton Archive/Getty
Remembering our history: This history, though deeply troubling, seemed to be forgotten the moment the pill was marketed to women living in the continental U.S. Ads for the pill promoted the product by touting women's liberation — already hot topic of discussion in the early 1960s, and which largely enabled the Sexual Revolution of that decade, as Nancy L. Cohen has pointed out at AlterNet. The pill remains statistically the most popular form of birth control for women to date. "Within five years [of the pill's legalization in 1960], 6 million American women" were on it, Cohen notes. By 2012, that number had jumped to 10.6 million.
History in general isn't pretty — and it's no different for the pill. But by being cognizant of the pill's past, advocates for reproductive justice and for women's rights in general can form a more nuanced, and more ideologically diverse, politics for our collective future.Around 1250 A.D., historical records show, ice packs began showing up farther south in the North Atlantic. Glaciers also began expanding on Greenland, soon to threaten Norse settlements on the island. From 1275 to 1300 A.D., glaciers began expanding more broadly, according to radiocarbon dating of plants killed by the glacier growth. The period known today as the Little Ice Age was just starting to poke through.
Summers began cooling in Northern Europe after 1300 A.D., negatively impacting growing seasons, as reflected in the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Expanding glaciers and ice cover spreading across Greenland began driving the Norse settlers out. The last, surviving, written records of the Norse Greenland settlements, which had persisted for centuries, concern a marriage in 1408 A.D. in the church of Hvalsey, today the best preserved Norse ruin.
Colder winters began regularly freezing rivers and canals in Great Britain, the Netherlands and Northern France, with both the Thames in London and the Seine in Paris frozen solid annually. The first River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1607. In 1607-1608, early European settlers in North America reported ice persisting on Lake Superior until June. In January, 1658, a Swedish army marched across the ice to invade Copenhagen. By the end of the 17th century, famines had spread from northern France, across Norway and Sweden, to Finland and Estonia.
Reflecting its global scope, evidence of the Little Ice Age appears in the Southern Hemisphere as well. Sediment cores from Lake Malawi in southern Africa show colder weather from 1570 to 1820. A 3,000 year temperature reconstruction based on varying rates of stalagmite growth in a cave in South Africa also indicates a colder period from 1500 to 1800. A 1997 study comparing West Antarctic ice cores with the results of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) indicate a global Little Ice Age affecting the two ice sheets in tandem.
The Siple Dome, an ice dome roughly 100 km long and 100 km wide, about 100 km east of the Siple Coast of Antartica, also reflects effects of the Little Ice Age synchronously with the GISP2 record, as do sediment cores from the Bransfield Basin of the Antarctic Peninsula. Oxygen/isotope analysis from the Pacific Islands indicates a 1.5 degree Celsius temperature decline between 1270 and 1475 A.D.
The Franz Josef glacier on the west side of the Southern Alps of New Zealand advanced sharply during the period of the Little Ice Age, actually invading a rain forest at its maximum extent in the early 1700s. The Mueller glacier on the east side of New Zealand’s Southern Alps expanded to its maximum extent at roughly the same time.
Ice cores from the Andeas mountains in South America show a colder period from 1600 to 1800. Tree ring data from Patagonia in South America show cold periods from 1270 to 1380 and from 1520 to 1670. Spanish explorers noted the expansion of the San Rafael Glacier in Chile from 1675 to 1766, which continued into the 19th century.
The height of the Little Ice Age is generally dated as 1650 to 1850 A.D. The American Revolutionary Army under General George Washington shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, and New York harbor was frozen in the winter of 1780. Historic snowstorms struck Lisbon, Portugal in 1665, 1744 and 1886. Glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana advanced until the late 18th or early 19th centuries. The last River Thames Frost Fair was held in 1814. The Little Ice Age phased out during the middle to late 19th century.
The Little Ice Age, following the historically warm temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about AD 950 to 1250, has been attributed to natural cycles in solar activity, particularly sunspots. A period of sharply lower sunspot activity known as the Wolf Minimum began in 1280 and persisted for 70 years until 1350. That was followed by a period of even lower sunspot activity that lasted 90 years from 1460 to 1550 known as the Sporer Minimum. During the period 1645 to 1715, the low point of the Little Ice Age, the number of sunspots declined to zero for the entire time. This is known as the Maunder Minimum, named after English astronomer Walter Maunder. That was followed by the Dalton Minimum from 1790 to 1830, another period of well below normal sunspot activity.
The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.
Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.
The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.
At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed. NASA’s Science News report for January 8, 2013 states,
“Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 [the current short term 11 year cycle] is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion.”
That is even more significant because NASA’s climate science has been controlled for years by global warming hysteric James Hansen, who recently announced his retirement.
But this same concern is increasingly being echoed worldwide. The Voice of Russia reported on April 22, 2013,
“Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”
That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.
The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013,
“German meteorologists say that the start of 2013 is now the coldest in 208 years - and now German media has quoted Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory [saying this] is proof as he said earlier that we are heading for a "Mini Ice Age." Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationship with climate change on Earth, we are now on an ‘unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.’”
Faith in Global Warming is collapsing in formerly staunch Europe following increasingly severe winters which have now started continuing into spring. Christopher Booker explained in The Sunday Telegraph on April 27, 2013,
“Here in Britain, where we had our fifth freezing winter in a row, the Central England Temperature record – according to an expert analysis on the US science blog Watts Up With That – shows that in this century, average winter temperatures have dropped by 1.45C, more than twice as much as their rise between 1850 and 1999, and twice as much as the entire net rise in global temperatures recorded in the 20th century.”
A news report from India (The Hindu April 22, 2013) stated, “March in Russia saw the harshest frosts in 50 years, with temperatures dropping to –25° Celsius in central parts of the country and –45° in the north. It was the coldest spring month in Moscow in half a century….Weathermen say spring is a full month behind schedule in Russia.” The news report summarized,
“Russia is famous for its biting frosts but this year, abnormally icy weather also hit much of Europe, the United States, China and India. Record snowfalls brought Kiev, capital of Ukraine, to a standstill for several days in late March, closed roads across many parts of Britain, buried thousands of sheep beneath six-metre deep snowdrifts in Northern Ireland, and left more than 1,000,000 homes without electricity in Poland. British authorities said March was the second coldest in its records dating back to 1910. China experienced the severest winter weather in 30 years and New Delhi in January recorded the lowest temperature in 44 years.”
Booker adds, “Last week it was reported that 3,318 places in the USA had recorded their lowest temperatures for this time of year since records began. Similar record cold was experienced by places in every province of Canada. So cold has the Russian winter been that Moscow had its deepest snowfall in 134 years of observations.”
Britain’s Met Office, an international cheerleading headquarters for global warming hysteria, did concede last December that there would be no further warming at least through 2017, which would make 20 years with no global warming. That reflects grudging recognition of the newly developing trends. But that reflects as well growing divergence between the reality of real world temperatures and the projections of the climate models at the foundation of the global warming alarmism of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since those models have never been validated, they are not science at this point, but just made up fantasies. That is why, “In the 12 years to 2011, 11 out of 12 [global temperature]forecasts [of the Met Office] were too high — and… none were colder than [resulted],” as BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson wrote in January.
Yet, just last week, there was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson telling us, by way of attempting to tutor Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, “For the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is no ‘great amount of uncertainty’ about whether the planet is warming and why.” If you can read, and you have gotten this far in my column, you know why Robinson’s ignorance is just another Washington Post abuse of the First Amendment. Mr. Robinson, let me introduce you to the British Met Office, stalwart of Global Warming “science,” such as it is, which has already publicly confessed that we are already three quarters through 20 years of No Global Warming!
Booker could have been writing about Robinson when he concluded his Sunday Telegraph commentary by writing, “Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion?”With your label, what do you look for in a young artist?
I look for talent. I look at their music, the buzz they got in their city. I like to meet up and know them as a person, see if they’re the type of person that would switch and turn bitch. I look for all that shit. But, mostly I look for talent and their dedication. They could have all the shit to make a hit record but have no dedication. You can get a hit from damn near a mistake and have no will to go in that studio and keep on doing it.
Pimp C gave you your first shot. How does it feel to have the opportunity to be that bridge for a younger artist, now, the way he did for you?
It makes me feel like I have a responsibility. I basically give the same steps that Pimp gave to me: I never show them too much enthusiasm. They’ll let me hear me a record, I’ll be like, “It’s aight.” That make them work harder. That make them know that that’s not they best even if I feel it’s they best. That’s what Pimp did to me. He kept me hungry. I wanted to please him. I took that as a CEO of my own label. It always made me wanna go in there and make more records. When I came into Pimp, I was already damn near regional but he made me feel like I was local again so I had to become nationwide.
Where do you find that hunger now?
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My motivation now is for my kids. I done basically had everything I wanted out of life because I come from nothing. I made a million dollars and felt like I crossed the damn Nile River. So now, I’m doing it for my kids and building them up so they have a better life than I did. My fans keep me going, too. When they see me they see, “Boosie we need another one!” They keep me going.
It can’t be a secret to you that you’re a living legend. Your place in rap history is stamped just off how many people you touch with your stories. What is it like to know that?
It’s a good feeling, man. It’s a good feeling. Make me wanna live longer, make me wanna take care of myself better. It makes me wanna exercise, make me wanna get this diabetes out of my body. I got cancer out of my body. Me knowing I’m a legend, I don’t want it to end even though when I’m gone it’ll never end. I wanna be around to see my kids have kids. I wanna go out on top and see my kids go out on top. If not, I had a hell of a run baby.The approach to watchmaking of the Meyrin-basedmanufacture is never ordinary. This is well demonstrated by the recently presentedmodel.Housed in a round 42.5 mm diameter case, the Academia Out of Time watch is driven by an automatic DeWitt calibre featuring dead beat seconds, a highly appreciated watch complication.With dead beat seconds, the second hand advances in full steps of one second instead of the more usually smooth sweeping action of mechanical seconds. In the Academia Out of Time they are displayed in the sub-dial at 4 o'clock.This is visually balanced by another sub-dial at 8 o'clock which, surprisingly, has no hand. To use DeWitt's own description, it features a "free seconds hand". This is a symbolic representation of the opposition between real time and virtual time which we cannot measure with conventional methods.Entirely developed, produced and assembled in-house, the 217-component movement beats at 21,600 vibrations per hour and offers a power reserve of 65 hours.Combining traditional and innovative materials, the Academia Out of Time's case is crafted in rose gold and black rubber, with details that recall the typical imperial columns, one of DeWitt's distinctive design elements.The dial is available in three shades of lacquer (black, white or blue) with appliqué numerals and circles in rose gold colour tone.A timepiece where creativity and watchmaking tradition match together, the DeWitt Academia Out of Time has a price of Swiss Francs 52,000 plus taxes.DUBAI (Reuters) - A small fire broke out a Dubai hotel on Monday (Aug 7), forcing guests and staff to leave, in the third such blaze in the United Arab Emirates tourism and trade hub in less than a week.
Several fire engines and an ambulance were deployed at the Movenpick hotel near the Marina district as scores of people gathered outside.
A video of the hotel posted on social media showed thin clouds of smoke wafting around a lower floor.
Fire at the Mövenpick. Hope everyone is safe! #Dubai pic.twitter.com/Ys37ZZE2Pe — Tinia Nassif (@webteee) August 7, 2017
The hotel said on its official Twitter account that the fire was "swiftly brought under control and guests and staff were safely evacuated".
We can confirm that fire was reported in our hotel today. The fire was swiftly brought under control & all guests were safely evacuated. — MovenpickJBR (@MovenpickJBR) August 7, 2017
Civil defence workers gave the all-clear for people to return inside and there were no reports of injuries.
A blaze shot up the side of a nearby residential tower on Friday, and local media reported that a smaller fire was quickly put out at a neighbouring building on Sunday. No injuries were reported in either of those fires.
The series of fires in tall buildings in the UAE has revived questions about the safety of cladding materials used in the Gulf region and beyond.The Buffalo Bills reportedly kicked the tires on a veteran linebacker Thursday.
ESPN's Adam Caplan reported that the team hosted Justin Durant on a free agent visit.
Veteran LB Justin Durant visited the #Bills today. — Adam Caplan (@caplannfl) April 6, 2017
Durant, 31, is a 10-year veteran who has played for four different teams, most recently the Dallas Cowboys. It his second stint with the team, Durant appeared in 13 games, making 37 tackles, one sack and three passes defensed. His best season came in 2012 with Detroit, when he started 14 games and made 103 tackles.
Durant has 635 tackles, 4.5 sacks, three interceptions and 26 passes defensed in his career. If signed, he would serve as veteran linebacker depth if he makes the 53-man roster.Rayo Vallecano are on track to make their fourth signing ahead of the start of the 2015-16 season: Diego Llorente. The Real Madrid defender will arrive at Vallecas on loan. Llorente has been on Felipe and Paco’s radar for a while – they asked for him last summer and during the winter transfer window. This time, the player himself requested to be allowed to leave in order to avoid playing in Segunda B with Castilla, and his move to Rayo will become a reality. They are already waiting for him in Neurupping (Germany), where the rest of the team are working.
Llorente, 21, is a centre-back, but he can play across the back four. Measuring up at 1.86m. his aerial ability and his versatility are among his strong points. The defender joined Madrid’s academy in 2002 and has spent the past two seasons playing with Castilla. He made his first-team debut in 2012-13 and played against Cornellà in the Copa del Rey last term. He took part in the Under-20 World Cup in 2013.
As such, Paco is reinforcing his options at centre-back, where he can already call upon Zé Castro, Antonio Amaya and the recent arrival Chechu Dorado. However, another further signing is still expected, perhaps Lucas, about whom Rayo have already spoken with Atlético Madrid.The National Citizens Coalition is an organization that, in theory at least, is supposed to stand for the conservative principle of "more freedom through less government."
But it has recently taken on a cause that promotes the exact opposite.
It's true.
Recently, NCC "Director" Stephen Taylor sent out an email blast urging the group's supporters to demand the CRTC force cable carriers to distribute the Sun News Network.
"Help me save Sun News and help ensure conservatism becomes a permanent fixture on the cable news TV dial," writes Taylor in the email.
Admittedly, it's a call to action many Canadian conservatives would likely support. In fact, the Sun News Network has been actively and successfully rallying conservatives to back its highly publicized appeal to the CRTC.
But even though the Sun News Network's position might be popular with grassroots conservatives, that doesn't make it right.
Simply put, the conservative-leaning network says it needs a "mandatory carriage" license to help it stay in business. And a mandatory carriage license means cable carriers would be compelled to offer Sun News and consumers would be forced to pay a fee.
Clearly, this runs counter to the conservative free market principle of allowing consumers to make their own choices. And that's why the NCC's support for Sun News on this issue is so wrong.
To be blunt, the NCC shouldn't be in favour of "mandatory" anything. And certainly the group should oppose, on principle, the idea of forcing Canadians to pay for the Sun News Network whether they like it or not.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not by any means anti-Sun News. In fact, I agree with Taylor when he writes, "Before Sun News Network came along, conservative voices were only token attractions on the likes of CBC and CTV. Now, we're finally having the principled conversations that we want to have and we're doing it our own terms."
To which I might add, Sun News provides a perspective on the issues that you won't find on the other networks and it breaks stories mainstream outlets might ignore.
Plus it's fun to watch.
In short, having Sun News on the air is good for conservatism and it's good for the news industry. The more voices the better. For these reasons, I want the network to survive and thrive.
And I can even understand and fully sympathize with the network's desire to get mandatory carriage. After all, the Sun Network's primary goal isn't to promote conservatism, it's to make money. And right now, it's losing money. Lots of it.
So from a business perspective, it makes all the sense in the world for the Sun News Network to do what it can to stem its financial losses. Hence, its appeal to the CRTC for mandatory carriage.
Besides, as the network rightly argues, it isn't competing in a true free market. In fact, both of its main rivals, CTV News Channel and CBC's Newsworld, enjoy the advantage of mandatory carriage.
As Pierre Karl Peladeau, the CEO of Quebecor Inc., of which Sun News is a subsidiary, recently wrote, "While a free-market approach is a noble vision, and one to build toward, it bears little resemblance to the television market as it operates today."
In short, Peladeau wants a government agency to use its muscle to level the playing field. And there's nothing unusual about a businessman like Peladeau taking this sort of stance. Indeed, just about every big business and corporation in Canada has at one time or another sought out some form of government intervention.
Sometime that means asking for a government subsidy, sometimes that means asking for protective tariffs, sometimes that means asking for a regulation that could stifle competition.
This is why, ironically, big business is not the best advocate for the free market system; all too often it doesn't practice what it preaches.
And this is why it's so important to have groups like the National Citizens Coalition. The NCC isn't a business and its purpose isn't to make money; its job is to unabashedly promote and defend conservative principles, values and ideals.
That includes promoting the free enterprise system and individual choice, even if that makes its friends in the business world unhappy.
This is not to say the NCC shouldn't come to the aid of Sun News. But it should help the network in a way that's consistent with its philosophy, i.e. run a campaign urging the dismantling of the CRTC and the ending of the mandatory carriage license.
The NCC's goal, in other words, should be to create an environment where the various TV networks compete in a true free market without any form of government assistance or coercion.
The NCC chose instead to mimic the Sun News Network's arguments and in doing so it has undermined its credibility. How can it now oppose any future government subsidies to businesses without looking completely hypocritical?
It's too bad. In this day and age of stimulus spending and run-away government deficits, we need all the principled conservative voices we can get.
Photo gallery Sun News Fake Citizenship Ceremony See Gallery The Latest Sun News Endorsement Is Out of Line 1 / 14
Sun News Fake Citizenship Ceremony 1 / 14crime
Former gram pradhan from Uttar Pradesh held for breaking into houses, stealing valuables in Vasai, Navi Mumbai and Thane; accused used booty to fund his election campaign and buy real estate
A former gram pradhan in Rampur Rajwadi village of Pratapgarh district in Uttar Pradesh was arrested on Wednesday night in Allahabad and brought to Mumbai on Friday on charges of breaking in houses and stealing valuables in Vasai, Navi Mumbai and Thane. But the quirky bit about his modus operandi is he used to book air tickets in advance to conduct robberies in the city.
The accused Aslam Israel Shaikh was brought to Mumbai yesterday. Pic/Hanif Patel
Investor
The accused identified as Aslam Israel Shaikh used up the booty in election campaigning, property investments and buying small restaurants.
He was caught on CCTV while robbing a residential society in Vasai in January this year and was identified by one of the police informers, who directed the cops to Uttar Pradesh. Shaikh was nabbed with the help of Uttar Pradesh STF.
Later, police also found that Shaikh was once arrested in a similar case in Vashi but was out on bail.
Police says
PSI Ganesh Shinde from Manikpur police station said Shaikh is a professional thief, who used to enter residential complexes and ring the bell of each flat to check which one was vacant. He then used to break in, rob the booty and before the day could end he used to catch a flight back.
Shaikh has been remanded to police custody till March 7. The police are also trying to find out if Aslam had any accomplice.31 (Sundance Review) + video
7 10
PLOT: A group of carnies are abducted and forced to play a deadly game where, to gain their freedom, they have to survive twelve hours in a labyrinth while being hunted by psycho-clowns.
REVIEW: You have to admire Rob Zombie. More than a lot of other genre directors out there, he has a sensibility and style that’s immediately recognizable. Much of this comes from his love of seventies grindhouse cinema. While 31 is definitely a step back into the horror mainstream compared to the experimental LORDS OF SALEM, it delivers exactly what hardcore horror fans probably want.
The premise is nothing new, with this feeling like a kind of THE RUNNING MAN/SAW/TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE mash-up, but Zombie’s balls-to-the-while style and sense of character distinguishes it. In a festival full of ambitious, art-house fare, 31 feels like a kind of respite, in that it’s unapologetically a piece of ultra-violent, grindhouse horror, with so much gore it’s amazing this has somehow squeaked by with an R-rating.
In an era of PG-13 horror films, movies like this often get ignored by the mainstream and sure enough, Zombie had to crowdfund it. In that respect, he gave the fans exactly what they paid for. It’s probably his most straightforward film, but it’s also far-from watered down. If this had been made by a studio, the leads would have likely been a group of fresh-faced, sexy teens. Instead, Zombie’s cast real veteran actors, which allows them to distinguish their characters and build enough of a sense of camaraderie that once they start getting picked off you’re sorry as they’re fun to watch.
Of the heroes, genre icon Meg Foster is the most interesting as the carny’s matriarch, followed by Jeff Daniel Phillips as the gang’s handyman. Neither of them seems like a traditional horror lead and both look like real people, making them interesting to watch in a film like this. Vets Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs and Kevin Jackson also lend the film a unique presence, while Sheri Moon Zombie fits her part to a tee but makes her more than the sex bomb she’s initially presented as.
The villains are a colorful lot, and are led by Richard Brake, who gives a a really dynamic performance as the deadliest killer of the bunch. It’s obvious Brake’s character is the one Zombie’s the most intrigued by, so he gets several ambitious scenes, with an opening monologue running several minutes.
As far as carnage goes, Zombie’s thrown-in everything but the kitchen sink, with buckets (and buckets) of gore, chainsaw fights, decapitations and more. The production design and cinematography feels high-end for a modestly budget horror flick but Zombie’s gotten a lot of bang for his buck. The only things that really don’t work here are the shoe-horned in cameos by Malcolm McDowell and vets Jane Carr and Judy Geeson as the puppet masters for the killing. It would have been more interesting if this had been left ambiguous and feels like just another couple of names for the billing. The violence also gets a little too close to torture porn for my tastes at times, but again that’s what the audience for this probably wants.
Gore-hounds and horror fans will no doubt love every second of 31. Even more casual genre fans may get a kick out of Zombie’s style and grand guignol approach. It’s a very solid piece of genre cinema and while I’d still love to see him breakout of the genre he’s been pigeonholed in, it can’t be denied the man knows horror and what a whole lot of fans want.HAIR WARS | The Twist Out: Dry VS Wet
Is it better to do a wet or dry twist out? Hmm, let's find out! I was inspired by Vlogger Bargain Princess to do my own hair battles and "which side" or "style" wins based on the process and how much I liked the style. So I thought I start with one that all naturals would like to know:Hmm, let's find out!
****The end results |
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Likewise, Fortune Magazine took the complaints of protesters as gospel by naming two Ferguson activists in the magazine’s “50 World’s Greatest Leaders” list. Fortune said they fit the bill for “extraordinary men and women” who were “transforming business, government, philanthropy, and so much more.” The magazine seemed unfazed at the ways Ferguson protests had turned to violence or arson.
Even liberal politicians used their positions of power to promote a false agenda. After the court cleared Off. Wilson, Democratic Reps. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), Al Green (D-Tex.) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY) took to the floor of Congress Dec. 1 to protest. They each put their hands up and said, “Don’t shoot” in a stunt that revealed their contempt for the criminal justice system. Jeffries even admitted to The New York Times after the DOJ report was released, that he didn’t care if “Hands up” didn’t happen:
“If I had to do it again, I would proceed in exactly the same way,” he said. “I made clear in my remarks that ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ is a rallying cry for people all across America who want to see the constitutional promise of equal protection under the law brought to life.” Jeffries added, “At no point in that speech did any member of the black caucus indicate that that’s what occurred between Mr. Wilson and Mike Brown.”
In addition, some members of the media have tried to diminish the harmful impact protesters and rioters have had, especially following riots in Baltimore. Former CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, MSNBC anchor O’Donnell and Comedy Central’s Larry Wilmore attempted to make the case that “thug” was the new “N-word” and so people shouldn’t describe those who loot, riot, throw rocks and commit arson, as “thugs.”
The Phrase Has Made It’s Way Into Pop Culture
“Hands up, don’t shoot” didn’t just rely on news media for promotion. Even sitcoms, sports and award shows spread the falsehood. African-American celebrities helped cement the phrase in the national consciousness.
Perhaps the most egregious example came in an ABC Scandal episode devoted entirely to presenting a fictional Brown as an innocent and Wilson as a racist who fabricated evidence.
This incendiary episode aired after Wilson was cleared by the courts and government. But ABC wasn’t the only network to do something like this.
Comedy Central’s Daily Show “Senior Black Correspondent" Larry Wilmore flippantly said on Dec. 2, that questioning the narrative was unacceptable and people who do so should “probably go fuck themselves.”
A few days after Brown was shot, rappers Nelly, Chris Brown and Bow Wow led the crowd at a Los Angeles charity event to raise their hands and chant the phrase. People Magazine reported how on a lavish trip to Iceland, Beyonce and husband Jay-Z posed for several pictures with their hands up, found on her website and Instagram account.
Even the Grammys broadcast this year was commandeered with a bizarre routine by pop artist Pharrell. At one point, he stood with his dancers frozen, holding their hands up in tribute.
Professional sports broadcasts weren’t safe from this agenda either. Several St. Louis Rams players entered a game by holding their hands up in protest. NBC covered the incident while ignoring NFL coaches and players who wore apparel supporting the NYPD.
The media also celebrated openly gay Michael Sam, a former Rams player, who posed with his hands up in a picture with comedian Dave Chappelle at the 2014 GQ Magazine Awards.
The expression spread. One high schooler’s anthem using the phrase was nominated for a student Emmy Award, The Tennessean reported. An activist organization was even spawned from the phrase, calling themselves, “Hands Up United” that was praised by The Huffington Post. Of course this group still holds to the myth that Brown’s hands were up. On its “About Us” page it describes Brown as “an unarmed, Black, 18-year-old, with his hands up in a posture of surrender.”
Other News Outlets Have No Problem Saying Claim Is False
Some journalists understood how important it was to correct the record about “hands up, don’t shoot.” CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times all pointed out the flaws in the theme.
The Washington Post debunked it giving it “four pinocchios” as a blatant falsehood, a category the paper uses for what it calls “whoppers.” The fact-checker column about the phrase was headlined, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Ferguson.”
Liberal Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart got a lot of flak from angry protesters when he changed positions and wrote a piece admitting he had been wrong, simply called, “‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ was built on a lie.”
Capehart concluded that, “we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative on behalf of someone who would otherwise offend our sense of right and wrong.” He added, “And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching. That’s what I’ve done here.”
For simply reporting the truth, Capehart was admonished by liberals who didn’t want to hear the truth.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper and New York Times/CNN media reporter Brian Stelter both explained the phrase was false on their shows. On Anderson Cooper 360, correspondent Sara Sider even quoted from the DOJ report saying, that phrase is "inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence" and that "witnesses have acknowledged their initial accounts were untrue."
The New York Times reported the findings on its own, albeit spending most of the report defending the use of the phrase.
Conclusions: The Tragic Results
It might be impossible to convince supporters that “Hands up, don’t shoot” never happened. The government said so. Responsible media outlets have done the same. But the damage was done early on, and despite the phrase being debunked, protesters have continued to use it, even as recent as the Baltimore riots.
The effect has left an increased backlash and distrust for police officers in black communities around the country. The job of law enforcement continues to get tougher. “In total, 126 officers were killed in 2014. That's a 24 percent increase from 2013, when 102 officers were killed,” according to NPR.
Some cases from this past year point to the escalation of violence against police:
-NYPD Officer Brian Moore, 25, was shot to death May 2. The suspect, 35-year-old Demetrius Blackwell, has exhibited violent behavior to police in the past.
- Two Ferguson police officers were shot while guarding a protest the same day DOJ report was released, March 12.
- NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos killed by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, 28, who admitted beforehand he wanted to enact revenge for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, Dec. 20.
- Houston police Officer April Pikes survived after she was stabbed 15 times by a man who allegedly said he was out to kill police because they were “oppressive.”
The ongoing anti-police protests have sparked police officers to start their own social media hashtag, #BluelivesMatter, posting pictures of themselves in uniform, to show their lives are just as important as anyone else.
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald wrote a powerful piece in The New York Post explaining how the media and the Obama Administration helped fuel this violence:
“By now, the media and politicians are on ample notice that their crusade against law enforcement carries deadly risks. There's no more excuse for inflaming hatred against the police, especially when the allegations used to inflame that hatred are proven untruths.” (emphasis ours)
The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics urges members of the profession to “Be Accountable and Transparent.” According to SPJ, journalists should both: “Respond quickly to questions about accuracy, clarity and fairness”; and “Acknowledge mistakes and correct them promptly and prominently. Explain corrections and clarifications carefully and clearly.”
The broadcast networks have followed neither of those guidelines correcting the record of the “Hands up, don’t shoot” falsehood.
Methodology: MRC Culture counted all mentions of “Hands up, don’t shoot” among ABC, NBC and CBS on their morning and evening news broadcasts both before and after the DOJ report was released on March 4, 2015. Analysis was through May 25, 2015.“Can’t believe we live in a world where we’d even consider letting big corps deny women access to basic care based on vague moral objections,” tweeted Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren Monday, reacting to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision.
The 5-4 ruling held that requiring for-profit corporations to include contraception in their insurance coverage violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The family of David Green, owners of the Hobby Lobby corporation, had sued the government for forcing them to provide possibly abortifacent medication (“morning-after pills”) to their employees. (RELATED: GOP Cheers Hobby Lobby Decision)
“It is HHS’s apparent belief that no insurance-coverage mandate would violate RFRA,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion, “no matter how significantly it impinges on the religious liberties of employers—that would lead to intolerable consequences. Under HHS’s view, RFRA would permit the Government to require all employers to provide coverage for any medical procedure allowed by law in the jurisdiction in question—for in- stance, third-trimester abortions or assisted suicide. The owners of many closely held corporations could not in good conscience provide such coverage, and thus HHS would effectively exclude these people from full participation in the economic life of the Nation.”
“The Supreme Court has headed in a very scary direction,” said Warren.
Follow Tristyn on TwitterAnimals are trapped within a fenced enclosure from which they cannot escape, then people go in and pay a fee to kill those animals. Many of the animals used in canned hunts come from private breeders and zoos. These are animals that are indigenous to Africa or Asia, but they're bred here in the U.S. for this kind of activity.
Nearly two dozen members of Congress have co-sponsored a bill known as the Sportsmanship in Hunting Act, which would make it illegal to transport exotic species between states for the purposes of hunting.
The Safari Club International in Arizona has lobbied Congress and spoken out against bills that would make the practice of hunting exotic game in fenced-in preserves illegal. The organization based in Arizona is defending this controversial type of hunting that is against the law in Arizona.
SOURCE: http://www.kpho.com/story/16022205/arizona-organization-protects-canned-hunting
The Honorable Jan Brewer
Governor of Arizona
1700 West Washington
Phoenix, Arizona 85007
Telephone (602) 542-4331
Toll Free 1-(800) 253-0883 (within Arizona only)
Fax (602) 542-1381
E-mail http://azgovernor.gov/Contact.aspHalo: The Master Chief Collection
Released 11/11/2014
Re-live Master Chief's greatest adventures with Halo: The Master Chief Collection, only on Xbox One.
Experience a collection of all four Halo games with Halo: The Master Chief Collection and follow the story as Master Chief in Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 4. Honour John 117s epic journey as he uncovers the original Halo, defeats the covenant and brings ruination to the Prophets, all in Xbox One visual fidelity and 60fps. Featuring the re-mastered Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and for the first time Halo 2: Anniversary, a visually re-mastered version of Halo 2 that has been rebuilt from the ground up.
Also within the Master Chief Collection youll gain access to the episodic live action series, Halo: Nightfall, produced by Ridley Scott in conjunction with 343 Industries this streamed series explore a new story for old and new Halo fans alike. Get a taste for Halo 5: Guardians with the Halo 5: Beta, set to deploy December 29th 2014.
Featuring a new, unified Halo, players can play start to finish or jump into one of over 45 missions from any of the four games from the Master Menu, play Halo: The Master Chief Collection your way. In addition to the campaign missions, you can play with your friends on over 100 multiplayer and Spartan ops maps, including the original Halo: Combat Evolved maps. The all new Halo 2: Anniversary edition will complement this with 25 re-mastered multiplayer maps and 6 all new re-imagined maps including fan favourites Ivory Tower, Ascension and Lockout.
Order Halo: The Master Chief Collection with GAME and jump into the fight on November 11, 2014.
Review
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the perfect game for fans of the Halo series, as it successfully pays homage to one of the most influential video game franchises in history. Encompassing Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4 and over 100 multiplayer maps, Halo: The Master Chief Edition will keep you playing well into the New Year...
read moreTrump’s Debt Increases Put Obama to Shame and Most New Debt is Due to Yellen’s Increased Interest Rates
Guest post by Joe Hoft
Although President Trump held the longest and largest decrease of US Federal Debt in US history at $100 Billion, it is now over.
When President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017 the amount of US Federal Debt owed both externally and internally was over $19 Trillion at $19,947,304,555,212. As of September 1st the amount of US Debt had decreased by more than $100 Billion but today the amount of US Debt increase since his election is over $20 Trillion. President Trump has now increased the US Debt by $486 billion or a little more than 2%.
What the mainstream media (MSM) is not telling you is President Trump’s efforts to minimize the US Debt are hindered by the fact that the debt was twice the size of the US debt when Obama took office, which results in twice the amount of interest on the debt payable each month. This amount is in the billions. Also, Obama benefited from lower interest rates. During the majority of Obama’s term the US Federal Reserve kept interest rates at near zero. Since President Trump was elected the ‘Fed’ has increased rates three times. These increased rates on an increased debt account for most of the debt increase since January.
Also, what the MSM will not tell you is that President Obama increased the US debt by more that $1.33 Trillion at this time during his Presidency. When Obama was inaugurated the US Debt stood at $10.6 Trillion. By October 20th, 2009, President Obama had increased the US Debt to more than $11.9 Trillion. This was an increase of $1.33 Trillion or 12.5%.
The difference between Presidents Trump and Obama is that President Obama increased the US Debt by $844 Billion or nearly $1 Trillion more than President Trump during their respective first nine months in office.Vampires have been a part of cinema almost since it’s inception. To coincide with the 85th anniversary of Universal Pictures’ ‘Dracula’ starring Bela Lugosi, using fluid dynamics students from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester have examined how long it would take for the undead fiend to drain an average human’s blood.
They have calculated that it would take only 6.4 minutes to drain 15 per cent of the blood from the external carotid artery in a human’s neck. The human body can’t function during major blood loss. After 15 percent of the blood leaves the body, the heart rate changes, and blood drinking, even from the carotid artery, becomes difficult.
15 per cent was used as the benchmark as any more blood loss causes the heart rate to change, while less can be taken without affecting the circulatory system of a human. Considering the human body has an average of 5 litres of blood and that a vampire might feasibly take 15%, in the study a vampire would drain 0.75 litres of blood, and by their calculations it would take 6.4 minutes to do so.
The students presented their findings in a paper for the Journal of Physics Special Topics, a peer-reviewed student journal run by the University’s department of physics and astronomy.
Course tutor, Dr Mervyn Roy, a lecturer in the University of Leicester’s department of physics and astronomy, said: “Every year we ask each student to write around 10 short papers for the Journal of Physics Special Topics. It lets the students show off their creative side and apply some of physics they know to the weird, the wonderful, or the everyday.”
So if you’re setting out to make a realistic vampire movie, you’ll probably want to give their findings a read.
You can check out the student’s paper in full here.The company’s recent deals reflect that optimism about the growing importance of video traffic. Two weeks ago, Cisco began a tender offer to buy Tandberg, a Norwegian maker of videoconferencing systems, for $3 billion. And in March, Cisco agreed to pay $590 million for Pure Digital Technologies, a start-up that developed the popular Flip video cameras.
John T. Chambers, the chairman and chief executive of Cisco, has said that the company plans to keep spending. At $35 billion, Cisco has more cash on hand for acquisitions than any other technology company. Cisco’s vast cash stockpile results, in part, from its lucrative networking equipment business. The company is by far the largest supplier of the routers and switches that help direct data and voice traffic between computing systems.
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While the profit margins on many popular data center products have plummeted over the years, Cisco reports 65 percent gross profit margins on its networking hardware.
Mr. Chambers has used acquisitions as a means of complementing the company’s networking products, while also getting Cisco into new businesses. For example, the purchase of Pure Digital bolsters Cisco’s video and nascent consumer electronics efforts while also giving the company a way to promote devices that create bulky files that consume great deals of bandwidth.
While the Starent purchase has a video element, it is primarily a sign that Cisco expects smartphones and wireless data plans to rise in popularity. In addition, the acquisition offers another door through which Cisco can approach telecommunications companies that have turned to Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei Technologies for networking equipment that feeds mobile devices.
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In a research report, Mark Sue, a networking analyst with RBC Capital Markets, valued the mobile carrier infrastructure market at $47.5 billion.
Starent, based in Tewksbury, Mass., was founded in 2000 and has traded publicly since 2007. Last year, the company reported a 74 percent rise in revenue, to $254.1 million.
Matthew Robison, a communications analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, said Starent had made a name for itself by creating a single piece of networking hardware that could move data while also performing more complex management functions like handling user tracking and billing processes. “It’s almost like a router and a computer server in the same box,” he said.
Such technology has become desirable among the large telecommunications suppliers, which have either made similar acquisitions or tried to build their own hybrid systems. “Cisco needed to do this to have a good road map out to the next generation of products,” Mr. Robison said.
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The all-cash deal is expected to close in the first half of 2010.BOSTON (CBS) – Boston Police are investigating three similar attacks on city residents in which someone comes right up to their front door pretending to be delivering a package.
In the most recent case, on Dorchester’s Lonsdale Street, a pair of criminals entered the victims’ home and pistol whipped the elderly couple that let them in.
“We don’t usually see that, but it’s definitely what happened,” says Boston Lt. Detective Thomas Hopkins. “There have been two home invasions and one B&E where Asian victims were targeted, in two of the incidents people were duct taped with zip ties.”
In the Lonsdale Street case, the suspects came to the door with a package addressed to the residents. But the men either didn’t know or didn’t care they were being recorded the whole time by the camera right on the home’s front porch.
Investigators have released that video, hoping the images will encourage someone to come forward with information.
“It is kind of scary because it is right next door,” explains neighbor Shawn Goughnour. “I hope they do catch them.”
MORE FROM CBS BOSTONIt’s an unfashionable thing to admit, but sometimes what happens in the European Parliament really matters. This week, unnoticed by almost everyone, MEPs will consider proposals by the European commission and member states to overturn a ban on the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops in Europe. But it’s a step that could be undermined if anti-GM lobbyists get their way.
This little-noticed debate could be crucial for the future of European agriculture. For nearly 15 years the European Union maintained a de-facto ban on any GM cultivation despite repeated advice from independent scientists that GM should be allowed to go ahead. This ban operated because certain countries, such as France and Hungary, have made it clear that they will never approve a GM crop under any circumstances, thereby preventing any other member state within the EU’s single market from allowing farmers to plant biotech seeds.
No-one thinks that the French and Hungarians, who seem to have integrated anti-GM superstition into their cultural DNA, are going to change their minds anytime soon. So the proposals put in front of the European Parliament by the commission and member states (via the European council) were intended to allow anti-biotech countries to opt out of any pending GM crop approvals. The likes of France and Hungary would no longer have to advance their customary spurious scientific justifications: a religious-like aversion to new plant breeding technology will do just fine.
This is a bitter pill to swallow if you think that science-based risk assessment should guide policymaking on important issues. But it is probably a necessary compromise in order to allow EU members like the UK, Spain and the Netherlands - who do want to move forwards on biotech research - to do so without being held back forever by the intransigents. Notably, these European council proposals won near-unanimous approval, from both anti and pro-GM countries in Europe, because they would allow each to make their own decisions.
But this compromise, carefully crafted over four years of tortuous European Council negotiations, is now being undermined by anti-GM lobbyists working furiously behind the scenes in Brussels and Strasbourg. The latest proposals from the parliament’s influential environment committee have been so drastically amended that they would make the existing stalemate even worse.
Specifically, the amendments the committee has put to fellow MEPs remove the requirement to first request a national opt-out before a country ban can be introduced. This upsets the careful compromise, where companies applying for permission to market GM seeds would be expected to agree to national opt-outs in order to avoid bans being formally introduced. The fear is that if anti-GM member states are allowed to go straight to the banning stage, this undermines the single market and would put unfair political pressure on those who want to allow GM cultivation. “If France has banned it,” the activists would shout, “it must be dangerous!”
The amendments also further undermine the council’s proposals by suggesting opt-outs can be justified on safety grounds. In practice no seed developer will sign up to a statement that its product is unsafe, so countries would move straight to the national ban stage.
These provisions appear intended by whoever drafted them behind the scenes to upset the proposed compromise and thereby keep the existing stalemate. This does make some kind of twisted sense: for the antis, of course, a de-facto ban is as good as a legally-agreed one, especially if it prevents any EU member state from moving forward. For the anti-GM campaigners, this is about keeping the EU blocked, preferably forever.
Those pursuing this intransigent line will no doubt present themselves as the good guys, trying to stop the bad guys at Monsanto from enslaving European farmers. But that is a red herring. Monsanto has already publicly announced that it has given up on crop biotechnology in Europe. And in any case it should be farmers who decide which seeds they choose to grow, not city-based lobbyists working for NGOs.
With private-sector crop biotech largely out of the picture, the activists are now trying to stamp out public-sector biotech in Europe as well. To the quiet despair of scientists at national academies, plant research institutes and universities across the continent, MEPs now risk sleepwalking into approving legislation which would effectively prohibit scientific research by default. The result would be that important taxpayer-funded biotech work could be frozen out of Europe on the back of a redundant anti-Monsanto trope.
This matters because Europe is still, despite years of anti-biotech vandalism and pervasive misinformation, a leader in publicly-funded research to address some of the real challenges in agriculture. A consortium of European universities and public-sector research institutions has, for example, developed a blight-resistant potato, which could drastically reduce the need for chemical fungicides. Will European farmers ever be able to grow them? Not if MEPs rubber-stamp the latest proposals.
Similarly, work by the UK-based Rothamsted Research on omega-3 oilseeds, aimed at developing a sustainable source of fish oils for salmon farmers, may never get beyond the laboratory. Instead, we will carry on hoovering up all the fish in the ocean to make fishmeal for feeding salmon – increasing the destruction of marine biodiversity, ironically in order to satisfy the entrenched ideologies of Greenpeace and its anti-biotech fellow travellers.
There will be a chilling effect in developing countries too: in Bangladesh, anti-GMO campaigners are currently trying to stop poor farmers having access to aubergine seeds that eliminate the need for pesticides spraying. I have personally experienced how the antis, both in Asia and Africa, constantly cite European resistance to GMOs as proof of the validity of their cause and as justification for banning developing country farmers from accessing improved crops.
The timeline is tight: the deadline for amendments to the European Parliament’s environment committee is Wednesday, with the new proposals set to be approved on 5 November. MEPs will no doubt be under intense pressure from NGO lobbyists to approve the amendments. Before doing so, they might consider consulting less politically powerful actors – in particular the scientific community whose work stands to be outlawed.
Make no mistake: within three weeks from now crop biotech in Europe could be dead and buried. Europe’s cutting edge in an important field of scientific innovation will be lost forever. And our continent’s farmers will be stuck using gallons of pesticides and chemical fertilisers when science offers more environmentally-friendly ways of growing crops - if only European politicians will allow European farmers to use them.
• Mark Lynas is an environmental writer and campaigner, and is currently visiting fellow at the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, Cornell University @mark_lynasWizKids/NECA will release Star Trek: Attack Wing Wave 25 later this month, and StarTrek.com has the exclusive First Look at the ships in the upcoming expansion packs, continuing with the Scimitar (Repaint).
The Scimitar is a Reman Warbird equipped with an arsenal of disruptors and torpedoes, primary and secondary shields, and a highly advanced cloaking technology, which allows it to remain practically impossible to detect. It also carries an extremely lethal thalaron weapon, which has the capability to destroy all life on a planet’s surface. Under the command of Praetor Shinzon, the Scimitar battled against the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-E in the Battle of the Bassen Rift.
The Scimitar is the most powerful ship in the Romulan Fleet so far. With a Primary Weapon Value of 6, 2 Agility, 7 Hull, and 4 Shields this ship is both ready to attack and durable enough to survive a prolonged battle. The ship’s named ability allows you to stay cloaked after attacking, as long as you place an Auxiliary Power Token beside your ship. The generic version of this ship, the Reman Warbird, loses one Shield and a Tech Upgrade Slot compared to the named version.
The Scimitar Expansion Pack contains three unique Captains for the Romulan Faction. The first is Shinzon, who is a Skill Level 9 Captain. During the Gather Forces step of Setup, instead of purchasing an Elite Talent Upgrade as normal for Shinzon, you may spend 4 SP to place up to 4 Romulan Elite Talent Upgrades face down beside this card. These cards remain face down until you decide to use one of them. When you do so, select the one you want to use and turn it face up for the rest of the game. Then discard the other 3.
Viceroy is a Skill Level 5 Captain. At the start of the game, place 2 Mission Tokens on this card. During the Planning Phase, after all other ships have chosen their Maneuvers, you may discard 1 of the Mission Tokens from this card to target a ship at Range 1, look at that ship’s Maneuver dial, and then select your Maneuver. The target ship cannot change its chosen Maneuver after you look.
Hiren is a Skill Level 2 Captain but he can also be played as an Admiral. As an Action, you may disable 1 of your Crew Upgrades to gain +1 attack die this round. No matter which Captain you choose, each one brings a special ability that will give you a competitive edge over your opponent.
The Scimitar Expansion Pack includes three Elite Talents to add to your roster. Attack Pattern Shinzon Theta is a powerful card that adds 1 additional damage to the target ship’s Shields for every uncancelled [critical hit] result. You must discard this card afterwards. Target Weapon Systems allows you to search the damage deck for a “Munitions Failure” or a “Weapons Malfunction” card, instead of drawing a random Damage Card, whenever you damage an opponent’s hull with a [critical hit] result. Re-shuffle the Damage Deck when you are done. Finally, Full Stop allows you to discard this card and ignore your chosen maneuver, electing to not moving. You still take an Action during the Perform Actions Step.
Reman Boarding Party is the only Crew Upgrade in this Expansion Pack. If your ship is not Cloaked, you may, as an Action, disable all your remaining Shields and target a ship at Range 1-2 that is not Cloaked and has no Active Shields. Discard this card and disable all Upgrades on the target ship.
When it comes to weapons, you will find the Scimitar is fully loaded. Photon Torpedoes allow you to attack a target ship at Range 2-3 with 5 attack dice. If fired from a Reman Warbird, gain +2 attack dice for truly frightening 7 attack dice. If that doesn’t get the job done, then perhaps it is time to deploy the Thalaron Weapon. Discard this card to perform a 10 dice attack at Range 2-3. Instead of inflicting normal damage, for each uncancelled [hit] or [critical hit] result, discard the Captain Card or 1 Crew Upgrade (opponent’s choice) on the target ship. If the Captain and all of the Crew Upgrades on the target ship are destroyed, any additional uncancelled [hit] or [critical hit] results damage the ship as normal (max 5 damage).
As if the Scimitar wasn’t intimidating enough, it has a number of defensive Tech Upgrades as well. Improved Cloaking Device allows you to perform a [cloak] Action even if you have no Active Shields and/or if there is an Auxiliary Power Token beside your ship. This Upgrade works exceptionally well with the Scimitar’s named ability, allowing it to stay cloaked almost indefinitely. Meanwhile, Secondary Shields allows you to place 3 Shield Tokens on this card at the start of the game. During each End Phase, if you have fewer total Shields (Active and/or Disabled) than your starting Shield value, remove 1 Shield from this card and add it to your ship. If your ship is Cloaked, you may choose to add the extra Shield as a Disabled Shield.
You will be hard pressed to find a more powerful ship than the Scimitar. Boasting strong attacks, cloaking technology, and healthy hull and shield values make it no surprise that the Scimitar is a popular favorite amongst Attack Wing Players. Now you have another chance to get this ship with a brand new metallic paint job.
Visit WizKids/NECA at WizKids.com/AttackWing for additional information about Star Trek: Attack Wing, and keep an eye on StarTrek.com for more First Looks and previews, coming soon.MATCH STATS
#2 Stanford def. Washington State 3-1 (19-25, 32-30, 25-16, 25-21)
#2 Stanford improves to 22-3 (15-1, Pac-12); Washington State drops to 15-13 (4-12, Pac-12)
Pullman, Washington (Pac-12 Match)
Attendance: 1,050
Box Score
Pullman, Washington – #2 Stanford bounced back from their first Pac-12 loss of the season to down Washington State on the road in four sets. Besides getting things back on the right track with every match important to earning a top four seed, the Cardinal inch one win closer to a Pac-12 title.
While many others posted big numbers, none stood above Stanford’s Kathryn Plummer (22 kills,.220, 13 digs) and Washington State’s Taylor Mims (25 kills, 14 digs, four blocks). Only one came out with the win though, as Plummer got more help around her with the rest of her teammates logging 40 kills compared to 28 from the ‘others’ for the Cougars.
Establishing those other options has been an issue at times this year for Washington State, and Stanford was able to continue that trend by holding the Cougars to a.169 mark while they hit.222. That was enough to overcome being slightly out-blocked (13-11, WSU) and struggling for yet another match in serving as they totaled 13 serve errors to three aces. They will hope that doesn’t become a developing trend as for their trip to the state of Washington, they recorded eight aces to 27 serve errors in two matches.
It wasn’t looking like a bounce-back performance early, as Washington State came ready to play in the opening set, needing only one lead change in the first five points to go ahead and never look back.
It wasn’t quite that simple in the second though as Washington State clung to a small lead until Stanford went in front 20-18 on a 3-0 run. After the Cardinal pulled ahead 23-20, the Cougars hit a 5-1 spurt with a Jocelyn Urias (seven kills, five blocks) kill to earn a set point chance. Back-to-back Audriana Fitzmorris (13 kills,.423, seven blocks) kills switched that opportunity though before Washington State would garner the advantage back at 28-27. After Fitzmorris thwarted that attempt yet again, Ella Lajos (eight kills,.316, six blocks) had kills to make it 29-28 and 30-29. With the Cougars unable to close though, a 3-0 Cardinal run finished off the set at 32-30.
Things weren’t as nerve racking in the third, as Fitzmorris continued her strong match with the first point for Stanford. From there, the Cardinal were ahead from coast-to-coast in the set to develop the 2-1 set advantage. After that, the fourth started tight but would slowly balloon out to bigger and bigger Stanford leads. The largest came at 20-15 and ended within just a point of that as Plummer laid down the final point at 25-21.
Other big performances came from Meghan McClure (career-high 13 kills,.344, 17 digs), Jenna Gray (53 assists, nine digs) and Morgan Hentz (23 digs, five assists) for Stanford while Penny Tusa (10 assists, 10 digs) notched a double-double for Washington State.
With the week now completed, Stanford will have some time as they prepare for two home matches with the Los Angeles schools in the upcoming week. It’s opposite for Washington State, who goes on the road next week to take on Oregon and Oregon State.
PRESS RELEASES:
Courtesy of Stanford:
PULLMAN, Wash. – Career-highs from Meghan McClure and 22 kills from Kathryn Plummer powered No. 2 Stanford past Washington State, Saturday, at Bohler Gym.
McClure finished with career-highs in kills (13) and digs (17) to notch her second double-double of the season. Plummer added 13 digs to her 22 kills for her team-best eighth double-double.
Stanford (22-3, 15-1 Pac-12) came out flat to start the match and the Cougars pounced, jumping out to a 15-5 lead. Stanford rallied behind freshman Meghan McClure at the service line, posting a 6-0 run before an attack error on Plummer gave Washington State (15-13, 4-12 Pac-12) the 25-19 win. The Cardinal hit just.119 in the set.
Sophomore Audriana Fitzmorris led all players with a.423 attack percentage, registering 13 kills and had a match-high seven blocks. Junior middle blocker Tami Alade chipped in with eight kills and four blocks.
The Cardinal evened the match in a wild second set, where Stanford came out on top 32-30. Fitzmorris led the team with six kills in the set, while Plummer and McClure had four apiece.
Sophomore setter Jenna Gray racked-up 53 assists and was one dig shy of a double-double. Sophomore libero Morgan Hentz tallied a season-high 23 digs to go with five assists, while freshman defensive specialist Kate Formico had 10 digs.
Stanford’s block came alive in the third as the Cardinal took a 2-1 lead in the match with a 25-16 decision. Stanford denied the Cougar attack on five occasions, including three by Fitzmorris. The Cardinal hit.206 in the set and held Washington State to a.054 clip.
Freshman Sidney Wilson came off the bench |
10,000 a year ago. Of course, email isn't the only way that project communication and coordination happens, and like reviews, doesn't necessarily measure activity from the very beginning of the project. 17,020 community members who have registered for membership with the OpenStack Foundation. Not every one of these is committing code, but likely a good chunk of those who take the time to sign up are actively participating in the community in some way. 4,500+ attendees of the most recent OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. This is at least a 50% increase from the roughly 3,000 who had attended the Portland Summit a year earlier.
As with any article full of stats like these that update daily, all of these numbers are of course subject to change. It's just a snapshot in time. What other numbers are worth following? Let us know in the comments.
Looking for more? Scott Wilson looked at relative values of project statistics in a previous piece entitled "How to evaluate the sustainability of an open source project" where he spoke to trends in code, community, and release.Image copyright AP Image caption Macaque monkeys are considered sacred by Hindus, who often feed them
A monkey in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has rained down banknotes on people, reports say.
Surprised holidaymakers in the scenic pine forest of Shimla, the state capital, ran around, collecting the falling notes for nearly an hour on Sunday, eyewitnesses said.
Reports said the simian stole 10,000 rupees ($165; £100) from a nearby home.
The monkey had entered the house to look for food, but when it did not find anything to eat, it took the money.
There are some 300,000 monkeys in the state and Shimla has long been a haven for the animals.
Macaque monkeys are considered sacred by Hindus, who often feed them.
But in recent years, the animals have been coming increasingly in conflict with humans, destroying crops, attacking people for food and biting children. And authorities in Himachal Pradesh have declared monkeys a menace.
The cash-dispensing simian was first spotted sitting on a tin roof with a bundle of currency notes before it playfully started throwing them down one-by-one.
As people began collecting notes of various denominations, the monkey moved on to a tree.
But as it continued to distribute money, many people rushed there to pick up the falling notes.
"Surprised by the attention it was attracting, the cash loaded monkey then decided to move into the thick pine trees. But as it continued to shower notes, the money collectors naturally followed it," said Amit Kanwar who witnessed the entire scene.
This is the second such incident in Shimla this year - in February too, a monkey stole a wad of currency notes from a home and distributed it among people on a crowded street.Egyptian archaeologists in Luxor have stumbled upon a decorative Coptic tombstone buried on the eastern side of the Sphinxes Avenue, under Al-Mathan Bridge.
The tombstone is carved of limestone and decorated with a cross and Coptic texts, Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Ahram Online.
The exact date of the object has not yet been ascertained, nor the identity of the deceased. However, Mostafa Al-Saghir, director of the Sphinxes Avenue, said experts are now studying the tombstone find out.
The excavations in the Sphinxes Avenue are part of a Ministry of Antiquities programme to restore the area and transform it into an open-air museum.
The avenue was the location for the procession of the Festival of Opet, which included priests, royalty and the pious, who walked from Karnak Temple to Luxor Temple.
Some 1,350 sphinxes, with human heads and lion bodies, lined the 2,700-metre- long avenue, and many of them have been now been restored.
The avenue was built during the reign of Pharaoh Nectanebo I to replace an earlier one built in the 18th Dynasty, as recorded by Queen Hatshepsut (1502-1482 BC) on the walls of her red chapel in Karnak Temple.
Hatshepsut built six chapels dedicated to the god Amun-Re on the route of the avenue during her reign, demonstrating its longevity as a place of religious significance.
Short link:Yesterday we reported that Samsung’s earlier-than-planned September 26th launch of its new Galaxy Note 4 had been met with complaints from customers regarding a ‘screen gap’ manufacturing issue. Today, a reference discovered in Samsung’s Note 4 manual confirms that the gap is actually a feature, not a flaw (via AndroidCentral).
Best iPhone, iPad, & Apple TV game controllers
The manual’s troubleshooting section has the following mention of the gap around the screen noting that it’s “a necessary manufacturing feature.”
A small gap appears around the outside of the device case… This gap is a necessary manufacturing feature and some minor rocking or vibration of parts may occur… Over time, friction between parts may cause this gap to expand slightly.
So that settles it. It’s a feature, not a flaw, and it could get worse (better?) over time.
Samsung officially launched the Galaxy Note 4 earlier this month on September 26th in Korea, which was reportedly an earlier-than-originally-planned launch due to pressure from strong sales of the new larger iPhone 6 models Apple launched early this month.
Apart from not looking very nice, the gap could cause some concerns related to dust, dirt and waterproofing features. The Galaxy Note 4 is already available to preorder in the US through AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile for an October launch. We’re assuming the stateside version of the device will also include the new screen gap feature.Photo
In the third sit-down national TV interview of her presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton said the candidacy of Donald J. Trump was a “bad development for our American political system,” rejected the implication that her campaign was irrevocably damaged by the email controversy and took a veiled jab at Senator Bernie Sanders, whose populist message has drawn big crowds and given him a lift in recent polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.
“You can wave your arms and give a speech but at the end of the day are you connecting with and really hearing what people are either saying to you or wishing that you would say to them?” Mrs. Clinton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday, without directly naming Mr. Sanders.
When asked by Ms. Mitchell about new polls that show a growing number of Americans do not trust her amid ongoing questions over her use of a private email, Mrs. Clinton said she was “confident” voters would trust that she was best positioned to help them improve their economic situation.
“The American people will know they can trust me when it comes to standing up to them and advocating for them and being their champion,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Asked why she deleted thousands of personal emails from her private server, Mrs. Clinton said her lawyers had meticulously examined the emails, determining which were work-related and which were personal, before handing over some 55,000 pages to the State Department. “I was asked ‘Do you need to keep your personal emails?’ and I said, ‘No, we don’t. You can delete those,’ ” she told a persistent Ms. Mitchell.
The State Department, she said, recently informed her lawyers it would be returning 1,200 additional emails because they were deemed strictly personal and not work-related.
Mrs. Clinton defended her close aide, Huma Abedin, whose special arrangement to take on outside consulting work while serving at the State Department was viciously criticized last week by Mr. Trump. “He has attacked so many people including my close aide and myself and many other people,” she said. “I think it’s an unfortunate development in American politics that his campaign is all about who he’s against.”
She said she was not involved in Ms. Abedin’s arrangement, but that “everything she did was approved under the rules as they existed in the State Department.” Concerning Mr. Trump. she said, “He’s great at innuendo and conspiracy theories and defaming people.”
Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on any policy differences she had with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is contemplating whether to seek the Democratic nomination. “I’m not going to address any of the political questions around my friend Joe Biden,” she said.
She said she felt confident about her own candidacy, but could understand why Americans were frustrated with their economic circumstances and looking for answers from a range of candidates. “Sometimes those answers are bombastic and very ideological,” Mrs. Clinton said. “But I can understand why people are looking for some way out of their own problems, particularly their economic problems.”Listen To Episode 94: Blow It Up? Or Stay The Course? http://media.blubrry.com/firesidechat/p/www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/firesidechat.s3.amazonaws.com/fireside-chat-episode-94.mp3
A debate around if the Flames should start to make wholesale changes to the team, or if their performance is expected for where they are in the rebuild and they should stay the course is the main topic of discussion for this week as we reflect back on the expectations from this time last year.
Breaking down the last week of games, we’re starting to see some some good play from the team, even with the continued poor results. We take on some of the criticisms of the team and players and if they’re deserved or not and other issues surrounding the team including Karri Ramo being waived and sent to the AHL and if that was the right choice.
There are lots of trade rumors with the Flames right now and we dive into why Steven Stamkos coming to Calgary isn’t viable. Dennis Wideman and Kris Russel leaving has been rumoured as well and we talk about which of the two defencemen we’d rather see leave and if we should move them now or wait until the Trade Deadline.Turkey has warned Australia against any further formal recognition of the Armenian genocide to avoid undermining its relationship and the special centenary commemoration of Gallipoli in 2015.
And NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell has retaliated, saying it was ''deplorable'' for the 100-year anniversary of the Gallipoli landing to be used for political purposes.
NSW MPs have been told they will not be welcome at the Gallipoli centenary commemoration in 2015. Credit:Mike Bowers
Turkey has also made it clear that NSW MPs are not welcome to attend the ceremony because of bipartisan support for a motion moved in Parliament by Mr O'Farrell in May which recognises and condemns the Armenian genocide.
The warning from the Turkish speaker of the parliament, Cemil Cicek, has come on the eve of a public ballot for 8000 tickets reserved for Australians to attend the special ceremony in Gallipoli on April 25, 2015. The ballot opens at midnight on Friday and closes on January 31.The Mane Six, plus the Cutie mark Crusaders reimagined as Eeveelutions!Jolte-Dash is the fastest eeveelution, whether on land or in the skies. She commands thunder and lightning.Flutterleaf is quiet and in tune with nature, everything from plants to animals. She wouldn't even hurt a Zubat.Flarie Pie likes to go to parties. At her birthday party, she blew the candles on. (Hah, hah)Vapority is calm and beautiful like flowing water.Esparkleon is skilled and powerful with her psychic attacks. She takes after her mentor, Celesteon.Emberjack uses her fire to cook apple-themed delicacies! Her high attack also helps with hard farm work.The Evolutionary Explorers are three little Eevees who explore together in hopes of evolving.Also check out Celesteon and Luneon, the Eevee-fied versions of our favorite sun and moon princessesthanks to SpindleWinter for coming up with a punnier name for Twilight SparkleThe Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has lost a significant, longtime sponsor and race officials this week blamed the departure on "manipulative misinformation" spread by animal rights organizations, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA.
The statement from the Iditarod Trail Committee chief executive on Tuesday said Wells Fargo announced its decision to drop its sponsorship earlier this week, severing its financial tie to the sled dog race after 29 years. PETA applauded the bank's decision and claimed victory in an online post on its website.
David Kennedy, Wells Fargo spokesman for the Alaska region, declined to say whether outreach from PETA and its supporters influenced the company's decision. Kennedy said in an email this week that Wells Fargo made the decision as part of its "regular marketing sponsorship review process."
"Wells Fargo regularly reviews where we allocate our marketing resources to ensure that our efforts help our customers understand how we can help them achieve their financial goals," he said. "We have nothing further to add."
Both Kennedy and the Iditarod refused to say how much money Wells Fargo has donated to the race.
Sponsorship dates to 1988
Kennedy said the longstanding sponsorship started in 1988 when the National Bank of Alaska stepped in to provide the winner's purse for Iditarod champion Susan Butcher. Wells Fargo bought the National Bank of Alaska in 2000 and the race sponsorship continued, he said in an email.
In 2011, Wells Fargo decreased its contribution to the race, moving from the top-tier sponsor to the second-tier level, which the race calls its "lead dog partners." The bank has sponsored the Unalakleet checkpoint award since 1993, this year presenting the first Iditarod musher to the coastal community with $3,500 worth of gold nuggets and a trophy.
Chas St. George, Iditarod chief operating officer, declined to say what level of contributions defines a "lead dog" sponsor. However, Alaska Business Monthly reported in 2014 that lead dog sponsors contribute between $100,000 and $250,000 to the race.
Iditarod Chief Executive Stan Hooley said in the statement on Tuesday that "there is no doubt" the bank's decision to withdraw support was directly related to "manipulative misinformation that PETA and others have been using to target our sponsors at their corporate headquarters outside of Alaska."
"These misguided activists are implying that the Iditarod condones and engages in cruelty to sled dogs that participate in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race," the statement said. "Nothing could be further from the truth. We honor the sled dogs who participate in the Iditarod."
PETA has long criticized the Iditarod. On PETA's website, the organization describes the Iditarod as an "abusive race in which dogs are run to their deaths."
Stephanie Shaw, a California-based corporate liaison at PETA, said in an interview Wednesday that the organization reached out to the Iditarod's corporate sponsors after the 2017 Iditarod "to make sure they're aware of the egregious suffering" of sled dogs both on and off the trail.
"This was one of the most tragic years in Iditarod history," Shaw said. "Five dogs died in less than a week."
During the 2017 Iditarod, three dogs collapsed on the trail and died and a fourth dog died after overheating on an airplane that the Iditarod chartered to fly dropped dogs from Galena to Anchorage. Another dropped dog got loose from a dog handler in Anchorage after being released from Iditarod care. The dog was hit and killed by a car.
It was the deadliest year for Iditarod dogs since 2009.
Appealing to Coca-Cola now
Shaw said PETA encouraged its supporters to reach out to Wells Fargo and urge the bank to end its sponsorship after the 2017 race. The organization provided a form on its website for people to fill out and send to Wells Fargo. She said more than 80,000 people filled out the form "in a matter of days."
"We are encouraging Coca-Cola to be the next sponsor to flee," Shaw said on Wednesday. "They've already received over 100,000 emails."
With Wells Fargo's withdrawal from the race, the Iditarod has four top-tier sponsors and six second-tier, or lead dog, sponsors, including Alaska Airlines and the Bristol Bay Native Corp. Coca-Cola is one of five third-tier sponsors, according to the Iditarod website.
PETA also said this week that Guggenheim Partners, a Chicago- and New York-based investment firm, had dropped its sponsorship of the Iditarod. The firm did not respond to request for comment Wednesday or Thursday. St. George, the Iditarod chief operating officer, said the Iditarod could not confirm PETA's claim. Guggenheim Partners is a "wheel dog partner," the fourth tier of Iditarod sponsorship.A skull of an enormous ancient mammal could force us to rethink the evolutionary history of mammals, our own taxonomic order.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists report that they have discovered remains of a mammal that lived some 66 million years ago on what is today Madagascar. At about 20 pounds, it vastly outweighed nearly all other mammals of its era.
"It was a monster," David Krause of Stony Brook University in New York, who led the research team told the Associated Press. "It looks like a big groundhog."
Krause and colleagues named the creature Vintana sertichi. "Vintana" means "luck" in Malagasy, and was chosen because of the way the skull unexpectedly appeared as the scientists were doing a CT scan of a large sandstone block to look for fish fossils. "We were astounded to see a mammal skull staring back at us on the screen," Dr. Krause told Reuters.
"It was dawning on me that I was experiencing the most incredible bit of luck I had ever been part of," added Joe Groenke, Krause's technician and the first to view the CT images.
The animal's second name honors Joseph Sertich, now a curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, who in 2010 collected the sandstone block.
The 5-inch skull gives scientists their first good window into a poorly understood group of ancient Southern Hemisphere mammals, called gondwanatherians, that had until now been known only from isolated teeth and bits of jaw. They went extinct long ago, without leaving any descendants today.
Vintana is only distantly related to today's mammals and was not a member of any of the three existing groups: placentals, marsupials and monotremes. "It is one of those evolutionary experiments in'mammalness' that did not make it," Krause told Reuters. "In essence, it really shakes up the early mammalian family tree and helps to reorganize it."
The closest modern comparison to Vintana is a large, semi-aquatic South American rodent called a nutria, Krause told Reuters.
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Judging from the animal's exquisitely preserved skull, it was an active plant eater with strong jaws, keen sense of smell, well-developed hearing and terrific eyesight under low light conditions, they wrote.
"It would have been a very fine hors d'oeuvre" for a dinosaur, Krause told the AP.Commission for (these are not my OCs)I really do love drawing warm pictures. Warm as in warm colours lol it's really my favourite thing. Anyway yeah, hope you guys had a great christmas! Sorry I haven't uploaded much. I do update my Patreon the most if you're interested in seeing some of my work for as little as $1 - www.patreon.com/dennyvixen Anyway, actually drew this just before Christmas, but since the commissioner requested for it to not be uploaded until the 24th/25th it's here now. Well I would have uplaoded it on the actual Christmas day but since it was...well, christmas day, I was quite busy with family and socializing and all that scary stuff lolHope you all had a great Christmas, or if you don't celebrate it, just a great day/week in generalAleksandar Tonev is on a season-long loan at Celtic from Aston Villa
Celtic's Aleksandar Tonev has lost his appeal against a seven-match ban for racially abusing Aberdeen's Shay Logan.
A Scottish Football Association appeal tribunal has upheld October's against the Bulgarian.
It was revealed that the original decision had been based on the belief that Logan, 26, was a more reliable and convincing witness than Tonev, 24.
Celtic had challenged both the decision and the length of the suspension handed out to the on-loan Aston Villa winger.
The SFA states that Tonev's seven-match ban will be applied immediately, although one match has already been served by the player who moved to Glasgow on a season-long loan in August.
English defender Logan reacted on Twitter by saying: "Do the crime, serve the time. Off ya pop geezer. #KickRacismOutOfFootball.
"On that note, let's forget what has happened in the past. It's done n dusted. Now time to move on and forget it. I'll always be me."
Celtic statement: "Celtic Football Club is extremely disappointed by the outcome of the Scottish FA's appeal tribunal. We will be approaching the Scottish FA to seek to address this issue."
The original tribunal's findings revolved around Logan's claim that Tonev had used the word "black" while swearing at him during a Scottish Premiership match at Celtic Park in September.
Celtic said they will continue to give the player their "full support" and hinted that they will further challenge the decision.
"We do not consider that any player should be found guilty of such a grave offence on the basis of the evidence presented in this case," said the Scottish champions, who confirmed they will approach the SFA to discuss the issue further.
"We would like to make it clear that at no stage was it ever suggested that Shay Logan had made any false allegations.
Shay Logan tweeted his response to the SFA's tribunal's decision
"However, Aleksandar Tonev's position consistently has been that he did not say the words that were alleged to have been said and that he is not a racist."
Aston Villa, like Celtic, said racism was "abhorrent" and had no place in football but also stood by their player's insistence that he did not utter the words alleged.
The Bulgarian FA said it was "very disappointed" to hear that the ban had been upheld. In a statement it said: "We still believe in Tonev's innocence, bearing in mind the fact that the player has never showed before any racist behaviour on and off the pitch".
During the match, Logan complained to referee Bobby Madden that Tonev had made a racist remark towards him and also reported it to Dons captain Mark Reynolds.
The 4 December appeals tribunal heard submissions on the Bulgarian's behalf as he challenged the suggestion that he had used "offensive, insulting and abusive language of a racist nature".
Celtic argued that the tribunal had failed to give Tonev a fair hearing, that it was entitled to reach its decision based on the facts and that the period of suspension imposed was excessive.
SFA judicial panel appellate tribunal "Having made allowance for the impact of anxiety upon him, the tribunal were unable to accept Mr Tonev as either credible or reliable."
In making its findings public, the appeals tribunal pointed out that there were "two inconsistent accounts" and that the original panel had to decide who they considered to be right on "the balance of probabilities".
"They stated that they believed Logan, found him to be a reliable witness and gave cogent reasons for doing so," the report said of the original panel.
It added that the Englishman "impressed them by the careful and measured manner in which he gave his evidence" and that his testimony was consistent with that of other witnesses and with video evidence.
It was pointed out that Tonev, who had rejected the opportunity to use an interpreter, had not been as convincing.
"Having made allowance for the impact of anxiety upon him, the tribunal were unable to accept him as either credible or reliable," read the report.
"They have explained that he gave his evidence in a guarded and hesitant manner and that his evidence on the understanding of the language that had been used was particularly unsatisfactory."Tyler Nero Western Carolina
Auburn defensive lineman Tyler Nero (91) runs up field against Western Carolina Saturday, Oct. 12, 2013, during the fourth quarter at the Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)
-- Defensive lineman
Tyler Nero
's football career at Auburn is on the ropes.
The reserve defender will take a "medical redshirt" and will complete his undergraduate degree at the school after collapsing in practice during a practice in the spring, coach
Gus Malzahn
said Monday. It's possible Nero could rejoin the team as a student assistant coach, but it appears his playing career has ended.
"Great kid," Malzahn said. "We wish him nothing but the best."
while Auburn was going through its pace drills. The reason for his collapse has not been released. Nero was carted off the field and hospitalized at East Alabama Medical Center.
Doctors ran tests on the Atmore native, but details surrounding the medical issue and whether it stemmed from a preexisting condition have not been released to the public.
"Any time any player gets hurt, as a coach, you're definitely concerned," Malzahn said in March.
About 10 of Nero's teammates visited him in the hospital. Teammates at the time believed the health issue was not serious.
Nero (6-2, 285), a sophomore, played in one game as a redshirt freshman in 2013 and had one tackle.
The Atmore native out of Escambia County High was ranked the 10th-best player in the state in 2012 and was rated a four-star prospect by the major recruiting services.Image caption Mohammed Abu Khdair, shown in an undated family photo, was seen being forced into a car
A number of Jewish suspects have been arrested over the murder of Palestinian 16-year-old Mohammad Abu Khdair, whose death sparked days of violent protests.
Israeli police told the BBC that the teenager, abducted on Wednesday morning and found dead hours later, was killed "because of his nationality".
He had reportedly been burnt to death.
Earlier, the bodies of three murdered Israeli students were found. Mohammad Abu Khdair's family believe he was murdered in revenge.
Israel's Shin Bet security agency issued a brief statement confirming the arrests, and said the suspects were being questioned at one of their facilities.
"In the wake of intelligence and operational information, the Israel Police and the ISA (Shin Bet) this morning arrested several Jewish suspects regarding the 2 July abduction and murder of Mohammad Abu Khdair," the statement said.
The agency did not comment on any possible motive for the killing, saying details of the case were subject to a judicial gag order.
Several Israeli media outlets have reported that one of the six suspects has confessed to the killing.
The reports also claimed that the individual had given police information about the other suspects, but this has not yet been confirmed by officials.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would respond to the killings "with a firm hand".
"We do not differentiate between the terrorists," he said. "We will not allow extremists from wherever they come to ignite the region and shed more blood."
Image copyright AP Image caption Thousands mourned Mohammed Abu Khdair's death on Friday
Analysis: James Reynolds, BBC News, Jerusalem
Israel has found itself carrying out two high-profile manhunts: first for the killers of the three Israeli teenagers found dead on Monday; second for the killers of the Palestinian teenager whose body was found two days later.
It may be that this second manhunt has achieved more results than the first. The arrest of a number of suspects, described as Jewish, suggests that Mohammed Abu Khdair's murder may have been politically motivated. But we can't yet know for sure. Israel's authorities have banned the reporting of any more details of the suspects' identities.
Palestinians have not immediately celebrated news of the arrests. The Palestinian people largely mistrust Israel's judicial system and its police force. They see Israel's institutions as instruments of occupation - not justice. "The arrests don't make me happy," said Hussein Abu Khdair, Mohammed's father, "Nothing will bring him back."
The parents of the three Israeli teenagers continue to await further word from the hunt for their sons' killers.
Image copyright AP Image caption Mourning over the teenager's death was marred by outbreaks of violence
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Mohammed Abu Khdair's family believe he was killed in revenge for the deaths of three Israeli students
Thousands attended Mohammad Abu Khdair's funeral on Friday near the family's home in the Shufat district of East Jerusalem.
Hundreds of Palestinian youths clashed with Israeli police in East Jerusalem before and after the funeral.
Huge controversy was sparked when mobile-phone footage emerged showing two officers repeatedly beating a teenager suspected of taking part in the violence.
The teenager was Tariq Khdair, a 15-year-old Palestinian-American who is also a cousin of Mohammad Abu Khdair.
He was bailed after appearing in court on Sunday, accused of attacking police officers during the unrest.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Tariq Khdair: "They came from the side and grabbed me"
Mohammad Abu Khdair was seen being forced into a car in Shufat early on Wednesday and his body was found later in a forest in West Jerusalem.
A post-mortem examination was carried out by Israeli doctors, with a senior Palestinian medical official in attendance.
The examination results have not yet been released.
But Palestinian attorney-general Mohammed al-A'wewy was quoted as saying fire dust had been found in his respiratory canal, meaning the victim had "inhaled this material while he was burnt alive".
Mohammad Abu Khdair, who had also suffered a head injury, had burns to 90% of the body, it was reported.Bisphenol A (BPA) is an organic synthetic compound with the chemical formula (CH 3 ) 2 C(C 6 H 4 OH) 2 belonging to the group of diphenylmethane derivatives and bisphenols, with two hydroxyphenyl groups. It is a colorless solid that is soluble in organic solvents, but poorly soluble in water (0.344 wt % at 83 °C[2]).
BPA is a starting material for the synthesis of plastics, primarily certain polycarbonates and epoxy resins, as well as some polysulfones and certain niche materials. BPA-based plastic is clear and tough, and is made into a variety of common consumer goods, such as plastic bottles including water bottles, sports equipment, CDs, and DVDs. Epoxy resins containing BPA are used to line water pipes, as coatings on the inside of many food and beverage cans and in making thermal paper such as that used in sales receipts.[3] In 2015, an estimated 4 million tonnes of BPA chemical were produced for manufacturing polycarbonate plastic, making it one of the highest volume of chemicals produced worldwide.[4]
BPA is a xenoestrogen, exhibiting estrogen-mimicking, hormone-like properties[5] that raise concern about its suitability in some consumer products and food containers. Since 2008, several governments have investigated its safety, which prompted some retailers to withdraw polycarbonate products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ended its authorization of the use of BPA in baby bottles and infant formula packaging, based on market abandonment, not safety.[6] The European Union and Canada have banned BPA use in baby bottles.
Production [ edit ]
World production capacity of BPA was 1 million tons in the 1980s,[2] and more than 2.2 million tons in 2009.[7] It is a high production volume chemical. This compound is synthesized by the condensation of acetone (hence the suffix A in the name)[8] with two equivalents of phenol. The reaction is catalyzed by a strong acid, such as hydrochloric acid (HCl) or a sulfonated polystyrene resin. Industrially, a large excess of phenol is used to ensure full condensation; the product mixture of the cumene process (acetone and phenol) may also be used as starting material:[2]
Numerous ketones undergo analogous condensation reactions.[2]
Uses [ edit ]
Bisphenol A is primarily used to make plastics, such as this polycarbonate water bottle.
In 2003, U.S. consumption was 856,000 tons, 72% of which used to make polycarbonate plastic and 21% going into epoxy resins.[9] In the U.S., less than 5% of the BPA produced is used in food contact applications,[10] but remains in the canned food industry and printing applications such as sales receipts.[11][12]
Polycarbonates [ edit ]
Bisphenol A and phosgene react to give polycarbonate. The reaction is conducted under biphasic conditions; the hydrochloric acid is scavenged with aqueous base:[13]
Million tonnes (8 billion pounds) of BPA are consumed for this purpose yearly.[14]
Epoxy and vinyl ester resins [ edit ]
It is a precursor in production of major classes of resins, specifically the vinyl ester resins. This application usually begins with alkylation of BPA with epichlorohydrin.[15]
Specialized derivatives [ edit ]
BPA is a versatile building block from which many derivatives have been prepared. Nitration give dinitrobisphenol A. Bromination gives tetrabromobisphenol A (TBBPA), which exhibits fire retardant properties.[17]
BPA is also used in the synthesis of polysulfones and some Polyether ether ketones. It is an antioxidant in some plasticizers, and as a polymerization inhibitor in PVC.[citation needed]
Several drug candidates have been developed from bisphenol A, including Ralaniten, #Ralaniten acetate, and EPI-001.
Identification in plastics [ edit ]
In the U.S., plastic packaging is split into seven broad classes for recycling purposes by a Plastic identification code. As of 2014 there are no BPA labeling requirements for plastics in the U.S. "In general, plastics that are marked with Resin Identification Codes 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 are very unlikely to contain BPA. Some, but not all, plastics that are marked with the Resin Identification Code 7 may be made with BPA."[18] Type 7 is the catch-all "other" class, and some type 7 plastics, such as polycarbonate (sometimes identified with the letters "PC" near the recycling symbol) and epoxy resins, are made from bisphenol A monomer.[2][19] Type 3 (PVC) may contain bisphenol A as an antioxidant in "flexible PVC" softened by plasticizers,[2] but not rigid PVC such as pipe, windows, and siding.
History [ edit ]
Bisphenol A was discovered in 1891 by Russian chemist Aleksandr Dianin.[20]
In 1934 workers at I.G. Farbenindustrie reported the coupling of BPA and epichlorohydrin. Over the following decade, coatings and resins derived from similar materials were described by workers at the companies of DeTrey Freres in Switzerland and DeVoe and Raynolds in the US. This early work underpinned the development of epoxy resins, which in turn motivated production of BPA.[16] The utilization of BPA further expanded with discoveries at Bayer and General Electric on polycarbonate plastics. These plastics first appeared in 1958, being produced by Mobay and General Electric, and Bayer.[21]
In terms of the endocrine disruption controversy, the British biochemist Edward Charles Dodds tested BPA as an artificial estrogen in the early 1930s. He found BPA to be 1 / 37,000 as effective as estradiol.[22][23][24] Dodds eventually developed a structurally similar[25] compound, diethylstilbestrol (DES), which was used as a synthetic estrogen drug in women and animals until it was banned due to its risk of causing cancer; the ban on use of DES in humans came in 1971 and in animals, in 1979.[22] BPA was never used as a drug.[22] BPA's ability to mimic the effects of natural estrogen derive from the similarity of phenol groups on both BPA and estradiol, which enable this synthetic molecule to trigger estrogenic pathways in the body.[26] Typically phenol-containing molecules similar to BPA are known to exert weak estrogenic activities, thus it is also considered an endocrine disrupter (ED) and estrogenic chemical.[27] Xenoestrogens is another category the chemical BPA fits under because of its capability to interrupt the network that regulates the signals which control the reproductive development in humans and animals.[28]
Health effects [ edit ]
[29][30] The largest exposure humans have to BPA is by mouth from such sources as food packaging, the epoxy lining of metal food and beverage cans, and plastic bottles
BPA has been found to bind to both of the nuclear estrogen receptors (ERs), ERα and ERβ.[25] It is 1000- to 2000-fold less potent than estradiol.[25] BPA can both mimic the action of estrogen and antagonize estrogen, indicating that it is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) or partial agonist of the ER.[25] At high concentrations, BPA also binds to and acts as an antagonist of the androgen receptor (AR).[25] In addition to receptor binding, the compound has been found to affect Leydig cell steroidogenesis, including affecting 17α-hydroxylase/17,20 lyase and aromatase expression and interfering with LH receptor-ligand binding.[25]
In 1997, adverse effects of low-dose BPA exposure in laboratory animals were first proposed.[31] Modern studies began finding possible connections to health issues caused by exposure to BPA during pregnancy and during development. See US public health regulatory history and Chemical manufacturers reactions to bans. As of 2014, research and debates are ongoing as to whether BPA should be banned or not.
A 2007 study investigated the interaction between bisphenol A's and estrogen-related receptor γ (ERR-γ). This orphan receptor (endogenous ligand unknown) behaves as a constitutive activator of transcription. BPA seems to bind strongly to ERR-γ (dissociation constant = 5.5 nM), but only weakly to the |
Bulgaria. Many of the Bulgarian elite were integrated into Byzantine society, being given military or civil positions within the Byzantine state. This integration is illustrated by the last Bulgarian tsar Ivan Vladislav being an ancestor of the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos.
Notes [ edit ]Knight Cities Challenge grant to fund city job training program
The city of Boulder will receive $200,000 to fund a program that trains homeless residents to make furniture and art from trees felled by the invasive emerald ash borer.
The idea, dubbed Tree Debris to Opportunity, was chosen as a winner in the $5 million Knight Cities Challenge hosted by the Knight Foundation. The challenge is held in 26 communities around the U.S. that were once home to newspapers owned by brothers John S. and James L. Knight.
Thirty-seven projects in 19 cities were awarded funds ranging from $4,000 to $385,000.
"The project reflects Boulder's characteristic resourcefulness, utilizing what most would think of as a nuisance into reusable natural resources to benefit the community," said Lilly Weinberg, Knight Foundation director for community foundations.
Tom Read, forestry assistant for the city of Boulder measures the sizes ash trees killed by the Emerald Ash Borer and calls out the measurements to Margot Josephs, manager, community outreach & partnerships with Boulder Parks and Recreations. The logs with be milled, dried, and sent to the Boulder Library Makerspace. Clients of the Bridge House will be trained to make them into useable items that will be on sale at the Boulder Farmers Market and other places around town. For more photos go to www.dailycamera..com (Paul Aiken / Staff Photographer)
The proposal was submitted by Yvette Bowden, deputy director of the city's parks and recreation department. Bowden was inspired by the huge amounts of trees killed by the green jewel beetles that will eventually affect up to 11 percent of the city's canopy.
"Aside from thinking what can we do to slow the infestation, I started thinking about what am I going to do with the debris?" Bowden said. "It's not very Boulder to leave it sitting in a yard. I said, 'What would Boulder do?'"
The city will partner with local nonprofit Bridge House to train homeless residents in woodworking, crafting furniture and art from the dried ash wood that will then be sold at the farmers' market. The 18-month long pilot program will utilize the maker space at Boulder library and will be open to members of the public as well.
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Bridge House has been partnering with the city's parks department since 2012 on Ready to Work, which employs homeless individuals on work crews doing cleanup and landscaping. About 50 people have graduated to full-time employment and housing through the program.
"When the city decided they wanted to apply for the challenge, they approached me with the idea that Ready to Work could be a partner," said Bridge House Executive Director Isabel McDevitt. "We're always looking for opportunities to enhance the employability (of our clients) so to have an additional layer of training and woodworking is exciting."
Another good thing is that the program is replicable, Bowden said. Not only for the 25 states in which the emerald ash borer is found, but for any municipality that finds itself with an excess of downed trees from other pests, inclement weather or construction projects.
"I can't express to you how honored we are" to be a challenge winner, Bowden said. "I'm really confident that we can turn this to an idea from solution."
Shay Castle: 303-473-1626, castles@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/shayshinecastleThe United Nations has begun to use biometric technology to better obtain and manage data on refugees, according to The United Nations has begun to use biometric technology to better obtain and manage data on refugees, according to a SciDev.Net article by Aamna Mohdin. The UNHCR ( United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ) is using iris scans, photographs, and fingerprints to collect this data.
Traditionally, the agency has relied on surveys and estimates from NGOs and governments to guess at refugee numbers, but it’s a massive task: the agency believes that in the first half of 2014, 5.5 million individuals were displaced by conflict. But early in that year, the UNHCR started collecting biometric data at the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi, believing it to be a more reliable means of identifying individuals who often don’t have their own identification documents.
While such methods can’t be used as effectively outside of refugee camps, they do provide a valuable contribution to the overall effort, and their data will perhaps be more reliable than that collected elsewhere. Indeed, governments around the world are starting to employ biometric identification methods for their own citizens, and while such measures may appear to be used for more nefarious ends under some regimes, in countries like India, where a national biometric registry is linked to identity cards, they are helping to make government more accessible for all citizens. In the hands of the UN’s refugee agency, the tools will almost certainly be used for good, helping the agency to more effectively do its vital work.
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January 28, 2015 – by Alex PeralaA new study suggests motorcycles account for 10 per cent of all motor vehicle deaths in the province, and cost the health care system six times the amount of car crashes.
Dr. Daniel Pincus, who works at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and is one of the authors of the study, told 680 NEWS that people need to realize that riding motorcycles has a higher risk of injury or death in an accident.
“Motorcycles account for five times the deaths, six times the medical costs and 10 times the severe injuries – those injuries being ones that would matter to your life – as compared to cars,” he explained.
The authors of the study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, said that while car safety has improved over the past 10 years, injuries from motorcycle crashes have remained stable or even gotten worse.
This study comes two months after more than 10 people were charged in relation to a series of dangerous motorcycle stunts this summer that snarled traffic on major highways in and around the Toronto area.
Police said the charges included dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, fleeing an officer and driving with a suspended licence.
Provincial police previously laid charges in March in relation to similar incidents on Toronto-area highways in 2016. One rider was killed in July last year when he collided with a transport truck as a group of motorcyclists travelling as a pack on Highway 401 slowed traffic while performing stunts.
But Pincus said that it isn’t just motorcyclists who take chances who find themselves in the ER.
“(It) is not only the people who are misbehaving, but some of the patients we see in the emergency department are just unfortunate – they drive responsibly and it’s just intrinsically a more dangerous mode of transportation,” he explained.
“Some of it is preventable but some of it probably won’t ever be.”
Read the complete study below:
Motorcycle Crashes in Ontario by CityNewsToronto on ScribdAbout
Blend it Like Becca—a small-town smoothie shop sensation!
It’s been a slow night, and Becca the shop owner, her young son Kevin and the Master Mixers -- including you! -- have started closing up shop. One minute before close, the door swings open. Outside, you see parked school buses and a line of people all the way to the street corner! The high school girl’s volleyball tournament has just gotten out, and everyone is craving a smoothie for the ride home. Becca cuts a deal: whoever blends the most smoothies tonight gets free smoothies for a month!
The Blend Off has begun, and only one can win. There’s just one problem: Kevin. Skittish at best on normal days, he flies into a frenzy, grabbing fruit for you from the fridge at random. Grab the fruit, complete the Orders, and blend your way to victory!
Animated gif of a two-player game in progress.
Blend Off! is a game of skill and speed for two to four players from designer Scot Eaton. Master Mixers roll the die (Kevin) to collect fruit to fill Orders from the deck (Becca). When a Master Mixer's fruit matches the Order, they can blend the ingredients and claim the Order for gold stars. There are no turns; everyone plays at the same time in a race for the finish. The winner is the player with the most gold stars at the end of the game.
Custom Dice!
In the main game mode, players are racing against each other to complete Orders from a shared deck of cards. Watch out, because if you're not fast enough, another player may complete an Order before you get a chance to finish it. Or maybe they will sabotage your efforts by placing a durian, a noxiously pungent fruit, in one of your Blenders.
In addition to the main game mode, there are two additional game modes included catering to different play styles and age groups – Race and Blend Off Jr.
In Race Mode, instead of players trying to complete Orders from a single pool of Order cards, players each have their own set of Orders to complete. This mode maintains the high speed frenzy of the main game, while dialing back the "take that" elements of the game.
In Blend Off Jr., players take turns trying to fulfill Orders. This is great for younger players or for players who just want to slow down the action.
Custom Wood Fruit Tokens! (Strawberry shape not final)
Want to read through the rulebook to see what it takes to be a Master Mixer? Check out the latest version: HERE.
Want to experience how Blend Off! plays before pledging? Go ahead and download the FREE prototype-quality print and play version, grab some colored cubes or other bits and try it yourself!
Regular Game Mode
Blend Off! Jr. Variant
"At two players it’s a good filler, providing five minutes of entertainment at a time. But at 4 players it’s madness, with players swiping fruit and snatching orders out from under each other. It’s awesome!" -- Andrew Fisher (Reviewer - Gameosity)
"Blend Off! provided a nice breath of fresh air in our household gaming repertoire. A full game takes less than 15 minutes and is full of all kinds of good-natured squabbling and jostling that comes with “no turns” play." -- Anthony Karcz (Reviewer - Geek Dad)
"My wife, daughter and I shared a lot of laughs and “hey, that was mine!” moments while we raced to the finish line. This is a terrific game to kick off a night of board gaming, as it will no doubt get everyone amped up." -- Scott Bogen (Reviewer - The Board Game Show)
"Blend Off! is great, it is a perfect filler game with you usual gaming group or for a family game night. Small enough to fit in most backpacks, you can take it anywhere to play." -- Dane Trimble, (Reviewer - Everything Board Games)
"I've really had a lot of fun playing Blend Off!... At under $20 there's no reason why this shouldn't be in everyone's collection! It's satisfying on many levels for just about anyone." -- George Jaros (Reviewer - GJJ Games)
"Blend Off is fast frenzied fun. A real treat for any gamer." -- John Goodenough, AEG Games (Game Designer - Talisman, Descent)
"My son and I had a good time with Blend Off. It's light and fast paced, and it gives you some fun, tense decisions." -- Randy Hoyt (Game Designer/Publisher - Foxtrot Games)
"Blend off is a fantastic frantic food frenzy that was a instant hit with my nephews!" -- Andrew Voigt (Game Designer - Perspective)
Comments from Game Playtesters:
"We LOVE this game! My kids pull it out and play it on their own."
"Simple to learn, fun to play, and enough variations to keep it interesting."
"This game perfectly walks the line between simplicity and complexity. If it were any more complex, it would be hard to play, but if it were any simpler, it wouldn't be strategic."
"Of all of the games I've played at this convention, this was by far the most satisfying."
Below is a short video showing the crazy fun of Blend Off! at an early playtest at Protospiel. Thanks to Dave and Scott from CMX Games.
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Help us spread the word! Share, follow, like, thumb, tweet, or whatever else you can think of!
TWG Page: http://www.thunderworksgames.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thunderworksgames
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thunderworksgam
BGG Page: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/166210/blend
Designer Blog: https://thepolariscollective.wordpress.com/category/scot-eaton/
Grab your avatar of choice!
Blend Off! Avatar
Blend Off! Avatar - Team Mango
Blend Off! Avatar - Team Orange
Blend Off! Avatar - Team Banana
Blend Off! Avatar - Team Strawberry
Blend Off! Avatar - Team Blueberry
Blend Off! Avatar - Team Durian
If the campaign goes really well, we have some exciting stretch goals planned. Let's help spread the word and enhance the game!
MASTER MIXER or ENDORSED MASTER MIXER Pledge Level
Shipping is included in the pledge for all backers in the US.
+$8 to Canada
+$12 everywhere else
MIXING ADVENTURER Pledge Level
Shipping is included in the pledge for all backers in the US.
+$10 to Canada
+$25 everywhere else
The expected MSRP of Blend Off! is $25. We will ship with a value of $19 which should avoid VAT and import taxes in most countries.
Additional charges for shipping are added after selecting a pledge level.
Roll Player is a game I designed and successfully Kickstarted last Fall/Winter with the help of an awesome group of backers. It is well on it's way into production and will be released into distribution in September of this year. Reviews have been great. I was asked by a number of backers for an opportunity to back Roll Player as part of their Blend Off pledge, so I'm offering it as the "Mixing Adventurer" Pledge Level. See the "How to play" video below.
This is Thunderworks Games' third time running a Kickstarter campaign, manufacturing a game and distributing a game. I believe I did a good job with my first two games, Bullfrogs and Roll Player, and will also deliver this great game to you with good/frequent/honest communication within a reasonable timeline.
Scot Eaton showed me his game Blend Off at Protospiel in Madison, WI in 2014. After one play, I was struck with how purely fun the game was. I just couldn't stop smiling after playing it and immediately wanted to play it again. It has a great theme. It's very approachable for non-gamers and gamers alike. It's portable. It doesn't take a long time to set up or play. So, I was stoked when Scot and I agreed to work together to bring it to you. This is his first published game and the first time I've published a TWG game that wasn't designed by me, so it's been really interesting for both of us.
I truely believe in this project and I'd appreciate your support. I am dedicated to transparency throughout this campaign. This game is for you, the gamer. Let's go on this adventure to make Blend Off! a reality together.
If you have any advice, comments, questions or just want to say hi, please feel free to contact me through the "Contact me" link under my bio on this page or send a message to me at keith@thunderworksgames.com or over at www.thunderworksgames.com!
Thank you so much for your support.
Keith Matejka of Thunderworks Games.Please share this story on facebook or any other social media outlets if you have not done so already. Let’s end careless driving. Help save a life.
Warning: this is a graphic post–not the pictures, just the content. I felt like I needed to write this as soon as possible to get it out of my head and start my own healing. My intentions aren’t to scare anyone but this is what I went through on Saturday when Adelaide was almost killed by an inattentive driver.
I’ve been planning a blog post for a few weeks now, letting the exciting incidents of my life build so I have material to work with. It’s my usual routine, especially when there aren’t race reports to write. With a number of writeable things going on of late, I figured I had plenty of options 1) Adelaide and I got mountain bikes 2) I saw three black bears on a mountain bike ride the other day 3) I got on a bike team for 2015 4) I saw a house burn down while on a run with Maybellene. A baby was killed in the fire.
The third option, when nothing comes up worth writing about, is to let my anger build over any number of random issues for a good rant.
The following is a story about the worst day of my life, by far.
Adelaide and I woke to a brisk but sunny day on Saturday. Maybellene was super excited to be up and running around as usual. Adelaide took her to the dog park while I was still asleep. After a pancake breakfast, which is our tradition for weekend rides, we met up with friends at Amante for the ride. Adelaide, the only one with an actual race to train for, parted from us early on, going north up highway 36 to Lyons as we went up to Ward. Her iron-distance triathlon was three weeks away and she needed a couple more weekends of long, hard, flat rides to prepare her for the 112 miles she’d encounter down at Lake Havasu on November 8th. Her running and riding form were coming along really well and she was shooting for a sub 11-hour race. Swimming is a non issue for her. She barely even needs to train for it.
The rest of us went at a leisurely pace for a while until I got a branch stuck in my front wheel, which required a brief stop. Matt decided an attack was in order right afterwards, since we’d both been complaining about the slow pace. Liam and I slowly towed him back, then pulled the plug well before that last steep pitch to the water pump. There, we all regrouped. They began the climb up to Brainard Lake and I said goodbye to head off down the mountain and reconnect with Adelaide, who would have been on the second of four 24-mile laps.
With me doing the lap in reverse, we had planned on meeting along the way. Being slow and tired from too much mountain biking and running, I planned to draft off her for a lap then head home to eat, take Maybellene for a walk or to the dog park, and work on the sponsor packet for the Carter Lake road race. A trip to Sprouts for dinner groceries was also in order.
I started to feel the day’s effort in my legs about three hours in. I should have seen her by then too. Her bike wasn’t at the Hygiene store, where she said to look just in case she had stopped for water. She drinks approximately 31 bottles an hour during rides. Zero throughout the rest of the day.
I kept going and took a left on 66 towards Lyons, fairly certain I wasn’t going to see her. Maybe she’d gotten tired early and only did one lap. Or she did a different route completely. I’m not one to worry too much. I was mainly thinking of how hungry I was getting since I’d only brought a small bit of food and the ride was approaching 3.5 hours. My mind drifted for a little while. I had a 15K trail race the next day. Four hours of riding wasn’t going to be the best preparation. Whatever, it was just a practice race anyways. I turned south on 36 towards home.
15 minutes later, as I climbed one of the rollers, I saw an Osmo bottle with a strange yellow lid sitting in the ditch. I recognized it as one of the bottles I’d filled that morning for Adelaide. She doesn’t leave bottles when they’re dropped. I looked up to the left, just now getting to the intersection of Hygiene Rd and Hwy 36 and saw two police cars and some people standing in the grass by the side of the road. It reminded me of a scene I’d come across on my way to Sprouts two days before: Emergency vehicles and a crumpled bike. I’d stopped then to see if anyone was seriously injured, just out of my own curiosity. This time, as I pulled across the road to the police car, I was suddenly very worried.
I asked what happened, if a cyclist was hit, was it a girl, what did her bike look like, what was her name, hair color. He gave me the bike’s description, not hers. He hadn’t seen her and the injuries to her face were substantial, which to me meant that she’d been unrecognizable. She hadn’t been able to give her name, he said. Those last two details made my stomach churn and my heart race. He didn’t have details about her hair color or who she was. He was the crash scene investigator. The female cyclist was taken to the hospital at 12:00. It was now 1:34. If it was Adelaide, she’d probably just started her second lap at that point, so the timing looked right. Or very wrong.
Since the bike he described matched hers and the bottle on the other side of the road looked exactly like hers, I didn’t want to take the chance of it not being her, so I asked for a ride in his car to the hospital (Longmont United). My bike wouldn’t fit. I said I’d leave it in the bushes. While walking it over to dump it off I asked the three civilians standing there what had happened, and if any of them was the driver. One guy said yes. I asked for a description of what she looked like and another guy said he thought her name had been Adelaide.
I paused for a moment, letting the shock hit me. Serious facial trauma and she hadn’t given her name, meaning that she was unconscious or dead (I assumed someone else riding near her had ID’d her and that she hadn’t told her name herself). The officer said she’d gone through the driver’s side window while traveling north on 36 and that the car had pulled out abruptly into the road in front of her to take a left turn. She’d T-boned it. Highway 36, which is the most popular training road in Boulder and had hundreds of cyclists on it that day, is straight at this intersection. So her coming around a corner or him not being able to see her was not the issue.
It’s the sort of “accident” that almost happens every day. It happens when drivers like this one feel just in gambling with a cyclist’s life in order to save five seconds of their precious time. Adelaide had almost been hit last week when someone did this to her while she was commuting home from work.
Note: we later found out that the driver, Russell D Rosh, a Process Engineer at Western Electronics, has a long rap sheet of negligent driving, having caused four previous crashes, driving while impaired, multiple counts of careless driving, driving down the wrong way on a one-way street, a half dozen speeding tickets, and a 7-year ban on his license from 1982 to 1989. In total, a count of 18 serious traffic violations. And that’s just in Colorado. Why do we continue to let people like him behind the wheel of a car? How many “accidents” will it take and how many people does he have to leave maimed and dead on the road for him to lose his privilege to drive? The past four decades show that he will never change.
I turned to the driver and screamed at him and took a half lunge toward him as he stepped back. I stopped myself from doing anything and the police officer stepped between us. My worry was far greater than my rage. I needed to get to the hospital.
I frantically jumped back on my bike and the police officer, who had to stay at the scene with the driver, yelled out some directions for me as I went. I began screaming again a few moments later, now crying uncontrollably as well. Sobbing uncontrollably. Screaming without expletives, or words at all, for the entire ride to Longmont. I thought she’d be dead or paralyzed when I got there.
During that awful ride I felt guilt for getting her into bike racing, guilt for leaving her to ride alone while I went up to Ward, guilt for departing Amante at the exact time that would put Adelaide in the path of that car. I began regretting all sorts of little and big things. Had I given her a hug that morning? I couldn’t remember. If I hadn’t, why hadn’t I? I regretted the tiny argument that we’d gotten into a few days earlier, which was really just a debate about how to solve the income gap between whites and blacks. Mainly I regretted not having asked her to marry me yet. Now I knew I wouldn’t have the chance. I imagined a future without her and knew I’d be better off dead too.
I was convinced she was dead from the way the officer had described the collision and her injuries. This must be a dream. This must be a dream. This must be a fucking dream. I was trying to ride as fast as I could but I was crying and screaming too much to get enough air in my lungs. I blew through every stop sign and red light, thinking of how funny it would be if I ended up in the hospital bed next to her.
When I got to Longmont United I dismounted and ran my bike in through the front doors asking where the emergency room was. The next 10 minutes would be the most stressful, horrible of my life. Finding out that it was Adelaide at the crash site and the ride to the hospital were absolutely the worst I’d ever experienced, but now was when I’d get the bad news I knew I wasn’t prepared to receive.
Someone chaperoned me to the ER, hugging my shoulder as we walked through the hall. She asked me what had happened but I couldn’t respond. So she just rubbed my back. I left my bike at the front desk of the ER and they quickly took me off to a private room to discuss Adelaide’s condition.
The doctor started off right away with the good news. She was alive, she had no damage to any of her limbs, spine, or brain. She was talking and somewhat coherent when she came in. That was the good news. The bad news was that all the injuries she sustained were to her face, which had literally been torn off.
He said almost every bone in her face had been broken. Her cheek bone, nose, eye socket, septum, her jaw in numerous places. Everything. The flesh from her upper right lip to her left shoulder had been ripped completely open. Through the tears in my eyes I could see tears even in his. He gave me a long embrace.
They took me in to see her briefly. She was sedated and unconscious, with a room full of doctors and nurses using a hand held pump to make her breath. Her face was mostly covered up and I couldn’t see much of her. I reached for her hand, which was coated in dried blood. It was cold. Pale white under the red stains.
One of her surgeons, Dr. Leonard, arrived and we met briefly before I was taken out of the room and back to the ER center desk area so I could use a computer and look up contact information. I didn’t have a phone on me. The next hour was spent signing forms for the surgery that she was about to have, another form for the anesthesiologist, general information about Adelaide including our address, contact information, insurance, etc, most of which I didn’t have or couldn’t remember. I talked to the same police officer, Officer Wise, who’d been investigating the crash. He discussed with me how he thought it might have happened. He and some of his colleagues had been out searching for me and had been worried. The hospital Chaplain, a gentle motherly woman named Laura, was with me the entire time, bringing pretzels, socks with rubber grippers so I could get out of my cycling shoes, and cup after cup of ice water. I was freezing cold but didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything about it. I had bonked, was in shock, knew I needed to eat but still couldn’t get the pretzels in my hand, let alone my mouth. I spilled most on the ground, then got distracted by the half dozen people with forms and questions for me. All this while I sat at someone’s desk, using an ipad to access facebook and search for someone’s number I could call.
I finally managed to get a hold of my brother Galen, who gave me the cell numbers for Lydia (Adelaide’s sister) and Jeff (Lydia’s fiance). And Adelaide’s mom, Kathleen. Galen hung up and set about getting some things together for me like clothes and food. He and Joslynn, Galen’s girlfriend, were soon on their way.
I left some absolutely terrifying voicemails on everyone’s phone before getting a hold of Kathleen. I could hardly speak at first, knowing very well that my inability to get the whole message out was scaring her more than it should have but I couldn’t help it. I spat it out eventually and finally my job was done. Kathleen would fly in from Pittsburg early next morning. Lydia and Jeff were on their way. Galen and Jos were on their way.
Laura, the Chaplain, took me to the O.R. waiting room, doing her best to console me. She gave me some blankets and she talked to me about a few random little things for a while to get my mind off the situation until Galen and Jos came. They gave me bear hugs and Laura showed me to a bizarre, single-person bathroom with a random bathtub in it. I’d told her I was freezing cold and needed a shower to warm up. I soaked in the tub and cried while drinking a San Pelegrino lemonade and some protein mix that Galen had brought. Later I had a smashed, cold, Square Burrito that Galen had jokingly offered me that morning as we left Amante for the ride. I cracked a smile when I first saw it. Then continued breathlessly sobbing.
Jeff and Lydia showed up shortly after I was out of the bath, warmly dressed in street clothes and puffy jacket. I felt a bit better. Just being warm with some sugar in me was the biggest thing to get out of the state of shock that I’d been in. To be truthful I’m still in shock days later, but once I finally had a grasp on the situation and friends and family were around, it made a world of difference. Having other people there felt amazing. I’d never felt so alone on that ride to the hospital and the hour and a half I spent there before anyone else arrived.
She would live. She would walk and talk and run again. That’s what mattered.
We spent the next eight hours waiting for Adelaide to get out of her first surgery, which was just stitching her back up. The facial reconstruction (bone repairs) would occur later in the week. Her surgeon, Dr. Schmid, came in once to give us an update a few hours in (I think). I was pretty out of it. One of the assistant surgeons or nurses came in a few times to tell us news. At 9:00, Galen, Jos, and I ate at Wahoos while Jeff and Lydia ate next door at Noodles & Company. We went back to the hospital to wait more.
I could barely keep my eyes open from the fatigue and stress of the day. I’d started writing this blog post earlier that afternoon but I was too tired and dazed to write any more. My eyes were incredibly red and dried out and stinging from so many tears. When Adelaide gets really upset about something, like girls do, she tells me she actually gets dehydrated from crying. I never really believed her. Now I know how it feels. I drank liters of water. Cup after cup after cup. I was thirsty to obsession.
Finally, after seven hours of surgery and another hour of waiting to hear how it went, Dr. Schmid came in. He said it had gone really well. All of the tissue had been salvageable and the blood flow to the upper lip was okay. The lip had been hanging on by a thread. Miraculously, none of her vital nerves had been severed in the crash. There had been just a millimeter to spare. It seemed like her eyes were going to be okay as well. Her tongue had been bitten in half, length-wise and also a chunk had been bitten off entirely but she would keep the majority of it.
He showed us pictures to prepare us–both before and after pictures. I couldn’t look at the before pictures for very long. They were truly horrid. The most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen. It looked like her jaw was completely gone, because it was. How had she been able to talk at all? I couldn’t imagine the pain she was in before she got to the hospital. Hollywood torture scenes would be nothing compared to that. Nothing. Her face was gone.
I came back when he revealed the after pictures, showing a stitched-up Adelaide, looking mostly alive again. He scrolled through the camera to a picture of his daughter by accident, then backed up one to Adelaide again with hundreds of stitches in her face, eyes swollen shut, unconscious. What world was this? Is this even real? Am I really awake?
They took us in to see her at last, I broke down immediately again. She’d been completely fine and cheerful that morning. Now this. Her breathing apparatus was pumping away. Tubes came out of her arms from every vein. Her tongue, sticking out past her broken teeth, made for an almost amused look when combined with the somewhat smiling expression on her face (to me anyways). It only looked that way because of how the breathing tube was positioned, pulling her mouth up in a half smile. Her face and neck were covered in thick black stitches and slathered in antibacterial ointment and blood. Her eyes were taped shut and were completely swollen black and blue. Her limbs, hands, and feet, and of course her face, were all swollen and almost unrecognizable. Her hair was red from blood and antiseptic. She was pale. I felt her hand. This time it was warm.
Dr. Schmid and his team had done an amazing job despite the pitiful state she appeared to be in. Every one of his colleagues had mentioned how talented he was and how lucky we were that he was the one doing the procedure. I felt like that’s something they always tell you, but I let myself believe it. And I still do.
We squeezed Adelaide’s hands, gently stroked her legs, and quietly talked to her. They said she could probably hear us, but of course she couldn’t respond due to the breathing tube and the injuries. The coma-like state that the drugs put her in would make it seem almost like a dream to her and she wouldn’t remember any of this. She probably wouldn’t remember anything for the next week or more.
She squeezed my hand back, very hard. Surprisingly hard. I knew she was with us. She came to more and more, and even nodded yes a few times to questions. In particular to the comment about us getting her a Vitamix. We spent about 40 minutes with her and it was time to go since she was becoming too agitated. When everyone had left the room, I asked her an important question that I know I’ll have to re-ask in a few weeks since she won’t remember. Then I told her I was going to leave and she freaked out, her arm restraints easily held her weak limbs down. I stepped out to tell Lydia and Jeff that I was going to stay. In the end I decided to lie and tell Adelaide that I’d just be waiting outside her room and that I’d see her in the morning. That calmed her down again. Having me in the room with her or outside down the hall in the ICU guest sleeping room would do neither of us any good. We both needed rest.
I got home and into bed at 1AM with Maybellene, who was allowed to sleep in bed with me so she could lick away my tears as I drifted off in a nightmarish sleep.
Photo credit for this last one: D2 photography
Edited 5/15/2015: The driver, Russell D Rosh, fought tooth and nail to avoid any punishment, blatantly lying to the police and authorities about what actually occurred. He has gone so far as to make up an entirely different narrative, placing the blame on Adelaide and others, despite all the evidence and eye-witnesses showing that he was solely at fault.
On top of that, Rosh offered no assistance when Adelaide was bleeding to death on the pavement. He has never issued an apology to Adelaide. He continued to delay his court dates numerous times, which caused Adelaide and our families to suffer needlessly more. And on top if it all, justice was not served. Our society believes that driving is a right as apposed to a privilege, no matter how dangerous and careless you go about it. Despite his long history of irresponsible, careless driving and disregard for others, he was given community service and a small fine. He will continue driving.
I don’t know how people like him live with themselves. My conscience would tear me apart. Instead of showing remorse, accepting blame, and realizing that he is unfit to operate a vehicle, this man fights, lies, and points his finger at others.
Be careful on the roads, because he and millions more like him are out there texting, running stop signs, and making their time more of a priority than your life. And the law is powerless to stop them. Powerless to protect you, your wife, and your children.It didn't take long for the public outcry to happen.
Just a day after the Fourth of July, undeniably the premiere holiday to shoot off fireworks, residents across Michigan are calling for the sale of fireworks in Michigan to end.
A MoveOn.org petition to get the 2011 Michigan Fireworks Safety Act repealed is only 260 signatures away from its 30,000 goal at the time of publication, a boost from the nearly 7,000 signatures it needed days before July 4.
"This law needs to be repealed," wrote Julie Slabaugh, of Westland. "It is a law which can't be enforced. It was only approved because of revenue. Not worth the toll on vets, pets and destruction of personal property."
Cindy Whittum-McGuire of Charlotte also went after the inability to enforce the law.
"It has gotten out of hand because law |
'uha fights off a block and avoid a blatant attempt at an illegal chop block by Logan Mankins. Once he frees himself, he explodes to the ball carrier. Harrison explodes to the ball carrier in similar fashion, but he gets freed up by Muhammad Wilkerson basically setting a pick for him by gatecrashing his way into a double team.
Penetrate and "dish"
One of the staples of any top nose tackle is the ability to penetrate, shed the block and then dish out some punishment on the ball carrier. Each of them do that to perfection here. Watch the offensive lineman's feet to get a sense of how they are driven back off their spot.
Conclusions
Harrison is exceeding all expectations this year and getting some good recognition as a result. While sites like PFF are starting to get national recognition and that fuels his reputation, the Jets' number one ranked run defense is the major reason behind that. However, let's not undersell the Po'uha-anchored 2010 defense, which was 3rd best against the run with no Muhammad Wilkerson. Both run defenses were ranked number one by PFF and Football Outsiders ranks the current run defense as number one in the NFL and the 2010 run defense as number two.
It should not go unmentioned that Kenrick Ellis, while he isn't getting as many reps as Harrison, has arguably been just as good as him on a per-snap basis. The pair of them are under contract next year at a combined cost of under $1.4m, so the future of the Jets nose tackle position seems very secure in the short term.
Here are some previous gif specials:
Leger DouzableGarrett McIntyreAntonio AllenKenrick EllisVladimir Ducasse
Yes, I will be back with an Ed Reed BGA tomorrow...AN ANIMAL cruelty protest has been shot down by hordes of holidaymakers at Sea World on the Gold Coast today.
Protesters unveiled banners at the theme park’s dolphin show, highlighting the plight of captive animals, but the stunt was cut short as spectators started booing while others ripped the signs out of the hands of protesters.
Security arrived within minutes to escort the group of activists out a rear entrance and out of the park, to large cheers from the crowd of several hundred people at the dolphin show amphitheatre.
media_camera Protesters interrupt a dolphin show at Sea World before being escorted out by security.
While the protesters were evicted, no charges have been laid.
In a statement, Sea World defended the treatment of animals at the park.
“Sea World is very proud of its world class exhibits including some of the largest filtered natural sand bottom lagoon systems in the world for dolphins” the statement said.
“The health and wellbeing of our animals is of the utmost priority and we have a strong reputation for caring for marine animals with a health and welfare programme designed to promote a long, enriched life.”
Marine parks, especially those in the US, often come under fire for housing marine mammals in captivity.
The Gold Coast’s Sea World has also been a regular target of protesters, some of whom have mistakenly linked it to the US parks housing orcas which bear the same name.3 Post-Court Myths Dispelled By Massad Ayoob “If we confuse how we think things should be with how things actually are, we do so at risk of life-destroying peril.”
In the absence of solid knowledge, people take what they can get, and if the “word on the street” or the advice of someone who seems to know what they’re doing is all they can get, well, that’s all they have to go with. It gets to the point where people who don’t know the reality come to believe that the myth is the reality, and the reality is the myth, and that’s really sad.
Inevitably, bad advice will cause a great deal of trouble to someone who was unfortunate enough to follow it. Let’s look at some examples of bad advice—“myths,” if you will—that can bring people to tragedy.
Myth #1: “A Good Shoot Is A Good Shoot”
Whenever I hear this shibboleth, I want to say, “Yeah, and next year, the U.S. Senate is going to balance the budget.” In 2013, America watched the trial of George Zimmerman in Florida, which I’ll call Case One. An elected captain of the local neighborhood watch, George Zimmerman was attacked by a young man he had spotted acting suspiciously during a rainstorm in the dark, prompting him to call 911. The evidence, then and later, clearly showed that the much taller 17-year-old had attacked Zimmerman, punched him to the ground and banged his head on a hard surface by the time Zimmerman drew his legally carried, semi-automatic pistol and killed him with a single shot.
The result was a never-ending ordeal. Within the first 48 hours of the investigation, it was clear to the trained, professional detectives that there was no reason Zimmerman could be convicted of wrongdoing, and it soon became clear to the jurisdiction’s chief prosecutor that the same was true. However, the family of the deceased hired a lawyer who in turn brought in a very professional public relations team, and soon the entire nation believed that the shooter was a racist who had profiled and murdered a boy armed only with a box of Skittles. The trial ended in an acquittal, but George Zimmerman was left with a severely crippled future and considerable time spent in a jail cell.
Myth #2: “If You’re Acquitted, It’s All Good”
This particular childish myth seems to be a favorite on the internet. Let’s continue for a moment with the Zimmerman case. Yes, he was acquitted, but he still has a legal bill reported to be seven figures that he’ll probably never be able to pay. He has also been called “the most hated man in America.” He is virtually unemployable, and he and his family live in constant fear from so many death threats that everyone seems to have lost count. After reading this, can anyone seriously consider that a “good outcome” for the defendant?
Consider Case Two in Texas, where I spoke first to the grand jury pondering indictment, and later to the petit jury in the civil lawsuit. A rancher came home from church to find his house being burgled by a man who turned out to have a long history of drug abuse and criminal behavior. He confronted the burglar outside his home, and the burglar fled to his getaway car carrying a bag the homeowner recognized as his own. The rancher knew the bag contained two pistols, both of which were loaded.
RELATED: 4 Headline-Grabbing Cases That Show the Need for Common Sense Tactics Against Unseen Dangers
The rancher ordered the man to halt. The suspect drove his getaway car straight at the rancher and his two innocent companions, one a young boy, while reaching into the bag—obviously for a gun. Deadly force twice over! The rancher fired a single shot, which killed the criminal instantly and ended the lethal danger to the three innocent parties.
It took literally years for this to play out. The grand jury returned no true bill, clearing him on the criminal side of things. However, because of the different standards of proof, this was no bar to a civil lawsuit, which was filed. Finally, at the end of the civil lawsuit trial, the rancher was totally exonerated as well. But ask yourself whether all those years of false accusation—and the six-figure cost of his legal defense, which he never recovered—can be translated as “Well, you were finally cleared of everything, so it’s all good.”
Myth #3: “If It Was Self-Defense, I Can’t Be Sued In My State.”
You might want to read the fine print on this one, with the “fine print” encompassing case law. Most of these laws, where they exist, have been around for no more than a decade, which means they haven’t been written in stone in the case law interpretations of the higher courts yet. Usually, the wording of the law will grant civil immunity in cases where it has been determined to be self-defense. Therein lies the mystery: What exactly constitutes that critical word, “determined”?
A prosecutor deciding not to prosecute is unlikely to be enough. The prosecutor handles criminal law, where the standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, or a high 90th percentile degree of certainty. If the prosecutor doesn’t try the case because they don’t think they can “prove that high,” that is no bar at all to a civil court lawsuit, where the standard is a much lower preponderance of evidence, a greater-than-50-percent certainty. By that standard, even being tried and found not guilty in criminal court does not guarantee “determination” under the civil court’s lowered preponderance of evidence standard.
RELATED: 3 Stand Your Ground Myths Busted by Massad Ayoob
Florida has such a law. In Case Three, I was retained by a criminal defense lawyer for anticipated charges after an armed citizen shot and killed a burglar on his own property. At the moment of the shooting, the burglar was coming at the homeowner and another family member and appeared to be reaching for a gun. The prosecuting authority, the state’s attorney’s office, decided not to indict. However, that office stopped short of issuing a memorandum of closure that explicitly stated that the shooting had been determined to be self-defense.
The result? Last I heard, the lawsuit filed by the family of the deceased criminal against the shooter was ongoing. One lawyer I talked to who is close to the case estimated the legal fees would hit $100,000 for the shooter and his family, with no guarantee of winning at trial. Since the case remains active, it will not be cited by name here.
By the way, just about anyone can still file a lawsuit on just about anyone for just about anything. What these laws say is that once the lawsuit has been filed, there is a provision for the judge to throw it out if it is shown to have been determined self-defense. However, the showing of that determination will still have to happen in court, and you’ll still have to hire an attorney to make that happen.
Bottom Line
What you’re reading is a short column, and there was only space for three myths and three cases. The fact is that there are a lot more of both. If we confuse how we think things should be with how things actually are, we do so at risk of life-destroying peril.It’s been almost 8 months since my last post in here. 8 months since I am back in Europe, living and working in Berlin and daydreaming about my future travels. 8 months. That is longer than my actual trip Across South America.
So I hope you wonder what have I been up to and how can I explain my absence?
After I got back from South America and quickly hit the reality of being in a slight debt, I had to prioritize (for those who don’t know, I planned my budget for six months, but extended my trip for another month. No regrets though.) It meant finding a job and some kind of income as quickly as possible. First months I spent juggling between Poland and Germany, staying either at my parents place, in my motherland or living on a couch at my friends place in Berlin. Luckily, both of the places are only few hours apart by train. And what means few hours for someone who had traveled for 7 months!?
At the end of June I moved into a shared flat and ended up in a pretty international environment that consisted of Me, Half-German half-Russian guy and a couple from Spain. Believe it or not most, of the time we ended up communicating in Spanish, as that was the language that each of us could speak. Personally I found it great. This let me practice and improve what I already learnt while on the road.
Even though the flat was right in the center of Berlin, just few minutes walk from the famous Alexander Platz, it had no internet connection. I know it shouldn’t be an excuse, as I had to face this problem many times in South America, but back in SA at least I had a laptop. Unfortunately my laptop, that was so devoted to me until my last days of the trip, had decided to give up its life right when I got back (what cost me to lose some of the photos, that I took at the end of my trip, but didn’t back up on my external hard drive).
First 2 months were horrible. A mixture of what I call post-travel-depression with job seeking and being broke. I am not gonna lie. There were moments, when I just sat miserably in my room and cried over my terrible faith. Ha. Thinking of it now makes me laugh really hard.
After few months I was back on track, working quite a lot and slowly getting used to my ‘new’ old life. Since then I moved twice and now have my own small place. Have I got used to it by now? Absolutely not. Also, the fact that it is -10 degrees outside whilst I am writing this text and thinking that exactly one year ago I was learning to surf at the beach in Ecuador definitely doesn’t help. I already have a big plan for another trip in my head and hopefully it comes into reality not too long from now.
In the meantime, I finally decided I am going to do what I promised to do long time ago. Give a summary of my trip around South America, post my overall experiences, tips for other travelers, who are there right now, doing what I was doing a year ago! I know it is quite late, but my memories are still very fresh and hey…better later than never, right?Hey all you tumblers out there, its me, THE OBSERVER! I’ve been AFT for quite a while now. You could say I’ve been having my own hiatus, but like Steven’s numerous amounts of hiatuses. They eventually, HOPEFULLY, come to an end. So… what I miss?
Uuhuh, uuhuh, new It’s A Wash Sign… Freak Storm outside, yes go on… An hour ago? Wha! A new Crystal Gem!.. oh, wait, it’s just Ronaldo…… wait. Ronaldo, crystal, wha! Oh my gosh, I’ve missed so much! That’s it, no more hiatuses for the rest of the year!
Okay maybe I won’t go with that far, but I need to stay on top of things. Okay starting tomorrow, I’m going to fully research what happened over the past few days. Good thing that I see all that goes on in Beach City. Except for the recent events, that went on, in Beach City… next time though.#KORUZA DOCUMENTATION Wireless optical system KORUZA is documented on GitHub, using best practices of software design to allow colaborative editing. See the KORUZA-instructions GitHub repository for proposing changes and reporting issues and see the links below for reading friendly version.
##KORUZA Overview
KORUZA Overview – Read this overview to get the basic understanding of the technical operation of KORUZA.
##Assembly Instructions
KORUZA Instructions - Step by step assembly instructions on how to build KORUZA units, including photo tutorial, best to be used with a DIY KORUZA assembly kit available at Fabrikor
Bill of material - Defines all parts required to assemble one KORUZA unit, two are required for a working link.
##User Manual
User Manual – Instructions on how to mount, power up the KORUZA system and establish a wireless optical link.
##Source
KORUZA project source documentation is available in a number of GitHub repositories.
KORUZA – Here you can find all the plans for mechanical and electronic KORUZA parts.
koruza-pi – This is a KORUZA package for Raspberry Pi (user interface, measurements data collection, controller).
UniversalUnipolarStepperController – Here you can find documentation for universal controller for unipolar stepper motors with encoders and end switches.
koruza-testing – Test scripts for fuse in artificial fog tunnel and generalk testing, primary useful for scientific applications.
##Nodewatcher
KORUZA Nodewatcher – Here you can see the real time performance of deployed KORUZA links.
##Support Should you need any help with KORUZA, get in touch with others involved in the project and Institute IRNAS team via:
CHAT – Join our chat group for real time collaboration with IRNAS team members and others working on Koruza system.
FORUM – We recommend using a forum for help, so the information will be preserved.At tomorrow’s BCS Championship game in Pasadena, John Urschel will be publicly honored during the first quarter for winning the 2013 William V. Campbell Trophy as the nation’s best football scholar-athlete. In addition to the public presentation, Urschel will receive $25,000 for post-graduate work.
“The national championship game provides the ultimate platform for showcasing the educational opportunities created by college football for the student-athletes who play our game,” said BCS Executive Director Bill Hancock.
“The Campbell Trophy and 2013 recipient John Urschel represent the fulfillment of that promise at the highest level. By featuring the Campbell Trophy, we hope to inspire future young people to build a foundation that will benefit them long after they leave the playing field.”
It’s already been a busy offseason for Urschel, who was named first team All-Big Ten and was a third-team Associated Press All-American in addition to winning the Campbell Trophy. He was also the 2013 Senior CLASS Award winner among college football student-athletes nationwide.
Urschel’s impact was perhaps felt even more off the field, however. In addition to graduating with a 4.0, Urschel has been published and was heavily involved in Uplifting Athletes during his time at Penn State.
Here’s hoping Mark Emmert is in attendance tomorrow so he can get a taste of our #culture.
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About the Author
Greg Schlosser Greg is a senior majoring in energy engineering at Penn State. He is a big fan of Pittsburgh sports and sandwiches with coleslaw and french fries. You can email him at [email protected] or find him at the Phyrst drunkenly requesting the band to play "One Headlight."Irish government knew of forged hit squad passports two weeks ago BelfastTelegraph.co.uk The Irish government has admitted it knew two weeks ago about concerns over ‘fake' Irish passports used in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/irish-government-knew-of-forged-hit-squad-passports-two-weeks-ago-28518967.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25678752.ece/1f77f/AUTOCROP/h342/DUBAI%20Hamas%2013
Email
The Irish government has admitted it knew two weeks ago about concerns over ‘fake' Irish passports used in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
But it has denied claims by Dubai's chief of police that Irish officials were first contacted on the issue last month.
Serious questions are now being raised about how quickly the Irish authorities reacted after the alarm was initially raised. The Belfast Telegraph's website reported the story on February 6.
The murky story took a further twist last night when the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that another two Irish passports had been implicated in the operation to kill a top Hamas commander, bringing the total number to five.
Until yesterday officials and gardai had been investigating the use of three Irish passports by a suspected 11-member Israeli hit squad operating in Dubai last month. But the number of suspects is now believed to stand at 18, and five of them are now thought to have travelled on Irish passports containing genuine numbers but with names, photographs and signatures altered.
Yesterday, Israel's ambassador to Ireland Dr Zion Evrony was summoned to a meeting at the Department of Foreign Affairs, but he said he “knew nothing” about the events in Dubai.
Irish government officials had earlier denied claims by Dubai's chief of police that it was first contacted on the issue last month after Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was killed in his hotel on January 20.
Dubai's chief of police Lt Gen Dhahi Khalfan Tamim has said he contacted consulates and embassies for assistance with his investigation into the suspects at the end of January.
A spokesman for the Department of Foreign Affairs denied that Irish officials had been contacted that early. But he said: “When we saw those media reports (on the incident), our embassy in Abu Dhabi made contact with the foreign ministry there.”
Anatomy of a professional hit
The operation to kill Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai took less than 24 hours to conclude.
January 19, 2010
00:09 Alleged hit squad begins to arrive in Dubai. First to arrive are ‘Michael Bodenheimer’ and ‘James Leonard Clarke’.
00:30 Gail Folliard and Kevin Daveron arrive from Paris on an Air France flight. Both are carrying forged passports from Ireland.
00:30 to 02:26 Other members of the team arrive. Each are carrying fake passports. The names and ‘fake’ passport countries are: Melvyn Mildiner, Stephen Hodes, Paul Keeley, Jonathan Graham, James Clarke, and Michael Barney — all Britain. Evan Dennings — Ireland.
02:26 Peter Elvinger arrives. He is using a fake French passport. He meets a member of the team at airport. They check into a variety of hotels using cash.
10:40 to 11:00 Alleged team members meet at shopping centre. They are seen entering separately or in pairs and leaving separately or in different pairs.
15:00 (about) al-Mabhouh arrives in Dubia — he is also using a fake passport. He does not have security with him. He is met by a Palestinian who is a resident of Dubai at the airport. He is allegedly followed by members of the assassination team at the airport.
15:25 Mahmoud al-Mabhouh checks into the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel, room 230. He is apparently followed to his hotel room by two members of the ‘hit squad’.
15:55 Peter Elvinger makes call to book room 237 at Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel. It is directly across the hall from room 230.
16:25 al-Mabhouh stayed in his room for an hour before leaving to meet people who are believed to be Palestinians from Gaza.
16:30 Peter Elvinger checks into room 237. He does not go to the room but allegedly passes the key to Kevin in the lobby.
19:30 Peter Elvinger leaves Dubai Airport.
20:00 Members of assassination team are allegedly seen on video on hallway near 230.
20:24 al-Mabhouh arrives back at his hotel after shopping for shoes.
20:30 al-Mabhouh returns to his room and supposedly is killed, first by being stunned and then strangled to death.
20:47 Hit squad leave hotel.
22:30 Melvyn Mildiner and Stephen Hodes depart to South Africa, Kevin Daveron and Gail Folliard depart to Paris.
23:30 Michael Bodenheimer and Jonathan Graham allegedly depart to Hong Kong.
January 20, 2010
00:30 Evan Dennings allegedly departs to Zurich.
Belfast TelegraphYou've probably heard that you should use relative units for font size. This is a good rule for accessible web design; if the user changes their browser's default font size, this enables your page's text to resize accordingly. You may have taken this advice and made the switch. Perhaps you got out your calculator and converted your site's font sizes from absolute px units to ems or, more likely, rems.
But if that's where you stopped, you are missing out on a lot of the flexibility and power that ems bring to the browser. The em unit is not simply a replacement for the familiar px; you can use it for more properties than just font-size. If you do, some of its other benefits begin to emerge.
By consistently using ems, you can design components on the page that respond automatically should the font size change. Then, with a clever trick for a responsive font size, you can produce an entire page that adjusts dynamically based on the viewport width of the browser. Let me show you how to leverage the'relative' behaviour of ems to create designs that are scalable and responsive.
Font size units
Using ems for font size can be tricky. The exact value is determined by the element's inherited font size (i.e. the font size of the parent element). This gets complicated when you start nesting elements more deeply. If an element has a font size in ems, its parent has a font size in ems, and its parent has yet another. You will have to multiply all these values to determine the actual computed value of the child element.
This means that placing the same module in different containers might change the meaning of em. The module will be unpredictable.
To avoid this, we typically use a different relative unit for font size: rems. A rem (or 'root em') is based not on the inherited font size, but on the font size of the page's root element, <html>. This means its value is the same throughout the page. It is more predictable than, and often preferable to, regular ems.
Building a module with ems
Let's use relative units to build a module. However, we're not going to follow the common approach. Instead of using rem for everything, we will use it only once: on the top-most element of the module. This will establish a known font size for the module, rather than it being based on an unpredictable chain of em values above it in the DOM. It means we can easily scale the size of the module by overriding a single value.
Use rems on the outermost element to establish a known font size, then use ems to build based on that value
After we establish this known font size, we are safe to use regular ems throughout the module. Use it not only for any font sizes on the sub-elements, but also for most other properties, including padding, margin and border-radius.
We'll build a panel with a heading and a body. The markup looks like this:
<div class="panel"> <div class="panel-heading"> <h3>Behold the power of ems</h3> </div> <div class="panel-body"> Consider the ways you can leverage relative units for dynamic sizing of your modules. </div> </div>
Let's style the outer container. We'll set the font size at 1rem to establish our local em value. We'll then define the border-radius using ems. I typically like to use px for border, though, to get a nice fine line.
.panel { font-size: 1rem; border: 1px solid #678; border-radius: 0.3em; overflow: hidden; }
Next, style the inner elements. We'll use ems for padding. Then we'll increase the font size of the heading to 1.25 times our local em value, producing a 20px computed size.
.panel-heading { padding: 0.6em 1.2em; background-color: #cde; border-bottom: 1px solid #678; }.panel-heading > h3 { font-size: 1.25em; margin: 0; letter-spacing: 0.03em; }.panel-body { padding: 0.6em 1.2em; }
You can multiply the padding values by their font size to determine their computed values (9.6px vertical and 19.2px horizontal). Truthfully, though, it doesn't matter. Try to not get bogged down with pixel-perfect measurements. This may feel awkward, but press on. The more you use ems, the more you will become familiar with them as a unit in their own respect.
Dynamically scaling the design
When we create reusable modules like this, we often find we need a few variations. Say we wanted to create a larger version. If we were using px for everything, this would mean increasing the font size, the padding, the border-radius and so on. However, because we have defined everything in relation to one rem-based font size, we need only to change that value, and the entire module will respond:
.panel--large { font-size: 1.2rem; }
We simply add this class to a panel to make it larger: <div class="panel panel--large">. This will change the local definition of an em, and thus the border radius and padding change as well, along with the font size of its child elements. With a single declaration, we've resized every part of the module.
A panel module, with paddings and border radius defined using ems
Likewise, we could create a small version:
.panel--small { font-size: 0.8rem; }
By grounding the module using a top-level font size in rems, we've made it stable and predictable. By defining everything else within using ems, we've made all of its component parts scalable.
It is possible to base the size of everything inside the module on one value, then change that value to scale it all
This is a powerful pattern. You can use this approach for anything on your page, from drop-down menus to social media buttons. Ground the module with a rem value, then use em for virtually everything else from paddings to positioning to icon sizes.
Making it responsive
Let's push the principle one level further. We've sized the module (and theoretically all other modules on the page) using rems and ems. This ultimately means their size is based on the root element's font size. Then, we can adjust this single value to make the entire page respond in turn.
Let's bring in another relative unit: vh. This unit's computed value is derived from the user's screen size; it is equal to 1 per cent of the width of the viewport. If we use the vh unit to define the root font size, it will automatically scale responsively, sans media queries. Set the font size on the root to 2vw:
html { font-size: 2vw; }
Unfortunately, the effect is a bit too strong. On an iPhone 6, for instance, this will compute to 5.5px, which is too small. Likewise, it's unreasonably large on bigger screens. To soften the effect, we can make use of CSS's calc() function:
html { font-size: calc(0.6em + 1vw); }
Now the font size is derived partly from a stable value, and partly from a responsive one. This produces a much better effect. The 0.6em behaves as a sort of minimum font size. Now the root em will scale fluidly from about 13px on smartphone to 21px on an average desktop screen.
With your page made up of scalable modules, each grounded to the rem value, and they too will scale with the viewport. The page is structured with a three-tier hierarchy; you can change the size of the entire page, an individual module, or a single element by making a simple edit to the font size. Trust the ems and rems, and the browser will take care of the work for you.
You may still need to add the occasional media query to control line wrapping and some other responsive concerns. But this small bit of code combined with a habit of using ems and rems will get you a lot of the way there.
This article was originally featured in net magazine issue 288; buy it here
Related articles:The Anxious Art Of Japanese Painter (And 'Enemy Alien') Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Enlarge this image toggle caption Alfredo Valente/Alfredo Valente papers/ Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Alfredo Valente/Alfredo Valente papers/ Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
In 1906, 16-year-old Yasuo Kuniyoshi came to the U.S. alone from Japan. He made his name as a painter and at 40 he was showing his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But there was one thing Kuniyoshi longed for that he was always denied: American citizenship. In fact, he was classified as an "enemy alien" during World War II.
Kuniyoshi died in 1953 and after that pretty much disappeared from public memory. But Tom Wolf — guest curator of a Kuniyoshi exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — says don't overdo the hardships. "He was a fun-loving guy," Wolf says. "He was a party animal, he had tons of friends, other artists loved him and he was so thrilled that he was able to became so successful. So it wasn't all suffering and tragedy."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
And Kuniyoshi was successful in his lifetime — right up there with Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper. "He exhibited with these people, he won prizes," says American Art Museum co-curator Joann Moser. But, she adds, after Pearl Harbor, things changed: "When he walked down the street, he looked like the enemy."
And the anxiety of being Japanese-American during World War II shows in his work. The colors are somber; the faces he paints — highly stylized, flat and folk-artish — are often fearful; and babies and children are never cuddly. His Boy Stealing Fruit from 1923 stares warily, a banana in one hand while the other reaches for a peach.
"There's a very famous Japanese folktale about a little boy and a peach," Moser says. "And so I think that is a reference to his Japanese childhood."
The chubby child could be cute, but he's not. Neither is the baby on his mother's shoulders in another 1920s canvas — Child Frightened by Water. Even Kuniyoshi's bright fuchsia paintings from the 1950s have grim details — a reference to death on the Fourth of July or a scary face behind a colorful mask.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Cathy Carver/Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/ Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Cathy Carver/Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY/ Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
It's easy to see biography in Kuniyoshi's work. The fun-loving party animal had lots to deal with, and anti-Asian prejudice went back a long way. In 1919, Moser explains, Kuniyoshi married a white American woman who then lost her citizenship for marrying an Asian man.
During the war, Kuniyoshi wasn't sent from New York to an internment camp like the West Coast Japanese were, but there were restrictions. "His camera was taken away from him," Moser says. "His binoculars were taken away. His bank account was frozen."
But Kuniyoshi was devoted to America and was deeply patriotic. "So when the Department of Defense asked him to do some drawings for propaganda posters," Moser says, "he was eager to do that."
He sketched a mother and child hanging from a tree as a Japanese soldier leaves the scene. In Clean Up This Mess, a woman's hand discards a bag filled with Japanese symbols, like a flag and a samurai sword. The posters never got made, but the anti-Japanese sentiment was clear. It must have been difficult for Kuniyoshi to repudiate his roots.
"I think he was very torn and it was a terrible period in his life," Wolf says.
"The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi" (at the American Art Museum through the end of August) is Kuniyoshi's first retrospective in more than 65 years. Abstract expressionism and newer movements nudged him off the art scene after he died in 1953. Curator Joann Moser says this show is a reminder of Kuniyoshi's American experience.
"He was really one of the most highly respected and esteemed American artists," she says. "So within artist circles, he functioned very well; he had many friends. But outside the artist circles, he remained a 'Jap.' "
Over the years, the Japanese have bought up Kuniyoshi's work and he has become a popular artistic prophet in his native land.With three quarters of the season in the books, we're taking a look at some of the awards that will be given out at the end of the season at NFL Honors in February.
Chris Wesseling did a great job breaking down the races for the Offensive Rookie of the Year and Defensive Rookie of the Year on Tuesday. Here's a look at our picks for Coach of the Year:
1. Pete Carroll, Seattle Seahawks
Too often this award just goes to the flavor of the month. That's why Dick Jauron, Jim Haslett and Ray Rhodes all have won it in the past. We don't think this should just go to a coach that engineered a comeback season. What's harder than sustained greatness in the NFL?
Carroll has the best team in football. He's built a program in his image and uses players in a creative way that plays to their strengths, often in ways that other coaches didn't envision. That's great coaching. The loss of defensive coordinator Gus Bradley has not hurt the defense, and a number of free agents have been brought into the mix seamlessly. Seattle has survived a ton of injuries and suspensions. Carroll is a boss.
2. Ron Rivera, Carolina Panthers
Riverboat Ron gets attention for his record on fourth downs. The Panthers have converted 9 of 11 fourth-down attempts, including one garbage time try that failed when the Panthers were just trying to run the clock out while ahead 36-0.
Rivera deserves credit for his early-season epiphany to be aggressive, but that wasn't a tough call to make when he has the best short-yardage weapon in football. We give Rivera more credit for methodically building up a championship-level defense. This is the team Rivera dreamed of when he took over the job.
3. Bill Belichick, New England Patriots
The Patriots have started unheralded Joe Vellano and Chris Jones at defensive tackle for most of the season after injuries decimated the position. The receiver group had an almost complete overhaul, and played without Rob Gronkowski, Shane Vereen and Danny Amendola for most of the season.
New England lost their defensive leader Jerod Mayo for the season early and suffered a slew of injuries in the secondary. Tom Brady had the worst half-season |
It is highly recommended that you store this in some form of VCS.
If your new theme is called rainforest, your theme file has to be named rainforest-theme.el. This is important if you are planning to submit your theme to melpa.
Go to emacs-theme-creator.
Enter theme name and author name, and if you have your new theme in a VCS repo, it's url.
You need to submit a color for every face listed, either by entering a color in hex format, i.e. #202020, or by clicking on the form using the supplied colorpicker.
When you are finished, click "Done".
Select all: C-a, copy: C-c, and save in your earlier created file.
Random Faces:
You can get random colors from go-colorful's 3 different color palettes, i.e. WarmPalette, SoftPalette and HappyPalette by pressing the corresponding button. I have left out the default foreground face, comment face and warningface, because usually those vary strongly from the other faces.
Save for later:
If you want to save your progress, you can click the 'Save' button. This will store your selected faces to localStorage amd restore them if you revisit the site.
Clicking on'reset theme' will set all faces to the original preset and delete the localStorage key.
To see some themes in action, you can pick one of the preloaded themes.
Applying a new theme
Disable the theme you are using at present.
(disable-theme <theme-in-use>)
Try out the new theme.
(load-file <your-name-theme-file.el>)
Customize the theme
Visit your new theme.
C-x - C-f <filename.el>
Recommended:
load rainbow-mode to display colors for the supplied colors.
Customize to your likings.
You can see a list of all faces and their current value with
M-x list-faces-display
Used Libraries
Emacs-theme-creator uses Go, AngularJS, in particular angular-seed, for the live preview of the selected faces and go-colorful for calculating darker and lighter variants of selected as well as the random palettes of warm, happy and soft colors.
Screenshots
theme file:
Add more preview languages.
Add support for more modes.
Every little helps:As halftime approached in the Monday Night Football game between the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos, K Sebastian Janikowski lined up for a 63-yard field goal, which would tie the NFL record set by two people: former Broncos K Jason Elam at the old Mile High Stadium in 1998 and New Orleans Saints K Tom Dempsey in 1970.
As yo can see in this video of Sebastian Janikowski's field goal, he drills it. 63 yards and he clears the uprights by about a yard.
But was it really 63 yards? Or was it 64 yards? The San Francisco Chronicle has this:
He and his teammates celebrated on the field, and they might have more to scream about today. The Raiders will appeal the spot of the ball and are arguing that it was a record-breaking 64-yarder.
We'll see, but I doubt this gets overturned, which would result in a new record.
Tying the field goal record was one of three goals Janikowski says he had coming into the league. The other two are playing for 10 years, which he's done, and winning the Super Bowl.Howard Stern once dubbed himself The King of All Media, so it should come as no surprise that the man has had a prolific career in multiple forms of media, along the way collecting praise and recognition from many of his contemporaries and fans, while at the same time drawing the ire of PTA groups, politicians, the FCC, and those who disliked him including other less successful and imitative DJs who have lived in his shadow. Howard has been no stranger to controversy, he received some record-high fines from the Federal Communications Commission for violating standards of decency. Stern has amassed more than $2.5 million in fines from the period of 1990 to 2005, when Stern embarked for satellite radio, taking his program and leaving behind the regulations.
Perhaps the most famous and impactful radio broadcast in history, The Howard Stern Show has aired for more than 3 decades. Titular host Howard Stern has built a career on shocking conversations, insightful interviews, off-color commentary, and edgy theater of the mind. The show was ground-breaking at the time, and shook up radio competition in every market it entered through syndication. Stern famously traveled to cities like Philadelphia, and Cleveland to host mock funerals for the jockeys who had been displaced from the number 1 ratings spot. Stern's good ratings streak continued, he remained the top dog and a consistent leader. Howard has made a substantial living to say the least, grabbing $500 million for his first 5 year contract, as well as many bonus packages compensated to him. His latest radio contract alone is estimated at $90 million/year for the each of the next 5 years. He recently made headlines as the highest paid performer on TV.
Now we will look at the 10 most shocking moments in Howard Stern’s career.
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10 Making Friends with Former Enemies
via youtube.com
Back in the 1990s, Stern garnered a lot of attention and popularity with his politically incorrect, every-man dialogue. He also had an army of fans with too much time on their hands, making it their mission to insert Howard Stern's name (and sometimes a reference to a certain appendage of his) into media broadcasts across the country. Stern also had a staff bent on asking celebrities at press events outrageous, trying questions, and lobbing sometimes cringeworthy (in a good way) personal insults at them, only inches from their faces. Stern has also used his own mouth on plenty of occasions. Over the years Stern has lashed out at politicians, staff and management at his radio station, competing dish jockeys, and high-profile celebrities.
A few examples of this behavior include Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Kathy Lee Gifford, and years later (in perhaps his shortest feud ever) Lena Dunham. Stern has since made nice with all of these ladies, apologizing to each of them for his rude, unthinkable behavior.
9 The Sybian
via www.howardstern.com
Essentially a vibrator attached to a saddle, the Sybian was built with the goal of providing women everywhere the same sexual pleasure they'd get with a man from some kind of mechanical bull apparatus. When Stern moved his program to Sirius Satellite Radio in 2006, his studio was equipped with one of these. Over the Sirius years, many adult film stars, curious employees, and even celebrities have gone for a ride on the Sybian.
The list of names include Jenna Jameson, Carmen Electra, and America's Next Top Model winner Adrianne Curry, to name a few.
8 Dana Plato
via imdb.com
Dana Plato was famous for playing the daughter of Mr. Drummond on TV's Diff'rent Strokes, alongside Gary Coleman. As she grew up, Plato struggled with substance abuse. On May 7, 1999, she appeared on the Howard Stern Show, where she discussed with Stern the troubles in her life and that she is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. When callers pressured her about her drug use she maintained that she had been sober and still is. She even offered to submit a drug test to the show and gave a snippet of hair for testing. However, when the show went to commercial break, Plato reportedly freaked out and begged to get the sample back. “She said, ‘I want my hair back.’ That’s when I knew she was lying,” reported Howard Stern.
The next day, Dana Plato died of a prescription drug overdose. Her death was ruled a suicide. Some criticized Stern immediately after her death, but ultimately he had only interviewed her, and had even defended her against callers' accusations. Her troubles did not begin that day. Nevertheless, Dana Plato's interview followed by her death hours later was a shocker.
7 Debbie Tay’s Ashes
via www.youtube.com
6 Kitten Donation Show
via youtube.com
When your career highlight reel includes decade’s worth of naked women performing various stunts, giving hot-headed celebrities brutal tongue lashings, controversial dark humor, and the largest fines in FCC history, naturally people will be shocked. But for hardcore fans and followers of Stern and his show, the shock jock topped himself when he devoted an entire hour of his radio broadcast to helping place kittens in foster homes along with his wife, Beth Ostrosky Stern.
5 Parodying Selena’s Death
via blendspace.com
On March 31, 1995, a Mexican-American singer dubbed the "Queen of Tejano" and the "Tejano Madonna" was shot dead...by a close associate, Yolanda Saldívar. Saldívar started the Selena fan club in their shared home state of Texas. Eventually she came into contact with the singer, working closely with her in a management position; however Saldívar became obsessed with the singer and eventually murdered her.
Robin's News is the segment during every Stern show in which co-host Robin Quivers reads news stories and provides audio, and Howard, Fred and the crew crack jokes and give their perspectives on the news stories. This feature in its heyday would often be the most captivating part of the broadcast. When Robin reported the story of Selena, of course Howard chimed in with some off-color jokes to make light of the situation, saying, "This music does absolutely nothing for me. Alvin and the Chipmunks have more soul... Spanish people have the worst taste in music. They have no depth." Stern then played one of her songs while his engineer played sound effects of chickens clucking and gunshots firing. It was the furthest thing from tasteful, but not damning. However, after an uproar an arrest warrant was issued by a Texas court charging him with disorderly conduct, Howard issued an apology on-air the next day, in Spanish no less!
4 Signing with Sirius Satellite Radio
via http://media.graytvinc.com/
In 2004, Howard Stern's popularity in radio was solid, however fear of more FCC fines lead CBS Broadcasting to censor the show heavily, sometimes cutting entire segments and chopping bits up in such a way that they had lost all intended meaning and purpose, and just seemed odd. The commercial breaks were also so frequent that they often interrupted the flow of the conversation and forced Howard to cut interviews short at times. This frustrated Howard greatly; these days his interviews range from 50 minutes to 2 hours. As the censorship increased, the offers started coming in from two satellite radio companies. Sirius and XM. Both courted Stern and he eventually wound up signing with Sirius. The move was a highly-publicized story with Yahoo! News covering his final show and running a live video stream.
3 His 4-year stint on America’s Got Talent
via tvweek.com
In 2011, Stern began to frequently speculate on his joining American Idol as a judge. Stern hyped up his credibility, comparing himself to judges like Ellen Degeneres and trying to build momentum for his hiring. Cowell had another idea in mind. America's Got Talent was entering its seventh season and needed some re-tooling. The show is reminiscent of The Gong Show, but with a button rather than a gong. The show was relaunched with Howard replacing Piers Morgan as a judge, alongside Sharon Osbourne and Howie Mandel.
Emails leaked in the Sony hack in December 2014 show that producer Simon Cowell wanted Stern off the show as recently as 2014, suggesting that "the right thing to do" is for Cowell to step in replacing Stern. Although Stern did not deliver blockbuster ratings as may have been expected, he did manage to help carry the show and maintain some viewership, despite analysts expecting the show's ratings to plunge.
2 Running for Governor
via twitter.com
Stern flirted with politics briefly during his career. In 1994, Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo was running for re-election against Republican George Pataki. Things got interesting when the Libertarian Party agreed to support New York icon Howard Stern as their candidate. Stern's platforms? Pushing for the death penalty, allocating road work to night hours only, restructuring toll locations to alleviate traffic jams, and the promise of resigning once these goals had been accomplished.
Stern eventually dropped out of the race several months later. He refused to reveal his financial statements, as is required of those who seek public office.
1 Cutting Ties with Artie Lange
via New York Daily News
In 2001, Jackie "The Jokeman" Martling, a well-established and respected stand up comedian who played sidekick, segment producer, and executive writer on the Stern Show for the majority of its existence, left due to a contract dispute. Stern, feeling jilted when Martling delayed his contract and played politics, decided not to allow for his return, instead auditioning the spot to new comedians and regular guests. Many have sat in the chair but the clear favorite was a comedian from MadTV, a close friend of then regular guest Norm MacDonald. Lange had appeared several times on the show before being offered the opportunity to sit in for a week, and was a popular guest among staff and listeners. Lange himself had been a fan of the show since his youth in New Jersey. Eventually in 2001, Artie Lange replaced Martling permanently, or so it seemed.
During a 2006 segment involving homeless people being given lap dances for free, one of the vagrants began discussing his troubles with heroin. Lange sympathized with the man, and ended up confessing to struggling with heroin addiction himself. The rest of the show developed as somber, emotional discussion about Artie's demons. From that point on, Artie's troubles with heroin became a topic of discussion on the show frequently. Over the next few years of his time at the Stern show, jokes about Lange's drug use were common. Artie would show up to the studio high, and sometimes pass out during the broadcast. There were a few brief periods of absence, and Artie's "sick" calls were used as on-air fodder as well.
Lange's behavior was at times erratic. In one segment Lange's personal assistant/switchboard operator, for another show on the Howard Stern channel, Teddy, was accused of stealing money by Artie and of being unprofessional among other things. Lange ended up throwing something at Teddy and then chasing after him trying to attack. Lange was detained by security until he calmed down, and when he returned he said his goodbyes and exited the building. When the show returned the next week, Artie had returned as well. Sirius and everyone involved were able to look past the incident and allow him to maintain his employment.
In December 2009, Artie Lange attempted to take his own life, stabbing himself nine times with a 13-inch knife. Lange was found by his mother and rushed to the hospital. He survived the suicide attempt, but his relationship with Howard Stern had not. Lange's suicide attempt and absence from the show went unmentioned by Howard for a long time. Eventually Howard addressed the issue through a caller. The caller, a woman named Dina, asked for "an update on what's going on with Artie." Stern snapped on the caller, advising her to go fuck herself and declaring that "I (Howard) will piss on my audience if I want to.
Lange has addressed the issue saying he feels "abandoned" by Stern, and has revealed that he and his former mentor have not spoken since that awful occurrence. Now Lange hosts his own podcast online, without the support of Stern and Lange also revealed that he is no longer welcome on the Stern Show even as a guest to promote his new ventures. Lange has not been replaced, and the seat has been vacant since 2010.Parents say that children at Risca Primary have been banned from riding their bikes to school.
Ceri Jeffries, 32, has three ten-year-olds at the school and says she is shocked the school has taken this decision considering its “eco” status.
Her children normally cycle in a group with four other children, cutting the twenty minute walk down to a five minute ride.
But now she says they cannot bring their bikes on site, and have to chain them outside the grounds if they decide to continue cycling.
Mrs Jeffries said she understood the school bike shed was to be removed.
She said: “The school is an eco- friendly school but has decided that children are no longer allowed to cycle to and from school, even though children have been doing this for years, including myself as a child.”
She said teachers had cited safety concerns, but added the amount of cars near the school was at least as problematic.
Mrs Jeffries said: “As you can imagine this has upset quite a lot of children and their parents. Childhood obesity is on the rise and promoting healthy eating and exercise is a must. What better way to promote this by encouraging children to cycle to school and by doing so reducing the amount of cars, making it safer for children and the environment?”
Rachel Guy, mother of two children at the school, said she met with head teacher Jayne Arthur about the policy. Mrs Guy said: “I said to Mrs Arthur, "It’s absolutely ridiculous." She said it’s a health and safety issue.
“My kids rode yesterday, to make a stand really. I’m hoping they haven’t been told off.”
Mrs Guy and Mrs Jeffries both said they were told the bike shed would be removed to create extra parking spaces for staff.
The school holds a cycling safety course each year when pupils bring their bikes to school for three weeks.
Mrs Jeffries said: “I also asked if safety measures are to be put into place for this short time, why can’t they be put into place permanently? This apparently isn’t an option.”
Head teacher Jayne Arthur said: “We are currently working alongside the council’s Road Safety and Health and Safety teams to review the situation and complete risk assessment and traffic survey of the school site. Ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our pupils remains our utmost priority, and we are seeking to resolve this issue as soon as possible”.
A spokeswoman for Caerphilly Council said the council did not want to issue an official statement, adding: “I’m aware of the situation. It’s a school policy rather than a Caerphilly-wide policy and it’s at the discretion of the school.”Believing in American Democracy requires some measure of faith these days. Donald Trump won by slim margins in states where Republican Governors and legislatures instituted new voting restrictions, and these restrictions likely provided the margin of victory in Wisconsin if not other states (a good counterargument is here). The Electoral College once again has awarded the Presidency to someone that received far fewer votes. And gerrymandered House districts will give Republicans a 55% majority of the seats in the House of Representatives even when--at most--they only got 50% of those votes. As more votes get counted, don't be surprised if House Democrats ended up getting more votes than their Republican counterparts.
It’s all rather dispiriting, but I am comforted that at least all of these base violations of the basic tenets of representational democracy are not new problems. We’ve been rigging the system in favor of a dominant white, non-urban power since the nation’s inception. I may not like the Electoral College much, but at least the rules were clear to everyone when we started the game, and there’s a good chance we’ll adopt a National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in our lifetimes. I may not like the voter suppression techniques employed by Republican legislatures (and even some Democratic ones in the primaries), but at least these can be remedied through political mobilization and change. And with the right mix of court decisions and some action at the state level, non-partisan redistricting with some measure of fairness could be achieved.
But in North Carolina, there is a scheme afoot that so transcends the basic notions of living in a Democratic Republic, that it deserves the highest level of condemnation I can imagine.
In a very tight race, Republican Governor Pat McCrory has lost to Democrat Attorney General Roy Cooper by around 7,000 votes. That’s a close margin, but given that recounts and further canvassing of votes almost always nets Democrats more votes, the final result is not really in question. Here in Virginia, our 2013 Attorney General’s race was initially certified as having a 165-vote margin of victory for Democrat Mark Herring. After a recount, that number rose to 907 votes and Republican Mark Obenshain ultimately conceded. And who can forget the famous 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, where after months of legal wrangling, Democrat Al Franken was certified the winner with just 312 votes when he initially started out behind.
In North Carolina, a recount seems inevitable, and no one really seems opposed to that. Getting the election results right is in everyone’s best interests. But Governor McCrory’s campaign team has also lodged a series of protests with local county election officials and the state board of elections alleging widespread voter fraud. These boards have been quick to dismiss the charges, bolstered by the fact that these boards are composed of two Republicans and one Democrat.
Normally, it would be easy to dismiss this all as a losing campaign’s last desperate maneuvers. Allege whatever you can, raise money for your legal team, and keep the pressure up and hope something jars loose. But I fear something far worse. As this article from Slate indicates, something far more nefarious may be at play here.
McCrory can, and probably will, still ask for a statewide recount. But he must know that a recount will not close such a sizable gap. His real goal appears to be to delegitimize the results to such an extent that the state legislature—which holds a Republican supermajority—can step in and select him as the winner. North Carolina state law states that when “a contest arises out of the general election,” and that contest pertains “to the conduct or results of the election,” the legislature “shall determine which candidate received the highest number of votes” and “declare that candidate to be elected.” By alleging fraud, mishandling of ballots, and irregular vote-counting, McCrory is laying the groundwork for the legislature to proclaim that a “contest” has arisen as to “the conduct or results of the election.” At that point, it can step in, assert that McCrory received “the highest number” of legitimate votes, and “declare [him] to be elected.”
The best part? Under the law, the legislature’s decision is “not reviewable” by the courts. Republican legislators can simply step in, overturn the decision of the voters, and grant McCrory another term. The courts have no authority even to review the legality of their actions.
Again, in a normal world, I would highly doubt that a Republican legislature would be so bold as to steal an election in broad daylight like that. But we live in a different time, where gerrymandering and the makeup of the voting public largely insulates Republicans from being punished for wrongdoing. If you knew the only way you wouldn’t be reelected is for not being Republican enough and losing in a primary, wouldn’t you consider this route?
There is a confluence of factors that make such electoral theft way more likely in the waning days of 2016 than in the past. The rise of fake news means that you can decide on any reality you want—just choose the world in which tens of thousands of votes really were fraudulent and use that to justify any action. Intense gerrymandering means the vast, vast majority of North Carolina legislators can never be punished by the opposing party. And most importantly, North Carolina Republicans have spent years instituting strict voting restrictions just to prevent this kind of scenario—there’s a kind of political inertia to all of this. We know fraud is happening. We tried to stop it. And now we have a duty to remedy the fraud that we’ve already established is happening.
Do I think this scenario is likely? No, but I also didn’t think the election of Donald Trump was likely either. Even when we are discussing events with low probabilities, we are all forced now to mobilize against worst-case scenarios long before they come to fruition. Will Donald Trump create a Muslim-only registry? I don’t know, but I have to prepare as if it will. Will Republicans repeal (and not replace) Obamacare? I don’t really have a choice but to take them at their word.
And in North Carolina, I have to take the Republicans at their word. They have legislated their belief that non-existent voter fraud justifies the blocking of hundred of thousands of otherwise eligible voters. I just pray they don’t take that belief to its logical conclusion—that awarding the election to the losing Republican candidate is the right and courageous thing to do. After all, anything less would be letting the fraudulent voters win.My fellow Americans, you can say that you are witnessing history.
I’m not talking about last year’s largely unexpected election of President 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. I’m referring to a fundamentally new paradigm in American politics: the death of the two-party system as we know it.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to 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.
During a recent interview, when asked what he thinks historians will make of his Speakership, the “unchained” former Speaker matter-of-factly stated: “They’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system.”
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So, with unexpected insight and scar-grounded wisdom, John Boehner, in a yoda-like manner, identifies what would be the most transformational event for American politics in the 21st century.
It appears the only thing that’s filtered for John Boehner these days are his Camel 99 cigarettes.
But you can see the numbers starting to bear this out. An NBC/WSJ poll out last week shows Trump’s continuing strong popularity within the GOP. In fact, Trump enjoys the highest popularity ratings among GOP respondents. He is more popular than the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.), Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.), former Trump chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon, GOP members of the House and the Senate, and the Republican Party itself.
But Donald Trump is but one feature of this potential political transformation in American politics. Behold the net negative view of both parties by all respondents (Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) in the same poll:
Democratic Party:
32 percent positive and 42 percent negative (net negative of 10 percent)
Republican Party:
27 percent positive and 46 percent negative (net negative of 19 percent)
Clearly, there is opportunity for something else new in our politics beyond Trump.
This poll comes as Democrats enjoyed a strong election night performance on Tuesday. Does what happened on Election Day in 2017 foreshadow anything for next year’s election? Perhaps it is an indicator of energy and salient issues. But it would be a mistake for Democrats to assume they will be successful on election night in 2018.
The more realistic interpretation is that this is yet another example of reaction and rejection: Trump can be seen as a reaction to former President Obama and a rejection of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE; similarly, the success of the Democrats on Tuesday could be seen as a reaction to Donald Trump and a rejection of the GOP’s failure to govern effectively and inclusively.
Yet, I believe there are larger, more important phenomena occurring within American politics today.
Identity is “trumping” party. National politics today is more about how people identify with the candidate than the party. There are complex, identity-based dynamics driving American politics today. That’s why we continue to see various groups vote against their economic interests across the political spectrum and irrespective of class: working class who vote for candidates promoting tax cuts for the wealthy; wealthy, white collar professionals who vote for candidates that want to raise their taxes; and women and minority-owned businesses that vote for candidates who want to increase corporate taxes, payroll taxes, and regulatory costs. What we are witnessing is a struggle for the identity of America itself.
Our identity-based politics could lead to an American version of a multi-party system. America no longer has two political parties. We have been witnessing the emergence of something of a multi-party system. In fact, one, at least, has already named itself: the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party. And the hyper “identitization” of American politics is not only driving the fracturing of the GOP. A deep rift has emerged between the so-called “Clinton wing” and the “Sanders-Warren” wing of the Democratic party. The real soul searching for the Democrats will come in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. They don’t have to make tough choices now about who they are. But if the Democrats lose again to Trump in 2020 (that is, if Trump even runs), a new, Sanders-Warren type of party will likely emerge.
There’s no party for “the middle:” Even though Trump is gaining with the extreme right and the Sanders-Warren political worldview is increasingly where the energy is among the left, no one represents the political middle. Not only isn’t there a leader emerging to capture that portion of the political “white space,” a “middle coalition” — committed to governance and solutions — is being fractured and diluted by the legacy two-party system and obstructionist strategies by both Democrats and Republicans. But “middle” is increasingly becoming an identity.
So, there is an opportunity to transform American politics in the way that John Boehner alluded to in his “death of the two-party system” quip. But it is not going to happen in Washington, D.C., (per usual), it must happen out in the country — where a “middle coalition” can be formed, incubated, emerge, and injected back into D.C.
The problem, of course, is that those who are “in the middle” seemingly do not have a homogenous world view and political ideology. But I do think there could be a coherent ideology for a “middle coalition” through a governance-focused approach: one that works toward progressive goals through conservative means. In other words, an approach that prioritizes the whole but does so via conservative, market-based, fiscally responsible means.
Call this “middle coalition” the new “Governance Party.”
In the end, I hope John Boehner is right. Our static two-party system does not meet the needs and varying worldviews of our country today. We must have new ideas injected into our politics, and we need a genuine focus on governance.
But before a “Governance Party” can govern, a “middle coalition” insurgency needs to coalesce, led by disaffected Republicans, Democrats and independents, in cities, small towns, and local communities. This is the only place from which our politics can be transformed and our country can be renewed.
John Boehner would probably cry and then smoke to that.
Alex Gallo served as a professional staff member with the House Armed Services Committee. He is a West Point graduate, a combat veteran, and a graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His work has been published by The Washington Post, National Review, The Huffington Post, The Hill, and Foreign Affairs. You can follow him on Twitter @AlexGalloUSA.Russell Westbrook has received a lot of praise in the wake of winning his first MVP award, but one former teammate’s congratulatory message is sure to make plenty of news — Kevin Durant of the Golden State Warriors.
In a comment on his YouTube channel, Durant sent well wishes to all of last night’s award winners. Of course that included Westbrook, his running mate in Oklahoma City for eight seasons. The two have shared a contentious relationship since Durant bolted from the Thunder last summer, but that didn’t stop the Finals MVP from sharing some positive thoughts on the newly-crowned league MVP.
via YouTube:
“Huge congrats to Russell Westbrook on MVP, that boy went out there and was a created player on 2k all year, F—in balled out. Gotta respect it!”
And the NSFW screenshot in case you can’t believe it:
Durant forgot to congratulate Sixth Man of the Year winner Eric Gordon, so he jumped back in with a follow-up comment. Refusing to leave it at that, the story then circled back around to the now prevalent idea that Durant ruined the game with his decision to join the historically dominant Warriors in free agency.
Again via YouTube:
“Also, congrats to Eric Gordon! Changed the course of his career with his stellar play this season. His 3 point shooting was a joy to watch! WHAT A YEAR, DONT DISRESPECT THESE PLAYERS OR THIS BEAUTIFUL GAME BY SAYING THIS YEAR WAS A DOWN YEAR FOR THE NBA. THE WHOLE LEAGUE SHOWED”
It’s highly unlikely that Durant’s message will go very far in repairing the relationship, but hey — it’s a start. For now it simply is what it is, and Thunder fans can now get back to celebrating the accomplishment of it’s prized point guard.
Moving on.The film Of Gods and Men told the true story of the French monks living in at a monastery in Tibhirine, Algeria, all of whom were slaughtered. It was believed initially that they had been murdered by jihadis but revelations since then have caused many to suspect that the Algerian government was responsible. The Catholic church in Lyon commissioned statues to pay tribute to the monks. It was originally planned that these statues would be sited in a public space in the city. But fears were expressed about local Muslims vandalising them, the church decide to place them inside church grounds instead.
"Can you imagine if an unbalanced person was sick enough to decapitate these statues?" The arguments of his entourage prevailed. And Cardinal Barbarin ended up giving up due to the fear of damage. The seven statues of the French monks of Tibherine, assassinated 20 years ago in obscure circumstances in Algeria, have just been installed in the court of Saint-Irene House, the seat of the new archbishop. A retreat inwards to the private sphere of the church and a return to the initial idea that seems to satisfy everyone while not annoying anyone.
... In addition, some people, in the Church, feared that it would be perceived as a provocation by Lyon citizens of the Muslim faith, as a Salafist mosque is situated close to the church of Saint Louis.
Saint Louis was a French king who died crusading in the Middle East, taking the fight to the Mohammedans. Now there's a Salafist mosque next to his church, and the Catholic church is afraid to put up statues to its own martyrs there due to fear of Muslim reprisals.Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, just signed into law a series of anti-abortion measures, including one requiring women in the state to bury or cremate fetal remains from their abortions.
Abbott approved Senate Bill 8 on Tuesday. The law will also ban the donation of fetal tissue and punish those who help women access certain types of abortion procedures.
S.B. 8 forces women, who are already in the midst of a potentially traumatizing and invasive experience, to undergo extra steps to humanize their fetus. The hope, in the eyes of lawmakers, is that this regulation will make people more likely to reconsider their abortions and keep their fetuses, but I doubt that’s how it will pan out. People may leave the state to obtain the procedure, making everything even more complicated for them, or be forced to keep children they can’t properly care for, which can lead to its own problems down the line.
The new law fits right in with the Christian Right’s Bible-based outlook, but not with reality in a nation that’s supposed to have a separation of church and state. Or at least policies based on sound evidence. These laws suggest women can’t make decisions for themselves and need the government to steer them in a different direction. Furthermore, there’s no evidence this law will help anyone, and I’m not the only one who has noted that.
The new law comes less than a year after the Supreme Court ruled that Texas cannot enact abortion restrictions that place an “undue burden” on women seeking an abortion. According to the Texas Observer, the law’s critics and some supporters agree that SB8 isn’t intended to advance women’s health, increasing the law’s chances of being challenged in court.
In addition to S.B. 8, Abbott wants to ban private insurance plans from covering abortion while also banning abortion providers from getting money from the government. Abortion may be legal in this country, but Texas is doing everything it can to throw more barriers in the path of women trying to get one. It’s worth noting that all these regulations are being imposed by Republicans, who claim to fight for individual liberty and less government intrusion.
This isn’t the first time Texas has tried to limit access to abortions, and it won’t be the last. This law and those rumored to soon follow are part of a distinct pattern of Texas politicians trying to effectively ban abortion. And what happens then? Historically speaking, back-alley abortion rates are likely to rise and the industry will go underground with less regulation than ever.
That’s what the “pro-life” side is working toward.
(Image via Shutterstock)Though he’s had a borderline disastrous October, tonight Luongo has a chance to redeem himself. I may be in the minority, but I for one believe he will get the job done tonight.
In honour of the Canucks embattled netminder, and his hilarious hair, I figured I’d write a quick song to express my continued confidence in his ability to lead a team to a Stanley Cup victory. I call it: "Redemption Luu."
The Bruins yes they robbed him/Of his first championship.
Minutes after they Won it/Canucks fans broke out in riots!
But Luongo was made strong/As a result of near constant failure
He looks forward to this next season/Ending triumphantly
So he doesn’t have a ring/He’s still a great goalie/The best we’ve ever had!
Redemption Luuu! Redemption Luu!
Emancipate yourself from the "he’s mentally weak |
care. In addition, all caregivers are encouraged to abide by several other practices, including removal of bumper pads, loose bedding, soft objects, and pillows from the sleep environment and strict avoidance of co-sleeping (using the same bed or crib) with adults, other children, or animals (see Table 1).1
As a community health nurse with a long involvement in maternal and child health, one of us (RM) was surprised to learn while preparing this article that the most recent analysis we have of SIDS deaths occurring in child-care settings was conducted more than a decade ago. Leading SIDS researcher Rachel Moon and colleagues reported in 2001 that the proportion of deaths attributed to SIDS among infants who died in the care of someone other than their parents had remained constant for several years.17 In a retrospective examination of almost 2,000 SIDS deaths in 11 geographically diverse states from January 1995 through June 1997, Moon found that 20% occurred in child-care settings, a much higher proportion than expected.18 (Based on the amount of time a typical infant spent in child care when the study was conducted, the researchers extrapolated that only 7% of all SIDS deaths should have occurred in that setting. Of 99 infants for whom researchers had the most complete data, 34 died during the first week of child care; 16 died the first day.18)
More recently, Moon and colleagues have suggested that education geared toward child-care providers and other nonparental caregivers should repeatedly emphasize safe sleep positions and environments.17 In 2005, Kreader and colleagues found that nonparental caregivers care for two-thirds of infants younger than 12 months of age while their mothers are at work or school; half of these infants are in a child-care center or child-care home.19 The typical maternity leave is six to eight weeks, so babies are often placed in child care at the time they are most vulnerable to SIDS. Anecdotally, one of us (RM) has heard experts recommend that health care providers encourage parents to avoid putting their infants into child care until they are at least four months old, past the most critical postneonatal developmental period. While these data and recommendations are welcome, perhaps it's worth pausing to consider some statistics presented in a 2012 white paper from Child Care Aware of America20:
“[S]ix states do not require family child care providers to adhere to SIDS prevention measures.... [Ten] states do not require providers in small family child care homes... to complete any initial health and safety training.... [E]ight states... do not license family child care homes that care for fewer than seven children.... [N]ine states do not require center caregivers to place infants on their backs to sleep.”
These same authors pose the compelling question, “Can the death of an infant due to unsafe sleep practices, such as placing an infant face-down on a soft bed, be equated with neglect or abuse?”20
CREATING COMMUNITY AWARENESS IN ARKANSAS
In 2008, the infant mortality rate in Arkansas was 7.38 deaths per 1,000 live births, significantly higher than the U.S. rate of 6.61 deaths per 1,000 live births.3 In 2007, 61 babies died of SUID in Arkansas.8 The case described in the testimony at the start of this article was especially puzzling—even to the family's pediatrician, David Matthews, who had not seen a SIDS case in years—given the fact that the death occurred in the first few hours of the baby's first day in a child-care facility.
We decided to initiate a public health intervention about SIDS and sought to develop a multilayered approach to the program. The intervention started with educating friends, family, and local community members about SIDS, focusing on parents, family caregivers, health care providers, and child-care providers with targeted messages about safe sleep. Next, one of us (AM) planned a fundraising gala for SIDS research, and we all wrote and placed articles about safe sleep practices in newspapers and parenting magazines. The local Rotary Club of Jonesboro provided a program services grant, agreeing to create and fund billboards, television and radio public service announcements, and crib cards outlining safe sleep practices that were distributed to health departments, hospitals, and clinics. One of us (RM) made a presentation on safe sleep practices to the women's advisory board of a local hospital and asked nursing administrators at three local hospitals to support back-to-sleep policies on the postpartum and nursery units. RM also made presentations to child-care providers to increase awareness of safe sleep practices using materials from the AAP Safe Sleep Speaker's Kit.21 This led to an invitation to testify before the Arkansas Department of Human Services Child Care Licensing Board hearing on revising the minimum child-care licensing requirements.
Educating child-care providers. The team recognized that child-care providers were the group that most urgently needed education about safe sleep environments. In 2009, RM made two presentations on the subject to 89 licensed child-care providers at two locations in Northeast Arkansas at mandatory education seminars for continued state licensure. Fifty-seven percent of participants had children younger than six months in their care and 61% cared for children in their home. When asked how infants were placed to sleep, 47% responded that they did not place infants on their backs. Only one child-care center had a safe sleep policy. After a presentation on safe sleep, participants received crib cards with 10 rules for safe sleep. Two months after the presentation, a model safe sleep policy was mailed to participants (see www.healthychildcare.org/pdf/SIDSchildcaresafesleep.pdf) with a letter encouraging providers to adopt a safe sleep policy, train their employees, and enforce safe sleep practices. At a follow-up in-service with the same group of participants in 2010, 81% of those present reported placing all infants on their backs to sleep and seven child-care centers and homes had safe sleep policies in place. The institutional review board of Arkansas State University approved this intervention.
CHANGING CHILD-CARE LICENSING REGULATIONS
Arkansas has lagged behind other states in regulating safe sleep environments for infants in child care. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (NACCRRA) advocates safe child-care practices and supports regulation of child care in small family child-care homes and centers. In 2011, NACCRRA released We Can Do Better, the third report in a biennial series that scores and ranks states based on child-care center program requirements and oversight.22 Each state is scored according to 11 child-care program benchmarks (the ninth benchmark addresses infant sleep position and crib safety). According to the report, Arkansas was one of only a few states that didn't have mandated safe sleep policies in licensed child-care centers.
In the summer of 2011, the Arkansas Child Care Licensing Board proposed a revision of the minimum licensing requirements for child-care centers and child-care family homes to reflect the NACCRRA guidelines for safe sleep. Some providers objected to the regulations because the wording of the revised requirement changed the suggestion that infants “should be placed on their backs” to the mandate that infants “shall be placed on their backs” for every sleep period. We testified at two of the statewide hearings, including the final hearing at the state capitol. AM testified:
“As a concerned parent, I support the changes in child care licensing requirements because my baby son died of SIDS. The guidelines for prevention of SIDS in child care settings are based on best practice and should be adopted and enforced. Today would have been my baby's fourth birthday. I can think of no better birthday present for my son than to be here today and honor his memory.”
As a result of this and others’ testimony, state regulations were changed on November 1, 2011, to require all licensed and registered child-care facilities (child-care centers and family homes) to place all infants younger than 12 months flat on their backs to sleep. In addition, cribs must be free of loose bedding; pillows, bumper pads, and stuffed animals must not be placed in cribs; and all babies must have a separate, well-constructed bed or playpen.23
NURSING IMPLICATIONS
While regulations for safe sleep in licensed child-care facilities will eliminate some SIDS deaths, gaps in education and prevention will undoubtedly persist. All health care providers, especially nurses, should offer comprehensive education to parents, family caregivers, and child-care providers to reduce the avoidable risks that converge to make sleep unsafe. For example, nurses on obstetric, neonatal, and pediatric units should model safe sleep practices for parents in the hospital by always placing babies on their backs to sleep. A 2006 study of 252 neonatal ICU nurses’ knowledge and practice regarding supine sleep position to reduce SIDS found that 95% of respondents identified a nonsupine (side or facedown) position as best for hospitalized preterm infants.24 Only 52% of these nurses routinely provided discharge instructions promoting the placement of babies on their back to sleep at home. Whether this reflects some nurses’ reluctance to change their practice to meet evidence-based standards or merely a lack of knowledge of the evidence, it is in direct conflict with the AAP guidelines for safe sleep in hospital-discharged preterm and healthy full-term infants.
In the community, nurses can make parents and child-care providers aware of the importance of safe sleep for babies at home, while in the care of family and friends, and in licensed and unlicensed child-care homes. For evidence-based guidance, nurses can refer to the Continuing Education Program on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) Risk Reduction: Curriculum for Nurses (www.nichd.nih.gov/SIDS/Pages/sidsnursesce.aspx), a collaboration by the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Nursing Research.11 The program provides the most current research findings and safe sleep environment recommendations, and gives nurses proven strategies to reduce SIDS risk.
Mandating safe sleep regulations that govern licensed child-care centers and family care homes will reduce the incidence of SIDS, but no public health intervention can perfectly address the problem of unsafe sleep environments. However, teaching parents and grandparents to provide a safe sleep environment for their baby—and asking caregivers to do the same—will reduce the incidence of this heartbreaking diagnosis.Wemyss Caves hold the largest collection of Pictish carvings in north-west Europe.
Archaeologists have revealed the initial results of a project to preserve ancient cave drawings in a Fife town.
Wemyss Caves hold the largest collection of Pictish carvings in north-west Europe.
However, they are under constant threat from coastal erosion.
The project, a joint effort between St Andrews University, York Archaeological Trust and a local community group, aims to scan the images and save them for future generations.
The academics will showcase their findings online to reach a wider audience.
The community conservation group wants to turn the caves into a prominent tourist attraction before they are destroyed forever.
A virtual tour of the caves will be accessible online from April.
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The one area that is probably the most interesting in this paper is Google’s look at what the study participants did while they where using their tablets. Watching TV, unsurprisingly, came in first with over 60% of the participants doing so, followed by eating and drinking (about 40%) and – somewhat surprisingly – cooking (27%). The participants told Google that they were using their tablets to enhance their TV experience “by extending that activity, through for example, looking up related information about the program that they were watching.” Looking at its diary study, though, the researchers also found that many of the participants just used TV as background noise while checking their email and doing other things completely unrelated to watching TV.
Shopping: Research On The Tablet, Purchase On The Desktop
Google, of course, has been pretty interested in getting tablet users to shop on their devices. This study, however, found that while the majority of participants did some product research on their phones (58%), many still decided to make the actual purchase on their laptops or desktops. Shopping-related activities, the researchers found, have “a higher percentage of transitions from or to other devices (30%) or the real world (17%), than many other activities.” The reasons for this, the participants told the researchers, ranged from not being signed in to their accounts on shopping sites to how difficult it is to enter payment information on tablets.
Because of this, the Googlers behind this research note, “it is important to provide a seamless experience across all of the user’s devices, so that activities started on one of their devices can easily be continued on another.”
If you are interested in learning more about this study, you can find the full paper here (PDF).French President Francois Hollande called Thursday for Berlin to supply all the information it had after reports Germany's foreign intelligence service spied on Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, saying it was not the kind of behavior he expected between friendly countries.
"We ask that all the information be given to us," Hollande said on the sidelines of a migration summit in Malta.
"These kind of practices should not go on between allies.
"I know that the chancellery will do everything it can to explain the circumstances to us in detail."
Hollande said he had been assured that such spying "had completely stopped" but wanted to see "see the proof".
The claims on Berlin public radio that the BND spy service had listened in on Fabius fuels an ongoing debate in Germany about state surveillance which was triggered by revelations from fugitive U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
The reports are awkward for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose office oversees Germany's intelligence activities, who in 2013 angrily told Washington that "spying among friends isn't on" after reports the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had bugged her cellphone.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tajikistan made the greatest strides in business-friendly reforms in the past year, part of an overall trend of improving business regulations across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the World Bank said in a report released on Tuesday.
An employee demonstrates counting Tajikstan's Somoni banknotes at the office of Agroinvestbank in Dushanbe February 2, 2012. REUTERS/Nozim Kalandarov
However, the business climate worsened most in Serbia compared with its performance last year, the bank said in its latest “Doing Business” report. The eastern European country is going through painful fiscal austerity after huge floods devastated the economy.
Singapore remained the world’s easiest place to do business for the ninth year in a row, followed by New Zealand and Hong Kong, the bank said in a report that ranks 189 countries on 10 criteria tied to the business climate, such as ease of opening a business, paying taxes or getting electricity.
In general, 85 percent of countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have made it easier to do business in the past year, compared with only half of countries in South Asia or Latin America.
Augusto Lopez-Claros, director of the World Bank’s global indicators, said European countries dealing with high debt burdens may seek to create more private sector jobs and boost their growth potential through business-friendly reforms, he said.
Ireland, for example, was among the top 10 most-improved economies on its ease of doing business this year, after ending its EU/IMF bailout.
RANKINGS DEFENSE
Since their inception in 2005, the World Bank’s business rankings have come to carry a huge weight with governments eager to attract private enterprise and trumpet commitment to reforms. The report is the bank’s most-downloaded publication.
But an independent panel set up by the World Bank found last year that the development institution should stop producing headline rankings because they may be misleading. Non-profit groups also criticized the methodology for promoting less regulation, which could hurt the poorest.
“If the Bank is unable or unwilling to take the reform of the (report) seriously, they should drop the entire exercise,” said Tiago Stichelmans, analyst at the European Network on Debt and Development, which comprises 47 non-governmental groups.
To address the critiques, the World Bank for the first time this year included measures that show how far each country is from the best performers, or the “frontier,” to enable governments to better judge progress from year to year.
For example, the Philippines dropped nine places in the rankings this year. But the country’s overall business climate stayed constant; other governments simply made greater strides in improving their business rules, raising their rank.
The bank is also changing some of the indicators to consider qualitative measures, such as how well laws are designed.
Ultimately, the Doing Business rankings cannot capture everything that contributes to an economy’s success, but they throw a light on one key measure, Kaushik Basu, the World Bank’s chief economist, said in a foreword to the report.
“Life is a many-splendored thing, and the Doing Business report tries to capture one aspect of the good life,” he said.At the end of his heavily anti-American speech, Duterte appeals to China: 'If China would find in its heart to help us in our needs then we will remember it for all time'
Published 9:35 PM, October 20, 2016
BEIJING, China – President Rodrigo Duterte took a jab, not only at the United States or President Barack Obama, but at the American people themselves, in a speech in front of Chinese businessmen and government officials.
“Americans are loud, sometimes rowdy. Their larynx is not adjusted to civility,” said Duterte on Thursday, October 20, before mimicking an American accent.
WATCH: Duterte describes Americans, impersonates them accdg to his perception. @rapplerdotcom pic.twitter.com/6awpfjhjbg — Pia Ranada (@piaranada) October 20, 2016
“They are a very discourteous people,” he said. Duterte was speaking at a business forum attended by Chinese businessmen and Chinese government officials at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China.
Among the audience was Zhang Gaoli, Vice Premier of China State Council. The forum took place on the third day of his state visit to China.
In one part of his speech, Duterte jokingly warned the Chinese not to do business with Americans saying, “That is the surest way of losing your money.”
Most of his speech contained such anti-American statements, interwoven with jokes about Philippines-China relations, and stretches of him speaking in Filipino. Chinese translators, who could be heard through headsets provided by the Chinese government, stayed silent as Duterte spoke in a language they could not understand.
The audience, for the most part, laughed at Duterte’s anti-American jokes and clapped loudly when he praised China. Most gave him a standing ovation at the end of his speech.
'America has lost'
The Philippine President explained that he felt offended by US officials, including Obama, “lecturing” him on possible human rights violations linked to his deadly war on drugs, a campaign that China says it supports.
“I tried to explain that I have 4 million addicts to take care of and that I need help but nobody was listening. I was talking in a very decent language but they just went ahead to pound so I was forced to express my anger with curses and epithets and all,” said Duterte.
Duterte has told Obama to “go to hell” and has said “fuck you” to the European Union for expressing concern over his anti-drugs campaign.
In his Thursday speech, he said “America has lost” in the areas of politics and culture, and that he is ready to “shift gears.”
“I realign myself in your ideological flow and maybe I would also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are 3 of us against the world – China, Philippines, Russia,” he said to loud applause.
He also said that the idea of the US being the "most powerful industrial nation in the world" is "a lot of bullshit."
Asks China for help
Alongside his tirade against Americans, Duterte commended China for its “sincerity” and support.
“China has the character of an Oriental. it does not go around insulting people, insulting on policies to follow them,” he said.
Duterte joked that he prefers Chinese loans to American ones since the Chinese “are not eager to collect [debt] and sometimes they forget because of our friendship.”
At one point, he referred to President Xi Jinping as "Ji Xinping."
But towards the end of his speech, he asked for China’s help in earnest.
“I am not asking [something] for free but if China would find in its heart to help us in our needs then we will remember it for all time,” said Duterte, again to applause.
In the same speech, Duterte announced his separation from the US in military and economic aspects. The US is seen as the sole country who can challenge China’s dominance in Asia and in the West Philippine Sea, a body of water critical to the world economy.
Earlier that day, Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping witnessed the signing of 13 agreements on cooperation. – Rappler.comDespite a population of over a billion people, India’s best ever national team performance has only been qualification for the 1950 World Cup. Even then, they pulled out because of a lack of funds and a misunderstanding of the importance of the tournament. Famously, they claimed they were unable to even spend money on football boots, although then-captain Sailen Manna has since stated that this was an excuse.
Despite witnessing first hand one of oldest cup competitions in the world – the Durand Cup, formed in 1888 by the Indian Army – the All India Football Federation (AIFF) has struggled to create proper infrastructure for the sport. As such, even with stadiums like the 68,000-seater Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata, the sport has yet to pick up. That particular stadium was actually the second largest football arena in the world before 2011 as it used to hold 120,000 people. It was, and is, rarely filled to capacity during football matches.
In 2013, as it seemed like Indian footballing mediocrity would stretch on forever, a seismic change occurred. Jindal Steel Works, led by Parth Jindal, decided to set up a professional club. Taking advantage of one of the most glaring holes in the sport’s infrastructure, they decided to create this new club in the football-mad city of Bangalore
Inexplicably, Bangalore did not have a big club, even by Indian standards, and had not even had a team in the I-League, India’s premier division. While the enthusiastic coastal areas like Kolkata, Kerala and Goa all had their local teams, Bangaloreans had been starved of a side to support.
Jindal got to work immediately, and he hoped to have the club up and running by the start of the 2013-14 I-League season. While he was able to take care of the off-field problems, such as finding a stadium and setting up world-class facilities, he was having trouble finding enough players. At the unveiling of the club, he had only managed to round up 12 players, all of whom were only available because they had been rejected by other sides.
The arrival of Ashley Westwood, an FA Youth Cup winner with Manchester United in 1995, would help to solve these problems. He managed to convince foreign players, such as popular striker Sean Rooney, to join the club to make up the numbers and provide some quality. He also brought in qualified staff, such as fitness coach Malcolm Purchase.
Most importantly, his training methods and ambition convinced Sunil Chhetri, India’s captain and best player, to sign on after a failed stint at Sporting Clube de Portugal. In turn, this would convince other quality home-grown players such as Robin Singh to take a chance on this emerging club. As a result, by the first day of the season, Jindal had succeeded – Bengaluru FC (BFC) were born and ready to take on the I-League.
• • • •
Read | Mohun Bagan and the fight for Indian independence
• • • •
Despite their low expectations, Bengaluru FC revolutionised the I-League. After a promising pre-season, they won four out of their first five league matches. The only anomaly in this run was a draw against Mohun Bagan, as the Bengali giants scored an equaliser deep into stoppage time.
By the start of December, Bengaluru had risen to the top of the league. They would largely hold onto their league advantage as they only lost three more matches until the end of the season in April. Improbably, Bengaluru FC, a team of misfits and unknowns, had won the I-League in their first season. However, this was to be only their second most surprising development of the season.
In an interview for the documentary Bengaluru FC: The Road Less Taken in Indian Football, Parth Jindal had claimed an altruistic motivation towards the setup of the club. Like most football watching Indians, he had been left frustrated by the efforts of the AIFF to promote the sport. Unlike most football watching Indians, however, he had the ability to positively affect the situation.
As the legacy to a super-wealthy steel industrialist, Jindal realised that the best path towards football development in India was to personally create the infrastructure. Like everything else in the nation, the private industry was far more likely to produce change.
According to Dhruv Nagarkatti, the BFC Operations Manager, Bengaluru has two aims: to eventually conquer Asia on the pitch, and to impact the city and unite people behind the BFC flag. While the first target only required the correct decisions and patience of a minority, the second represented a significant task to influence a majority. While Bangalore is a football loving city, many of its inhabitants have been turned off the local fare and prefer the European variety. Creating a community atmosphere off the pitch was not going to be easy.
Kunaal Majgaonkar, the Media Manager, found a simple solution: to go back to football’s roots. At the turn of the 20th century, football had undoubtedly been a sport for the working classes in Europe and the Americas. There were wage limits imposed and almost all players were considered amateurs because they had to supplement their salaries by working in the industries of the time.
This accessibility and off-pitch camaraderie of the players and their communities played a major part in the popularisation of the sport. Ironically, this incredible success led to its eventual wealth and the disenfranchisement of working-class fans. In a country where local football is only watched by diehard fans, Majgaonkar saw an opportunity. He would use modern technology and habits to create a century-old connection with fans.
• • • •
Order your copy of TFT Magazine
• • • •
Besides the obvious creation of several social media accounts, Majgaonkar made sure the players themselves were involved in this online attraction. Many of the staff, both before and during the season, would take over the Twitter accounts and personally answer questions.
Bengaluru also held open training sessions during pre-season and often invited fans to interact with the staff in person. After these sessions, and even matches sometimes, the players would often go to Arbor, a local brewery, to meet fans. Additionally, many of the players were encouraged to explore the city without escorts in an attempt to both help these players understand Bangalore and ingratiate themselves with the local population.
BFC also tied up with several non-profit and private organisations to both help their community and publicise their club. As they started to see a rise in interest, the BFC administration made their most important decision – to price half the stadium at either INR 30 or 50, equivalent 45 or 75 US cents. Even in a largely poor country like India, this was an incredibly cheap valuation.
Their marketing tactics seemed to have worked as around 7,500 people showed up for their first match. This attendance number would reach a high of 8,216 in December, and average out to 7,038 by the end of the season, the sixth-highest total in the I-League in 2013-14.
In addition to the pre-season attempts, Bengaluru FC also instituted several practices during the season to endear themselves to the fans. Their twitter account ran minute-by-minute reports during matches, unheard of in Indian football, while their Facebook account uploaded high definition highlights after each match. The refreshments were cheap for most stands, and even free with the priciest tickets of INR 500 (approximately, USD 7.45).
Importantly, and in a further attempt to emulate their Europeans counterparts, Jindal installed a large screen for in-game replays in the stadium. Bengaluru FC also created matchday pamphlets for each fan, with information about the history of the club and players, their recent form, and words to some of the popular chants. This meant that even fans that had become involved at a later stage were able to feel like a part of the audience. They weren’t tourists like they would have been in European stadiums.
These attempts by the club were highly appreciated by the fans. The players’ actions were reciprocated tenfold by grateful Bangaloreans, who finally had a chance to witness good football at their doorstep. Every player has their own chant, which is catered to personal traits and events. For example John Johnson is celebrated for his prolificacy from corners, while Curtis Osano was wished happy birthday with a giant homemade banner.
• • • •
Read | A Tale of One City: Kolkata
• • • •
Unlike in Europe where the player would smile and walk off the pitch, Osano made the effort to go and personally thank the fans who made the banner. Popular striker Robin Singh summed up the relationship when he stated that he would rather have 8,000 diehard fans chanting his name at BFC than the thousands more that were relatively passive at his previous club East Bengal.
As the club finally sealed their I-League victory away to Dempo FC with a match to spare, two bus loads of fans travelled to the airport to give their returning heroes a proper welcome. Their presence had dragged along the local media, but the Bengaluru staff made a point to prioritise the fans who had made their way out.
The players enthusiastically took selfies and signed shirts, as the media waited their turn. Days later, with the league season officially over, the fans put on an even bigger spectacle. BFC had cautiously decided to organise a public open-top bus celebration, the first of its kind in India. Not only did the fans appear in droves to applaud their champions, but they also followed the bus on its short tour in the centre of the city. As a Bangalorean stuck halfway across the world, I’ve never missed home as much as I did that day.
What’s important to understand about this community feeling was that it flowed both ways. While the fans finally had a team worthy of their support, the players finally had an atmosphere they had dreamed of. At no other Indian club would they be granted the facilities and off-field technical support as they did at BFC, and for no other side would they be granted the personal adulation of the masses. Sunil Chhetri, the BFC captain, and only player to have played in Europe and America, summed it up with his end of season speech.
He stated that God gave a man three wishes. The man wished for money, a successful football club and great fans. At this point, the fans erupted, assuming he was talking about them. After hushing them down, he continued. God granted the man the first two wishes but claimed he could do nothing about the last. The best fans already belonged to Bengaluru FC. Much like the inside jokes of a couple, it’s a corny line that only brings a grimace from an outsider. However, if you are the intended recipient, it’s perfect.
Bengaluru FC have continued to overachieve in the succeeding years. They won the Federation Cup in 2014-15 and only lost the league because of a late goal in their final match against eventual champions Mohun Bagan. The returned strongly in 2015-16 to win the I-League again, and are currently in quarter-finals of the AFC Cup, the Asian equivalent of the Europa League. However, as successful as they have been in the last two years, they will never be able to replicate the magic of 2013-14.
It was the perfect storm of incredible fans, an ambitious ownership, quality staff and passionate players. For a year, Bengaluru FC managed to stretch into the past to recapture what had originally made football great. For one season, there were no expectations, no gripes and no pressure. There was only unexpected joy.
By Tarutr Malhotra. Follow @sixthfebblogRuling political parties don’t take tax from their voters
ISLAMABAD: Contrary to the popular opinion, Pakistan’s taxation system is not anti-poor; it is anti-middle class. The tax is unevenly urban and almost not-rural in nature.
According to the 2011 PIDE’s study authored by Durr-e-Nayab, the expanded middle class comprises 35% of the entire population and it is 54% of the urban population. The study also argues that the middle class is less susceptible to inflationary pressures and thus given persistently low CPI inflation in the last couple of years, the middle class must have grown.
Unlike the simplistic criterion of income, Nayab developed a composite index and considered education, occupation, income, lifestyle and housing as defining features.
The professions of wholesale, retail trade, hotels and restaurants, financing, insurance, real estate and business services, and social and personal services dominate the expanded middle class. They are part of the services sector that contributes 40% to taxes. These are mostly urban phenomena.
The rural economy contributes only 1% to the tax net. Thus, 99% of tax is largely urban, large part of which is borne by the industry and a smaller part by the services sector, though understandably a clear geographic demarcation of industry and services may not be possible.
But if the industry based in Karachi is the single most important contributor to the direct tax, then it confirms my hypothesis that taxes are largely urban phenomenon in Pakistan. There is an obvious caveat here. Since 60% of taxes collected are indirect, one can infer that these may be proportional to population. However, a little consideration clarifies. The consumption of goods, of both consumer and consumer durable types, mostly happens in urban areas where the growing middle class resides. Rural households depend to a large extent on their own production and their labour, which is out of the tax net.
Therefore, the popular argument that equates indirect taxes with regressive taxes and terms them anti-poor is not well-founded. Since indirect taxes are paid on consumption, the urban-based middle class bears the most brunt of indirect tax as well.
All burden on middle class
As both very poor and very rich are practically out of the tax net, almost entire tax net falls on the proverbial middle class. These are the people with regular jobs in urban firms, work in the government, are professional, run organised and formal business, and are prominent in trade bodies.
These are the people who bear the tax brunt disproportionately. Poor are out of direct tax net as they don’t earn enough and rich are either out of will or are under-taxed.
The line between politics and taxation is not so thin. So far, the PPP has remained rural-based which has only 1% contribution to tax. PML-N has traditionally drawn votes from the urban trading class and a host of personality-driven rural constituencies. More recently, it has also drawn votes from the urban low income.
Like PPP, it carefully does not take tax from its voters. These two parties have largely relied on other constituencies – mostly urban, middle classes. The politics of taxation by these two parties is very simple and rather crude: tax non-voting classes.
Representation in parliament
While the rural poor and urban elite are represented in parliament indirectly (patron-client) and directly, it is this urban middle class, which is largely un-represented.
PTI’s legislatures may contain some exceptions, however, their top leadership comes from the same socio-economic milieu.
The choice of projects which have been implemented in the last two years and one major programme which was implemented in the last PPP tenure are also revealing. The PPP’s Benazir Income Support Programme is for rural poor. The PML-N’s Metro Bus Service is for urban low income.
Contrastingly, the privatisation process which can create jobs for urban professionals is on the back burner. Thus, just like politics of taxation, politics of development is also anti-middle class. The state earns from them, but do not spend on them.
The formal and organised business sectors are disgruntled over the three budgets presented under this government.
The latest showdown on 0.6% withholding tax on banking transactions is also very revealing.
PML-N could not afford to make its voters unhappy and had to withdraw it. The most alarming fact is this: the number of tax filers over the last 10 years has actually been halved – we are down to 856,229 in 2014 from 1,143,414 in 2011 and around two million tax filers in 2006.
This is the biggest sign of no confidence of the middle class on an extortionist tax regime propelled by politicians.
The writer is the founder and executive director of PRIME Institute, an independent think tank based in Islamabad
Published in The Express Tribune, July 27th, 2015.
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Read full storyIn an exclusive open letter, six members of Congress ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions to investigate the homicides of seven transgender women of color, all murdered this year.
March 10, 2017
The Honorable Jefferson Sessions
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
Dear Attorney General Sessions:
We write to urge you to investigate the recent murders of multiple African-American transgender women around the United |
. You can spread diseases long before you know you even have them, and someone else may pay the terrible price for your choice.
And in a more general sense, we need as many people vaccinated as possible, to maintain herd immunity and protect those who cannot protect themselves.
Advertisement
Self-explanatory. Yet we need to explain it again and again.
This article, written by my friend Rachael Dunlop, is an excellent resource to debunk long-overused tropes of the anti-vax movement. Keep that link handy.
9) Flu season is starting up. Got vax? I walk the walk every year. http://t.co/qngui4LyFq #VaxTruth #HearThisWell — Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) October 3, 2014
I get accused of talking the talk sometimes, and I think it helps to show I put my money where my mouth is. I’m fully vaccinated, as are my wife and daughter. We do this for ourselves, and to protect those around us, too.
I could make that list a lot longer, but that link and those people on Twitter are an excellent start for finding the truth about vaccines. To wit: Vaccines are effective, their risk is incredibly low, and they are one of the greatest health benefits humans have ever devised.In May 2014, I reported on my efforts to learn what the feds know about me whenever I enter and exit the country. In particular, I wanted my Passenger Name Records (PNR), data created by airlines, hotels, and cruise ships whenever travel is booked.
But instead of providing what I had requested, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) turned over only basic information about my travel going back to 1994. So I appealed—and without explanation, the government recently turned over the actual PNRs I had requested the first time.
The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I've ever used; some of them also contain:
The IP address that I used to buy the ticket
My credit card number (in full)
The language I used
Notes on my phone calls to airlines, even for something as minor as a seat change
The breadth of long-term data retention illustrates yet another way that the federal government enforces its post-September 11 "collect it all" mentality.
Parsing PNRs
Parts of my PNRs, such as travel itineraries, were easy to understand. Others were nearly impossible to parse, so I enlisted the help of Edward Hasbrouck, a travel writer who has extensively researched (and even filed lawsuits over) PNRs. He told me that PNRs like mine are created for domestic flights, too, but that it's only for international travel that data is routinely given to CBP.
I was most surprised to see my credit card details—full card number and expiration date—published unredacted and in the clear. Fortunately, that credit card number has long expired, but I was nonetheless appalled to see it out there. American Airlines, which had created that particular PNR in 2005, did not immediately respond to my request for comment on how or why such detailed personal information would show up here. (In other instances, the majority of the number was X’d out.)
As I looked through the logs, I also saw notes, presumably made by call center staff, recording each time I had tried to make a change by phone. Hasbrouck said that this is typical and that it's one of the downsides of global outsourcing—the people I’m talking to probably have no idea that everything they write down will be kept in American government records for years.
“There’s no sense on the airline call center staff that they may or may not be aware that anything they put in may be in your permanent file with the Department of Homeland Security,” Hasbrouck said. “There’s no training in data minimization. They are empowered to put things in people’s files with the government. I think that’s pretty disturbing.”
Travel sites (such as Travelocity) and airlines (such as American) all recorded the basic information one might expect, like payment and contact details, but only some of them kept detailed records of calls. It turns out that whatever the site chooses to put into its PNR will almost certainly be handed over to CBP and will remain in your file for years.
PNRs can also include personal information about someone's travel, such as whether they request special meals (possibly revealing religion) or if they need special accommodations (possibly revealing a health condition). The fact that PNRs can be so revealing is part of the longstanding hangups between such data sharing between the United States and the European Union.
Just metadata?
Travel sites like Travelocity also pass information to the federal government. In July 2007, I booked a flight on Travelocity on American Airlines from Oakland to Dallas Fort Worth to London Gatwick and back. The site recorded a huge amount of information on me: name, address, phone, e-mail address, credit card number (again, in the clear), what seats I asked for, the language I used on the site, whether I was traveling with anyone else (I wasn’t), whether any traveling companions were adults or children, and whether I preferred to be contacted by e-mail.
Hasbrouck pointed out that the more information the airlines choose to retain, the more of an opportunity the government has to build a profile on me. “They have seat assignments [and] could probably search who is seated next to you for social network analysis,” he said. “You have no way of knowing when you’re using this website which information they are storing.”
“This is not to catch people under suspicion; this is for the purpose of finding new suspects,” Hasbrouck added.
I asked Travelocity about its practices and received a statement from Keith Nowak, a company spokesman.
"As the ticketing agents to the airlines, travel agencies like Travelocity routinely provide ticketing and other relevant passenger data to the airlines to help facilitate passenger flight requests," he said, declining to answer further specific questions. "Once this data has been transferred, the airlines use the data for appropriate operational purposes, and the airlines determine how and when the data may be shared with other parties. As a partner in this process, Travelocity consistently complies with all relevant data privacy and data security requirements."
He declined to respond to how or why my credit card number was transmitted in the clear.
Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, said that my story raises a lot of questions about what the government is doing.
“Why isn’t the government complying with even the most basic cybersecurity standards?” Cate said. “Storing and transmitting credit card numbers without encryption has been found by the Federal Trade Commission to be so obviously dangerous as to be ‘unfair’ to the public. Why do transportation security officials not comply with even these most basic standards?”
The goal of PNR collection, according to CBP, is "to enable CBP to make accurate, comprehensive decisions about which passengers require additional inspection at the port of entry based on law enforcement and other information."
This information is retained for quite some time in government databases. CBP publicly states that PNR data is typically kept for five years before being moved to “dormant, non-operational status.” But in my case, my earliest PNR goes back to March 2005. A CBP spokesperson was unable to explain this discrepancy.
“No wonder the government can’t find needles in the haystack—it keeps storing irrelevant hay," Cate told me. "Even if the data were fresh and properly secured, how is collecting all of this aiding in the fight against terrorism? This is a really important issue because it exposes a basic and common fallacy in the government’s thinking: that more data equates with better security. But that wasn’t true on 9/11, and it still isn’t true today. This suggests that US transportation security officials are inefficient, incompetent, on using the data for other, undisclosed purposes. None of those are very encouraging options."
"No wonder they didn’t want you to know what they had about you,” he added.
Giving up
What does this all mean in terms of how I book international travel? Frankly, not much, since I have no real choices. Like everyone else, I'm at the mercy of the websites that I entrust with my data.
Sure, I could (and do) routinely obscure my IP address with a VPN, but that doesn't do a whole lot when authorities already have more personal information about me. My VPN may help thwart an IP logging and searching algorithm—but Hasbrouck wondered if it might actually make me stand out more.
I could also employ a Julian Assange-like tactic, only buying last-minute tickets at an airport and in person. But that’s a lot harder when traveling with others, and it's almost always significantly more expensive. Traveling is difficult enough already without adding more stress to the equation.
Seeing these travel records captured and stored for years on end reminded me of the other all-encompassing, blanket surveillance tools that I’ve been reporting on over the last few years, including license plate readers, fake cell towers (stingrays), and telecom metadata.
We now live in a world where it’s increasingly difficult to prevent the authorities from capturing information on one’s movements or communications. Is it "just metadata"? Yes, much of the time. But despite what the government wants you to believe, metadata can be exceptionally revealing.Taming state in Android with Elm Architecture and Kotlin, Part 3
Sergey Grekov Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 30, 2017
In the Part 1 I introduced the basics of Elm Architecture and in Part 2 I spoke about its benefits and implementation in Android. In this Part I want to concentrate on more advanced issues — Subscriptions, composing Elm Architecture with Clean Architecture, and Time Travel for dessert!
In order to demonstrate all real world use cases and edge cases of using TEA in Android, I developed a sample open source application, which is reimplementation of translate app Yandex.Translate. All code samples and UI demos are borrowed from there. The source code is located here
Subscriptions
In the previous parts I described main functions of Elm Architecture lifecycle — Update, Render, Call. But I didn’t mention another fundamental function — Sub, short for Subscriptions. Subscription is like an Observable in RxJava but built in the heart of The Elm Architecture. So, this is how it looks like and how does it work in Elm?
type Msg
= Tick Time
subscriptions : Model -> Sub Msg
subscriptions model =
Time.every second Tick
This code example returns subscription which is emitting Msg Tick every second. Every time application’s Model changes, Elm calls your implementation of function subscriptions with new Model (State in our terms) and receives new Sub. How to implement such behaviour in Kotlin? Turns out it’s not that difficult, thanks again to RxJava. First, we need a base class for Subscription instance
getObservable function receives params as an input and decides, whether it’s changed or not, and returns a Pair which contains an observable itself and flag of whether it’s recreated or not.
Now, we need to add it to the Program. And also we are adding now sub() method to our client interface Component
Every time our State changes, we check our subscription, if it’s recreated, and if they are, we dispose old subscription, and subscribe to a new one.
Let’s take a look at a real world case, where subscriptions are very handy. In sample app I have a screen with list of favorite translated words, which are stored in SQLite. And it is also it’s possible to filter them by first letters.
You can look at full working source code here
When user opens the screen for the first time, presenter subscribes to the database table with all favorite words, cause we have empty filter. Every time user enters a letter into filter EditText, State of screen changes, and we resubscribe to filtered words.
Many common scenarios can be incorporated into Elm dataflow very easily with subscription pattern, like locations changes, background/foreground app state, connectivity state, preferences changes and so on and so on..
Elm was initially designed as a runtime with Functional Reactive Programming model. Subscription is a simplified version of concept called Signal’s, the main building block for implementing concurrent FRP, which was lately dropped in favor of Subscription. If you are interested in FRP, I highly recommend to read master thesis about Concurrent FRP by Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm. It provides insightful look at the history of Reactive systems and frameworks, and shows motivation for creating Elm.
Clean Architecture
Recently Clean Architecture gained a lot of traction in Android community. I won’t go deep into it, as there are lot of great articles which doing great job explaining it.
If you are not familiar with Clean Architecture or it’s implementations in Android, I highly recommend Fernando Cejas’s great articles or Five’s blog post series
In Clean Architecture, Elm pattern sits in Presentation layer. Presenter takes the responsibility of interacting with View interface, implementing Component interface for processing Elm dataflow, converting user actions to Msg, keeping reusable functions, etc.
The original image is courtesy of Fernando Cejas
Presenter in conjunction with Elm pattern provides presentation logic of your app.
Besides presentation logic, your app has Business logic, which sits in the domain layer and implemented by Use Cases. If we treat UI as a sequence of pure functions, then Use Cases are definitely representing side-effects, cause Use Case usually get data from some external data sources and works in another, non-main thread. That means, that we must work with Use Cases only in call() function, which is intended to process side effects.
You can look at a full source code here
To summarize, Elm pattern fits very well into the Clean Architecture and gets great amount of Presenter’s responsibilities. Function update() contains Presentation(UI) Logic and function call() contains Business Logic.
Time Travel
Thanks to Elm’s state-machine like processing of UI events, implementing time travel becomes a pretty easy task. It can be broken down to 2 parts: recording state changes and travelling to concrete state itself. We will need one class, which will store event records and relay, through which we will emit travel commands, and provide it to every Program instances(in other words, to every screen of the app).
We will store each new event on every screen, associated with new state and a screen object. The recording operation will follow right after update() function in our Program. The adventureMode flag is necessary for signaling Program that we are currently in time travel process, and hence, do not process incoming new Msg from UI.
Now, if we need our Component to react to travel commands, Program class needs to subscribe TimeTraveller’s relay, and for every emitted record call Component.
The whole travel process will be as follows —
Set TimeTravel adventure mode to true. Send to TimeTravel’s relay start event and reset current state of the whole app to initial(in our case it’s MainActivity class). Then iterate through saved TimeRecords, and send them to TimeTravel’s relay. Implement travel() methods in our concrete components.
And that’s it, we have working TimeTravel debugger!LONDON (Reuters) - The British government said on Wednesday it would not publish in full its report on the sources of funding of Islamist extremism in Britain, prompting opposition charges that it was trying to protect its ally Saudi Arabia.
The report, commissioned in November 2015 by then-Prime Minister David Cameron, was handed to the government last year and ministers have been under pressure to release its findings following three deadly attacks in Britain since March which have been blamed on Islamist militants.
Home Secretary (interior minister) Amber Rudd said that though some extremist Islamist organizations were receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds, she had decided against publishing the review in full.
“This is because of the volume of personal information it contains and for national security reasons,” she said in a written statement to parliament.
The review found the most common source of support for these organizations was from small, anonymous donations from people based in Britain, according to Rudd.
But it also found overseas funding was a significant source of income for a small number of organizations.
“Overseas support has allowed individuals to study at institutions that teach deeply conservative forms of Islam and provide highly socially conservative literature and preachers to the UK’s Islamic institutions,” Rudd’s statement said. “Some of these individuals have since become of extremist concern.”
Critics were quick to see a cover-up to shield Saudi Arabia, a powerful Gulf ally of Britain and the world’s biggest oil exporter. The Home Office later released a statement denying this.
“Contrary to suggestions by some media outlets, diplomatic relations played absolutely no part in the decision not to publish the full report,” the statement said.
Lawmaker Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party who had been pressing the government to release the report, said Rudd’s statement was unacceptable.
“The statement gives absolutely no clue as to which countries foreign funding for extremism originates from - leaving the government open to further allegations of refusing to expose the role of Saudi Arabian money in terrorism in the UK,” she said.
That view was echoed by the Liberal Democrats and the main opposition Labour party.
“There is a strong suspicion this report is being suppressed to protect this government’s trade and diplomatic priorities, including in relation to Saudi Arabia,” said Labour’s home affairs spokeswoman, Diane Abbott.
Britain’s Henry Jackson Society (HJS) think tank last week released a report which said foreign funding for Islamist extremism in Britain primarily came from governments and government-linked foundations in the Gulf, as well as Iran.
FILE PHOTO: Britain's Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, arrives in Downing Street for a cabinet meeting, in central London, Britain June 20, 2017. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh
“Foremost among these has been Saudi Arabia, which since the 1960s has sponsored a multimillion dollar effort to export Wahhabi Islam across the Islamic world, including to Muslim communities in the West,” the report said.
The Saudi government has demanded the HJS provide evidence for its claims, saying it was committed to fighting terrorism and violent extremism at home and across the world.
“If there is a list of names of Saudi individuals or organizations with proven links to UK terrorism, the think tank should present them and Saudi Arabia will deal with them,” Saudi Information Minister Awwad Alawwad said in a statement.The bootstrap will install the pip implementation, setuptools by downloading their installation files from PyPI.
This proposal affects two components of packaging: the pip bootstrap and, thanks to easier package installation, modifications to publishing packages.
The core of this proposal is that the user experience of using pip should not require the user to install pip.
The Python installation includes an executable called "pip3" (see PEP 394 for naming rationale etc.) that attempts to import pip machinery. If it can then the pip command proceeds as normal. If it cannot it will bootstrap pip by downloading the pip implementation and setuptools wheel files. Hereafter the installation of the "pip implementation" will imply installation of setuptools and virtualenv. Once installed, the pip command proceeds as normal. Once the bootstrap process is complete the "pip3" command is no longer the bootstrap but rather the full pip command.
A boostrap is used in the place of a the full pip code so that we don't have to bundle pip and also pip is upgradeable outside of the regular Python upgrade timeframe and processes.
To avoid issues with sudo we will have the bootstrap default to installing the pip implementation to the per-user site-packages directory defined in PEP 370 and implemented in Python 2.6/3.0. Since we avoid installing to the system Python we also avoid conflicting with any other packaging system (on Linux systems, for example.) If the user is inside a virtual environment then the pip implementation will be installed into that virtual environment.
The bootstrap process will proceed as follows:
The user system has Python (3.4+) installed. In the "scripts" directory of the Python installation there is the bootstrap script called "pip3". The user will invoke a pip command, typically "pip3 install <package>", for example "pip3 install Django". The boostrap script will attempt to import the pip implementation. If this succeeds, the pip command is processed normally. Stop. On failing to import the pip implementation the bootstrap notifies the user that it needs to "install pip". It will ask the user whether it should install pip as a system-wide site-packages or as a user-only package. This choice will also be present as a command-line option to pip so non-interactive use is possible. The bootstrap will and contact PyPI to obtain the latest download wheel file (see PEP 427.) Upon downloading the file it is installed using "python setup.py install". The pip tool may now import the pip implementation and continues to process the requested user command normally.
Users may be running in an environment which cannot access the public Internet and are relying solely on a local package repository. They would use the "-i" (Base URL of Python Package Index) argument to the "pip3 install" command. This simply overrides the default index URL pointing to PyPI.
Some users may have no Internet access suitable for fetching the pip implementation file. These users can manually download and install the setuptools and pip tar files. Adding specific support for this use-case is unnecessary.
The download of the pip implementation install file will be performed securely. The transport from pypi.python.org will be done over HTTPS with the CA certificate check performed. This facility will be present in Python 3.4+ using Operating System certificates (see PEP XXXX).
Beyond those arguments controlling index location and download options, the "pip3" boostrap command may support further standard pip options for verbosity, quietness and logging.
The "pip3" command will support two new command-line options that are used in the boostrapping, and otherwise ignored. They control where the pip implementation is installed:
--bootstrap Install to the user's packages directory. The name of this option is chosen to promote it as the preferred installation option. --bootstrap-to-system Install to the system site-packages directory.
These command-line options will also need to be implemented, but otherwise ignored, in the pip implementation.
Consideration should be given to defaulting pip to install packages to the user's packages directory if pip is installed in that location.
The "--no-install" option to the "pip3" command will not affect the bootstrapping process.We Tried the New Reese's Doughnut From Dunkin' Donuts So You Definitely Don't Have To
When we heard the news that Dunkin' Donuts combined two of our favorite treats in a magical hybrid Reese's Peanut Butter doughnut, we did what any respectable doughnut-lover would do and rushed to the nearest DD. After tasting its new pumpkin treats for Fall last week, our expectations were high, but there were a lot of mixed reviews from the POPSUGAR co-workers.
Dunkin' Donuts announced the release of its new doughnut, describing the new treat as "a creative twist" on a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup that's filled with a "buttercreme." The Dunkin' Donuts Reese's Peanut Butter Square is only available for a limited time, but you have to hear what the POPSUGAR team had to say about it before running to Dunkin'.
Here's what some of our team members had to say about the new doughnut:
"I'd really rather just have a regular Reese's, the texture is off!"
"I would've preferred if it was glazed with a blend of chocolate and peanut butter icing with no filling. This is too sweet."
"I personally like the filling better than the actual doughnut."
"Peanut butter filling is slightly overwhelming!"
"I'm indifferent. I'd rather have pumpkin spice sweets. I wish it was real peanut butter."
"Not a fan of so much peanut butter."
"It's definitely reminiscent of a Reese's."
Although the Reese's special from Dunkin' Donuts wasn't the biggest hit, we'll always have our pumpkin spice favorites.
ADVERTISEMENTThe Android Architecture components were recently announced at Google I/O 2017. There are a few different components that are a part of these libraries. These components can be used in isolation but work really well when used together. In the previous blog post, we looked at using Room and LiveData. Make sure you read that post before this one, as this is a continuation.
If you can recall from the previous post, the diagram below was given as an indication of how we will be structuring our “Date Countdown” app.
In this post, we will create the EventListViewModel and AddEventViewModel shown in the diagram above. You can find all the source code for this post here. Before we dive into creating the ViewModels, we should first take a look at what a ViewModel is.
What is a ViewModel?
A ViewModel is not a new concept, nor is it neccesarily an Android concept. The name ViewModel came from the MVVM pattern designed by Microsoft in around 2005. With the new Architecture Components, one of the new classes is the ViewModel class.
ViewModels are responsible for preparing data for the View. They expose data to any view that is listening for changes. The ViewModel class in Android has some specific facts you should keep in mind when using it:
A ViewModel can retain its state across Activity configuration changes. The data it holds is immediately available to the next Activity instance without needing to save data in onSaveInstanceState() and restore it manually.
A ViewModel outlives the specific Activity or Fragment instances.
A ViewModel allows easy sharing of data across Fragments (meaning you no longer need to coordinate actions via an activity).
A ViewModel will stay in memory until the Lifecycle it’s scoped to goes away permanently – in the case of an Activity, once it finishes; in the case of a Fragment, once it’s detached.
ViewModel outlives the Activity or Fragment instances, it shouldn’t reference any Views directly inside of it or hold reference to a context. This can cause memory leaks Since aoutlives the Activity or Fragment instances, it shouldn’t reference any Views directly inside of it or hold reference to a context. This can cause
If the ViewModel needs an Application context (e.g. to find a system service), it can extend the AndroidViewModel class and have a constructor that receives the Application in the constructor.
Creating ViewModels for the Date Countdown App
EventListViewModel
The EventListViewModel class will be used for the list of events that we view when the date countdown app is opened up for the very first time.
Create a class called EventListViewModel. Make sure it extends ViewModel from the Architecture components class. In this class, we are going to migrate the code that was previously placed in the EventListFragment into the ViewModel. Add the LiveData variable to the EventListViewModel. The EventRepository variable will be injected using Dagger. The EventListViewModel class should look like this now: public class EventListViewModel extends ViewModel implements CountdownComponent.Injectable { private LiveData<List<Event>> events = new MutableLiveData<>(); @Inject EventRepository eventRepository; @Override public void inject(CountdownComponent countdownComponent) { countdownComponent.inject(this); events = eventRepository.getEvents(); } public LiveData<List<Event>> getEvents() { return events; } } Now in the EventListFragment, we will want to replace the event loading code we wrote in the previous post by rather getting the list of events through the ViewModel. public class EventListFragment extends Fragment { private EventListViewModel eventListViewModel; @Nullable @Override public View onCreateView(LayoutInflater inflater, @Nullable ViewGroup container, @Nullable Bundle savedInstanceState) { //.. inflate view etc eventListViewModel = ViewModelProviders.of(this, new CountdownFactory(countdownApplication).get(EventListViewModel.class); eventListViewModel.getEvents().observe(this, events -> { adapter.setItems(events); }); return v; } } The line that contains the ViewModelProvider.of(..) will either create a new EventListViewModel class if one doesn’t exist, or it will fetch the one that exists for the scope that is defined (in this case it is the EventListFragment ). This is where the magic happens. When the device is rotated and the fragment gets recreated, the ViewModel that will be returned here will be the one that was previously used. This allows us to retain the state of the screen without having to manually save information to the Bundle and restore it ourselves. The Event data is now obtained from the EventListViewModel. As mentioned previously, by passing this as the first parameter, the LiveData observable will be managed automatically for you. This means the fragment will take care of disposing the observables when the fragment is no longer used. The observable callback won’t be called if the fragment is not started or resumed. Create a Dagger CountdownComponent, we will use this to inject the dependencies into the ViewModel. @Singleton @Component(modules = {CountdownModule.class}) public interface CountdownComponent { void inject(EventListViewModel eventListViewModel); void inject(AddEventViewModel addEventViewModel); interface Injectable { void inject(CountdownComponent countdownComponent); } } Create a custom ViewModelProvider.NewInstanceFactory that will be used to instantiate the ViewModel. When the ViewModelProvider needs to create a new instance of a ViewModel it will use the create method defined in the factory below. public class CountdownFactory extends ViewModelProvider.NewInstanceFactory { private CountdownApplication application; public CountdownFactory(CountdownApplication application) { this.application = application; } @Override public <T extends ViewModel> T create(Class<T> modelClass) { T t = super.create(modelClass); if (t instanceof CountdownComponent.Injectable) { ((CountdownComponent.Injectable) t).inject(application.getCountDownComponent()); } return t; } } To delete an Event, we can add a method to the ViewModel. This will delegate to the EventRepository to delete the event. In this example, we are using RxJava to delegate to a background thread. public class EventListViewModel extends ViewModel implements CountdownComponent.Injectable { //.. public void deleteEvent(Event event) { eventRepository.deleteEvent(event).subscribeOn(Schedulers.io()).observeOn(AndroidSchedulers.mainThread()).subscribe(new CompletableObserver() { @Override public void onSubscribe(Disposable d) { } @Override public void onComplete() { Timber.d("onComplete - deleted event"); } @Override public void onError(Throwable e) { Timber.e("OnError - deleted event: ", e); } }); } }
We will now use this delete method in the Fragment where we delegate to the ViewModel:
View.OnClickListener deleteClickListener = v -> { Event event = (Event) v.getTag(); eventListViewModel.deleteEvent(event); };
For the AddEventViewModel implementation, take a look at the full source code example here. We now have a DateCountdown app that loads events from the database using Room and the ability to add new events. We’ve used ViewModels to ensure that the data is retained on rotation and to separate our code out from our fragment.
In Summary
The new Android Architecture Components address common scenarios that we haven’t been able to handle easily before. Handling screen rotation is now really easy by using a ViewModel and the ViewModelProvider.
Be sure to checkout the full code sample available here to see everything in action and the relevant unit tests. Let me know what your thoughts are on twitter @riggaroo.
References
Thanks to Erik Hellman and Yigit Boyar for proof-reading this post.Personal essays are very popular on the internet right now. Like others who use the internet, I occasionally have strong-ish, activist-y, or emotional opinions about what this could mean, and whether or not it is bad. For the sake of this multi-part guide, I’ve tried to compartmentalize these feelings to the best of my ability in hopes of producing a practical and utilitarian primer for those who think they may want to go online in 2015 and publish writing about their life. Much exists already on the craft of writing itself, the theory of the essay, the benefits of talk therapy, the pitfalls of the so-called content industry, and other arguably adjacent topics. I’ve yet to come across a guide to personal writing that focuses on the internet as a platform specifically, so I am leveraging the newsiness of the topic plus six-ish years of writing about my life online in order to write the one I wish existed.
This guide comes at you in the form of questions. None of these questions have right or wrong answers, and ultimately I do not have any stake in whether or not you or anyone else eventually publishes a personal essay online. This guide is essentially a refined version of the questions I ask myself before sitting down to write a first-person piece of nonfiction writing for publication on the web. The thoughts contained herein are necessarily informed by the highly specific condition of existing online and in the world as me. Existing as you is different, so I can’t really promise anything more than a set of concerns that my own experience has proven worth highlighting. Both feelings and the internet share an unpredictable volatility, so your own results will almost certainly vary.
1. Do you read personal essays?
This seems like a ludicrous question to ask of someone who is considering writing a personal essay, but for some reason there exists a misconception that writing is an alchemical essence that flows forth without explanation from a yet-identified gland. But good writing does not just happen. Certainly, some people are inclined towards language in the way that others are inclined towards music or athletics, but even the best, most original writer spends some time getting familiar with what other similar writing might already exist. If you are thinking about publishing a personal essay online, you will likely find it beneficial to your success to spend some time reading other personal essays that have already been published (especially essays on topics that are similar to yours). Knowledge of the genre, its landscape, and its shortcomings can help you to understand what you do and do not like, and what may or may not work well for you.
2. Why do you want to publish a personal essay online?
A second misconception that persists is the idea that that published writing is somehow the most noble way to tell your story. Often, movies and television and even books themselves treat “publishing a piece of writing” as the triumphant reward for a writerly-ish protagonist who has overcome some personal difficulty. This narrative is a highly romanticized value judgement that is not based in reality. In most cases, even for professional writers, a published piece of personal writing is not the ideal way to contend with a difficult or meaningful life experience. This is doubly the case if your story is not extravagantly unique, or if you are not accustomed to writing for a public audience.
Before you sit down to write your personal essay for eventual publication online, it is useful to interrogate your motives. There are lots of reasons people publish stories about their own lives on the internet for others to read: in pursuit of glory, for attention, to vent, to share joy, in hopes helping others, in hopes of helping them self, out of spite, out of financial necessity, out of political angst, to prove they can do it, to one-up an enemy, or in order to exact revenge. These reasons and others are entirely valid, but in the vast majority of cases, a published essay is not the most efficient or effective means of accomplishing them. Which introduces the question:
3. Are you sure you need to write a personal essay at all?
Consider the following situation:
You’ve broken your leg. You call your mother crying, and she tells you to go to the hospital. At the hospital, you fill out forms before seeing a doctor. Later that week in therapy, you express frustration that you will need to wear a cast to your friend’s wedding. Fifty years later, at the couple’s anniversary party, you browse old photos of the wedding and laugh together about how stupid the cast looked with your outfit.
The above situation tells several versions of the same story, each accomplishing something different. The phone call to your mother serves as an immediate emotional response to the situation, or rather, a literal cry for help. The hospital forms tell the story of the leg-breaking in the sparsest terms possible, with many facts and zero analysis or emotion. At therapy, you analyze the experience and your various frustrations in a self-gratifying way in hopes of coming to terms with the situation. The eventual retelling at the anniversary party is highly romanticized, glossing over the initial pain of the experience for the purpose of generating some bonding nostalgia between friends.
Just like each account of this incident accomplishes something different, so would a retelling in the form of a personal essay.
Allow me a technical moment:
A personal essay has two ingredients: 1) personal, and 2) essay. These two ingredients aren’t always easy to combine. An essay is a systematic discourse, meaning it moves its readers through an idea or set of ideas in a methodical, deliberate, and understandable way. Many types of writing hinge on developing an argument, where the writer is expected to arrive at or defend a definitive opinion. The word essay comes from the French verb essayer, meaning “to attempt.” Essays differ from many other types of writing in that they don’t always need to progress an argument in order to be good. In my view, this is one of the best things about the genre, because it exists as a tool for talking in and around disparate-yet-related ideas that might never add up to something as fully-reconciled as an opinion, a stance, or a grand unified theory of anything.
In this sense, the essay is a good match for many personal experiences, because often in life our personal experiences don’t end in a way that is fully finished or easy-to-understand. That said, a good essay is hard to execute, especially when it focuses on something of intense personal value.
Anything you write must contend with the fact that readers read selfishly. You are a reader right now, and there is no doubt you are reading selfishly too — looking for ways that the information from this guide can be of relevance to your own life and interests. This is not to say that all personal essays should be relatable, but rather that care should be taken to make sure that the personal information is presented in a way that offers sufficient value to a reader. Think of the broken leg stories from before. The crying phone call makes sense as a phone call, but but would likely feel too irrational masquerading as an essay. Similarly, the hospital forms would read as too dry to hold anyone’s interest. The therapy session is too self-serving for an outside reader to feel any investment of their own, and the nostalgic story is too specific to be enjoyed by anyone who wasn’t there when it happened.
Aldous Huxley called the essay a three-poled tent, suggesting that a great essay includes: 1) something personal to the writer, 2) something factual or objective, and 3) something analytical or universal. Unless your story is wildly exceptional (most stories aren’t) or your voice is wildly unique (most voices aren’t), your experience probably won’t thrive as a personal essay without two or more of these poles in place. To consider the broken leg example again, an essay about how you broke your leg and cried is probably boring. An essay about breaking your leg and waiting for ten hours in the failed American emergency room system offers a more factual, newsy approach. An essay about feeling powerless and frustrated in the face of bureaucracy could ground that factual, newsy approach in a more universal idea, making for an essay that has all three tent poles in place. Not every essay needs to appeal to every reader, but an essay with all three poles will probably |
wargame called BattleDroids, first published in 1984. It quickly made the leap to digital with BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception, a turn-based third-person game published by Infocom in 1988. Bullock, who was only 13-years old at the time, remembers playing it on his family’s 8086 PC in CGA, a four-color format that was top-of-the-line for its day.
It wouldn’t be until Activision’s MechWarrior, published the following year, that Bullock and other BattleTech fans could actually pilot their own ‘Mech from inside the cockpit.
“I’m 42,” Bullock said, “which means that MechWarrior was really perfectly in my wheelhouse. The original MechWarrior actually had EGA graphics, which was 16 colors. So I remember having to get a new monitor to play it.”
Bullock says that much of his team’s inspiration for MechWarrior 5 was drawn from these early games, as well as their experience as the developer and publisher of MechWarrior Online. Before development on MechWarrior 5 even began, the team had already recreated some 700 individual ‘Mechs for Online, all pulled from BattleTech’s well-established body of lore.
Building on that work, MechWarrior 5 will add an open-ended and expansive universe for players to explore. The game begins in the year 3015 when, according to BattleTech lore, nearly the entire human race is embroiled in the Third Succession War — a galaxy-wide conflict fought across hundreds of worlds. Players will take the role of an upstart band of mercenaries and have their pick of hotspots all around the Inner Sphere in which to begin their journey.
Over the course of a 34-year career, players will grow their scrappy company from a single pilot with a single beat-up ‘Mech to a full lance of seasoned MechWarriors riding into battle atop state-of-the-art fighting robots. In order to join the ranks of the elite mercenary units, players will have to manage their finances as well as a staff of technicians to service and repair their ‘Mechs between battles. Some of those techs will be regular grunts, while others will have more specialized skills like the ability to boost a ‘Mech’s speed or improve the cyclic rate of certain weapons.
But nothing in the world of BattleTech comes for free.
Signing on with one of the five Great Houses, or the smaller factions aligned against them, will earn players money. But, every mission takes time — time to travel through deep space, time to stage at the rendezvous point and time scouting the area in advance of a mission. In MechWarrior 5, the clock is always ticking.
“Time is a resource that you spend,” said designer Dave Forsey. “If you’re not earning money, you’re losing money.
The game ends in 3049 when, again according to BattleTech lore, the powerful human faction known as the Clans arrive in the Inner Sphere. Piranha isn’t ready to say if players will get the chance to fight against them, but suffice it to say that if you’re not one of the most powerful mercenary companies in the galaxy by the time the clock runs out, you won’t even get the chance to find out.
An entire career, Bullock said, will take players 40-plus hours of gameplay from start to finish. Replayability is key: Once players complete it, they can fire it up again and start a new career in a completely different corner of the galaxy.
Know when to walk away
The BattleTech tabletop game has been around for more than 30 years. In that time, the rules have expanded and contracted but, by and large, the experience published by Catalyst Game Labs today is the same as the one published by FASA Corporation in 1984.
The same cannot be said of the video games set in the BattleTech universe.
Each one is a different experience than the last, owing as much to changes in computer technology as to developer style and design goals. But, each one has contributed something different to how fans experience that fictional world. Bullock says that, for its part, MechWarrior Online has dramatically changed how players fight with BattleMechs.
For five long years, core dedicated players have been wailing away on each other in endless, vicious skirmishes. That community helped to create the MechWarrior Online World Championships, where last year players fought it out for a final prize pool of more than $143,000. Bullock says that the community has taught the team at Piranha a lot, and the team is pouring that knowledge into the new single-player campaign.
“I think MechWarrior Online is really responsible for creating a lot of brand new tactics in the MechWarrior universe, especially when it comes to how players play a PvP game,” Bullock said. Take the technique of “armor tanking.” Once almost a stunt, now many players regularly build their ‘Mechs so that one entire side acts like a shield to protect the delicate, powerful weapons on the other side.
But, since MechWarrior Online is a competitive game, Bullock says that Piranha has always had to be careful to keep the experience balanced between players. With Mechwarrior 5, the gloves are off. The new single-player game features an active economy, which will simulate things like scarcity, innovation and invention all in accordance with the official BattleTech lore. It will be possible for players to stumble upon a windfall of powerful technology, and just as possible for them to be starved for both money and for ‘Mechs in the early game. Every player’s experience will be different.
Grid View A Shadowhawk-class BattleMech. Piranha Games
A view from the floor of the Leopard-class DropShip. Piranha Games
In MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries players will have access to their own Leopard-class DropShip. It will be your base of operations, fully capable of ferrying four full-size ‘Mechs into battle. Piranha Games
Piranha Games
More importantly, players who choose to fight in the southern part of the Inner Sphere will have a much different set of ‘Mechs and armaments to choose from than those who fight in the north, and everything will change as the in-game years roll on.
The core gameplay loop that I played is much like that of a BattleTech simulator. Piranha has plans to support keyboard and mouse, of course, but also flight sticks and throttles and even Track IR. The team even said that it hasn’t ruled out virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive. But, said Forsey, regardless of how you play the game, skill and tactics will always make the difference. And, while enemy ‘Mechs may have more skilled pilots in the cockpit, they will never have an artificial “level” that makes them behave like a massive pile of hit points.
Players will “level up” as they do in a roguelike; by getting better at the skills needed to pilot their ‘Mechs, and by obtaining certain weapons and equipment that will give them advantages. Thanks to those advantages, players will be able to take on more challenging assignments and raise their standing among competing mercenary outfits.
Rolling the dice
Running a business is all about staying profitable. In MechWarrior 5, that means knowing when to press your advantage and when to take your ball and go home.
“That’s going to be a choice that you’re going to be making in your head at all times,” said Forsey. “You could take what you think is an easy contract, and when you come into the mission say, ‘The intelligence reports were wrong. There is a big fucking Atlas there in the distance. I can’t do this. I’m not going to take this on.’
“Missions won’t come with a prepared set of solutions. There will be situations where you can accomplish your objectives and get paid, and there will be times when you can’t.”
But cash-on-completion isn’t the only way that mercenaries are compensated in the world of BattleTech. Forsey said that in MechWarrior 5, players will be able to negotiate their contracts to include up-front payments as well as salvage rights to carry off disabled ‘Mechs from the battlefield.
For MechWarrior 5 to have the kind of replayability that Piranha wanted, the team had to create a diverse selection of missions. Forsey and his team settled on a blended approach that uses procedural generation alongside hand-designed missions and set piece encounters. Overseeing it all will be an intelligent “game director,” as Forsey called it, that will control pacing by making missions more or less challenging in real time.
It all begins when the player selects from one of the many star systems in the Inner Sphere where missions are available. Each one is drawn from established BattleTech lore, with canonical biomes all plotted out ahead of time. Every given planet will have an authentic mix of say arctic, heavily forested and desert land masses. Then, a tiered set of linked missions are created for each warring faction, again drawn from the established BattleTech lore. When players select an available mission set, they’ll receive an intelligence report along with details on the mercenary contract and options to renegotiate the terms.
After players accept a mission, MechWarrior 5 goes to work creating the map and placing the mission objectives. While players are walking around the hangar of their DropShip, arming their ‘Mechs and selecting their crews, Piranha’s intelligent system is building terrain based on a specific biome and then placing hand-made objectives — complete with enemies like infantry, tanks, VTOL flyers and other ‘Mechs — within those confines.
Grid View Piranha Games’ designer Dave Forsey breaks down what goes on behind the scenes to create every map in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
Piranha Games
In motion, the system is impressively diverse.
In a demo, Piranha showed off a harsh Martian environment with long sightlines and deep, rocky canyons. There was a lush, forested biome where each tree could be knocked over simply by walking through it. There was even a snowy map with jagged, black rocks poking out through the drifts. My favorite by far was an environment designed to look like the surface of our Moon, complete with harsh, directional lighting that cast the entire map in shades of gray.
Forsey said the game will also include missions set at all times of the day and in multiple weather conditions, including rain and snow. Different optical filters will be available for players in situations like these, including night vision and even thermal solutions.
A mission’s difficulty will influence the level of resistance players run up against, as well as the size of the map and the challenges they’ll face along the way. MechWarrior 5 won’t have traditional difficulty settings at the outset. It will be up to players to take on the missions that they feel comfortable with.
Forsey compared the system to those of games like NetHack and Rogue.
“Every time you roll the dice and you go into Rogue, you go as far as you can and depending on what’s happening you win or you lose,” Forsey said. “You can think of every mission in MechWarrior 5 as a run of Darkest Dungeon or Dwarf Fortress or Rogue: Legacy. I go in there, I do the mission and when I come back out I’ve got some more stuff than when I went in. I’ve won or I’ve lost, and now I go in and I’m making another roll.
“But here you’ve got a bit of control over the difficulty, or of what kind of challenges you’re ready to take on. There will be a selection of levels of difficulty for each star system, and there will always be something in the background that you can do as a low-risk mission.”
One step at a time
As good as MechWarrior 5 feels right now, while playing it was clear to me that the game isn’t anywhere near done yet.
The demo that I played a few weeks ago didn’t look quite as good as the video included in this feature. The level and the objectives are largely the same, but the team at Piranha has made a lot of progress in just a few weeks.
When fans get their own hands on this playable demo at MechCon, Piranha tells me that even more will be on display. Multiple mission types on multiple maps, including Mars-like deserts and airless Moonscapes. The game’s AI will get tweaked up until the moment it hits the show floor. The game’s smaller enemies, like tanks and VTOL flyers, are still behaving erratically. You can see remnants of that behavior in the clip above, where one rotor-wing chopper is literally flying into the ground while upside down. But the team tells me that it’s par for the course.
The fact is that Piranha has a lot of time left to tweak and polish the final product. And, from what I’ve played, the end result should be well worth it for BattleTech fans who have waited 15 years for a game like it. The team tells me that it has even more surprises up their sleeve for fans at next week’s MechCon in Vancouver.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is scheduled for a full release in late 2018.A Blaine man pleaded guilty Thursday to ejaculating into a co-worker’s coffee.
John R. Lind, 34, pleaded guilty in Ramsey County District Court to indecent exposure, defined as engaging in lewd or indecent behavior.
He is scheduled to be sentenced for the misdemeanor on May 22.
“I’m glad he’s getting something, because I believe he deserves some punishment,” said Pat Maahs, the co-worker in the case.
“So far, my sentence is greater than his.”
Lind’s attorney, Mark Kelly, declined to say what type of sentence he would pursue for his client. The plea did not include an agreed-upon sentence.
“From the outset of the investigation, he’s cooperated with authorities, provided them with admissions of his conduct,” Kelly said.
Lind was originally charged by the county attorney’s office with two counts of gross misdemeanor fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Those charges were dismissed by Ramsey County District Judge Patrick Diamond because the law does not define contact with semen as sexual contact.
The county attorney’s charges against Lind alleged that, to get Maahs to notice him, he masturbated over her coffee and at her desk multiple times when she wasn’t present.
Maahs told police that she first thought that her foul-smelling coffee, an ongoing issue, was due to spoiled milk.
The two worked at Beisswenger’s hardware store in New Brighton. Maahs, who continues to work there, said her employer has been supportive throughout the case.
The New Brighton city attorney’s office charged Lind when the county’s case was dismissed.
The case led to proposed legislation — initiated by Maahs — that would make such an act a felony.
“I felt that there was a hole in the law, and it needed to be plugged,” Maahs said, “and it was up to me to do it because no one else was going to do it for me.”
Twitter: @ChaoStribHaving parents with financial means is generally assumed to give students a leg up in academia – but a new study finds that might not always be the case.
While the study, “More Is More or More Is Less? Parent Financial Investments During College,” found that parents who fund their child’s education increases the child’s chances of attending college as well as their odds of graduating, parents’ financial support actually decreases a student’s GPA.
RELATED: Parents: How Much College Do You Owe Your Kids?
The study draws on data from the National Center for Education Statistics on parent financial contributions and student grades across all types of colleges and universities. After controlling for parents’ socioeconomic status, the author of the study, Laura Hamilton, a sociology professor at the University of California, Merced, found that as parental aid increased, every income group saw a reduction in GPA – with the curve steepest among the most privileged students. The chart below shows the striking results:
Hamilton concluded that the effects of parental financial support on GPA was modest overall and not enough to decrease a student’s odds of graduating, but “any reduction in student GPA due to parental aid – which is typically offered with the best of intentions – is both surprising and important,” she writes in the study. “Even small disparities in GPA are magnified in an increasingly competitive labor market and disadvantage graduates when their records are considered next to those without such deductions.”
Hamilton suspects the reason behind the drop is that students who receive endless checks from mom and dad may not take their education as seriously as those students who have to weigh the financial investment and return of college. She also found after interviewing parents that students had lower grades if their parents paid for their schooling but did not discuss the students’ own responsibility for their education.
The study comes at a time when colleges and students are growing more dependent on parents’ financial support. According to a recent study from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, nearly two thirds of young adults between the ages of 19 and 22 receive financial assistance from their parents. And an April 2012 Merrill Edge report by Bank of America found that 56 percent of parents have paid or expect to pay more for college than they expected when their first child was born.
“As public schools begin to operate more like private schools and rely heavily on tuition dollars, the role of parents becomes even more central,” writes Hamilton in the study. “Parents often become the primary financiers of higher education.”Waxangel Profile Blog Joined September 2002 United States 27026 Posts Last Edited: 2013-08-29 05:19:20 #1
Samsung Khan's has announced his retirement. According to Daily Esports, the two time OSL champion had expressed that he had lost interest in StarCraft II.
JangBi will forfeit his spot this season's Code S Ro32, where he had been scheduled to play in Group C. JangBi is said to return to his hometown of Busan to take a year off before starting his mandatory military service.
Source: DailyEsports Samsung Khan's JangBi has announced his retirement. According to Daily Esports, the two time OSL champion had expressed that he had lost interest in StarCraft II.JangBi will forfeit his spot this season's Code S Ro32, where he had been scheduled to play in Group C. JangBi is said to return to his hometown of Busan to take a year off before starting his mandatory military service. Administrator Hey HP can you redo everything youve ever done because i have a small complaint?
citron Profile Joined November 2011 Canada 6 Posts #2 Whoooa....unexpected
Shellshock Profile Blog Joined March 2011 United States 94972 Posts #3 wow. that sucks. O.o Moderator http://i.imgur.com/U4xwqmD.png
StarStruck Profile Joined April 2010 24047 Posts #4 Are you fucking kidding me? God damnit. Ace Match King falleth. D:
LeeDawg Profile Joined April 2012 United States 1193 Posts #5 jangbi NOOOOOOOOOOO I wanted to tear my clothes off and run around naked, so I sprayed myself with windex, since it prevents streaking.
Looms Profile Joined May 2010 United States 4569 Posts #6 gl JangBi... so many memories... WOWgl JangBi... so many memories...
rauk Profile Blog Joined February 2009 United States 2215 Posts #7 SOSPA GOGOGO
MORE PROTOSS JOBBERS TO GET CRUSHED BY MINIDONG AWW YEAH
Msr Profile Joined March 2011 Korea (South) 495 Posts #8 good decision by him. Amazing player that is not able to showcase his skills with how stupidly protoss is designed in sc2. Sad to see him go though.
Megaliskuu Profile Blog Joined October 2010 United States 5112 Posts #9 NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |BW>Everything|Add me on star2 KR server TheMuTaL.675 for practice games :)|NEX clan| https://www.dotabuff.com/players/183104694
Tosstriss Profile Joined November 2011 Canada 325 Posts #10 Shit, just heard the news on Mafia but damn...
Zerg.Zilla Profile Joined February 2012 Hungary 4902 Posts #11...fuck. OMG this shit sucks...fuck. (•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) ~Keep calm and inject Larva~
babylon Profile Blog Joined April 2011 7541 Posts #12 What. And he was doing so well. :/
Well, good luck to him.
DMXD Profile Joined February 2008 United States 4064 Posts #13 NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!
jangbi retiring before stork......
Darkness2k11 Profile Blog Joined December 2010 Chile 269 Posts #14 NOOOOOOOO!! When Behind, Dark Shrine
Pin Profile Joined December 2010 United States 55 Posts #15 wow this sucks
lolfail9001 Profile Joined August 2013 Russian Federation 11893 Posts #16
Good luck to him in whatever he chooses to do thereafter. Sad zealotGood luck to him in whatever he chooses to do thereafter. DeMoN pulls off a Miracle and Flies to the Moon
Bam Lee Profile Joined June 2012 1708 Posts #17 but we'll I guess if you don't enjoy the game any longer there's no point in trying to compete Would have not expected it he was just starting to have success in individual league. Damnbut we'll I guess if you don't enjoy the game any longer there's no point in trying to compete
StarStruck Profile Joined April 2010 24047 Posts #18 Very dark, dark day for Starcraft fans. Some players just aren't having fun with it and want to get their military service over with. All on you sHy now and this is super bad for Khan.
boesthius Profile Blog Joined February 2008 United States 10907 Posts #19
gl in life jangbang<3 fuckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkgl in life jangbang<3 Moderator twitter - @TL_boesthius || mahnini: "my blinds are kinda retarded cause closing down results in a tighter close but closing up makes more sense because gravity makes sun rays go down "
BisuDagger Profile Blog Joined October 2009 Bisutopia 16635 Posts #20 Can't wait to see him stream BW. SRT awaits him. And Brave needs an ally for ex khan players. Poor Stork though is all alone. Moderator Ofiicial Afreeca Starleague Caster: http://afreeca.tv/ASL2ENG2
1 2 3 4 5 45 46 47 Next AllThe Freestyle BivyPack has been developed by a traveler who's been on the road since 2007 and a thru hiker who's been fabricating obsessively ultralight gear for years.
Who it's for
For the traveler that doesn't want to have to stay in a hostel or hotel every night, or just always have the option of going on multi day hikes and camping trips.
For avid section and thru hikers that live with a backpack on, it should feel invisible as you take in the beauty of the trail and comfortable at the end of the day.
I'd say homeless people, but the fact that you have the Freestyle BivyPack means your home is ready to roll out at a moment's notice.
For preppers and survivalists who want a bug-out bag that's not only lightweight, but also a shelter.
It's an ultralight, comfortable backpack fit for the trail or the city, your carry-on when flying or thrown in the back of the pickup truck you hitched a ride with. It's shelter from the rain, bugs, wind and other elements. You're now more versatile and your options are open.
How it works
The bivy extends from a wrapped hidden pocket in the collar of the backpack, the pack frame slides out to now function as tent poles that create some breathing room around your head while blocking out mosquitoes. This space was designed specifically to make use of your rain jacket, sliding your sleeves through the tent poles locks it down to keep you dry during a windy downpour.
The whole setup weighs about 1.5 pounds and takes just a couple minutes or less to transform between backpack to bivy and vise-versa.
Thru-hikers love it's efficiency, world travelers love the simplicity (plus it's flight carry-on size) and survivalists have found their new standard bug out bag.
The Backpack
You'd want this backpack even if it didn't transform into a bivy.
We used a combination of the best fabrics available, balancing ultralight, waterproof and durability (we'll have several colors for our backers to choose from as well). Besides the stretch pockets, the primary exposed area of the backpack is constructed with 300 denier diamond weave ripstop polyester - it's lightweight, waterproof and durable enough to hold up in real life travel and hiking. There's even a reward for those who are ultra-obsessive ultralight - a BivyPack made with incredibly lightweight cuben fiber.
The frame is made from strong and lightweight carbon fiber, it curves to form a trampoline style back panel creating airflow between your back and the pack (no sweaty back!), then bends just enough to mold to your body and absorb shock, allowing you to adjust the fit perfectly to your particular torso size.
There's 40 liters of primary capacity, plus another 10 liters with the stretchy pockets, that's enough for long distance hiking or your next world tour. The main compartment of the bag is sealed with a roll top closure and is waterproof - no need for a pack cover with this bag, your gear stays dry and the pack itself dries quickly.
Additionally there are two deep side pockets and a big front stretchy pocket for items you might need quickly, like a rain jacket or water filter.
The straps are cushioned and comfy, a hip belt (not pictured) and chest strap provide even more comfort. Side compression straps can be tightened as well when your pack is at minimum capacity.
Measuring 7" x 13" x 21" this bag meets standards as a flight carry-on. Since the frame is removable, it can be crossed and rearranged to even qualify as a "personal item" on even the stingiest airlines (I'm looking at you Spirit!).
The bivy is rolled into the collar of the backpack, you'd maybe never notice the secret double life the pack has been living...
The Bivy
"Weight, utility and comfort is the magic trio that makes this new Kickstarter project pretty unique." - Teton Gravity Research
The most basic bivy sacks are simply rainproof bags that slide over your sleeping bag to keep you dry. They're meant to be lightweight and simple. That's great, but a hybrid has risen between these basic bags and full on tents which bring the best of both worlds. The Freestyle BivyPack is a shining example of this trend.
The upper body portion of the bivy extends out from the collar of the backpack, the frame of the pack then slides out to becomes the poles that you give you ample space around your head and shoulders. This area is surrounded by noseeum bug netting so you can breathe easy, reduce moisture buildup and allow you to see the scenery around you and the stars above. Mosquitoes are jerks, keep 'em out.
Don't have a tarp? That's no problem, the Freestyle BivyPack was designed to take advantage of the gear you're already carrying. Take your rain jacket and slide the sleeves through the bivy poles to lock it in place, now it's doing double duty while your sleeping as a rain fly, keeping you dry even in windy rainstorm conditions.
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The bivy can be virtually invisible when you're not using it, tucked away in the collar of your backpack you may forget you had a shelter ready to go. So go ahead and travel the world, couch surf and stay in hostels if you want, but when you need it, it's there.
Our Story
"... there is something to be said for the individual that follows through, not just with the idea but a sewn, tested, usable product." - Backpackers.com
I (Kenny) started traveling in 2007 and have been on the move ever since. No home base, no rent, just a lot of hiking, hitchhiking, the odd job here and there and a whole lot of great adventures along the way.
Living out of my backpack for this long has made me conscious of every ounce I carry, so I'm constantly shedding items I don't need, upgrading to lighter materials and removing redundancies by finding multiple uses for single pieces of gear.
The lighter my pack got the more comfortable I felt hiking for longer, whether on the trail or around a new city. My sense of freedom grew more and more.
Through all the downsizing and streamlining there was one big dream that I kept sketching and thinking about: combining my backpack and bivy sack. Backpacks and bivys can be made from similar materials, account for a good percentage of the total bulk and weight you carry, and you never use both at the same time.
I've carried different bivys in my travels - they're a simple lightweight addition that provides an incredible degree of freedom. Besides hiking and traditional camping, the bivy offers an alternative to hotels, hostels and couch surfing when traveling. A bivy offers a way to sleep just about anywhere, even in the rain or in the midst of mosquitoes. Also, unlike a tent, you feel more in tune with your surroundings.
In 2013 I met James, a hiker from Georgia who had founded Helium Hiking Equipment, an outlet for his passion of making obsessively ultralight gear. A thru hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2014 stoked the fire even more, giving him more experience and inspiration.
He loved the idea of the Freestyle BivyPack, so finally I hitched on down to Georgia again to start making it a reality, a true all-in-one waterproof backpack and shelter that could stand alone as either while being insanely light.
Weighing just over a pound it's lighter than most any comparable backpack or bivy you'd find in the store, while functioning as both. There are no compromises either; if this was just a backpack you'd wear it on every trip. If it was simply a bivy it would be your go-to for solo travel. It's both, and it's awesome.
I've taken our prototypes exclusively on trips hitchhiking and bussing through South America, camping in rainy Ireland, buggy Scotland, it's been my carry-on for flights, and by my side hitchhiking in zigzags all across the United States this year.
The thing is a miracle, an ultralight backpack and a comfortable shelter to sleep in, transforming back and forth effortlessly. Now I don't just live out of my backpack, I sometimes live in it.
We're excited about it, and even more so to now share it.
Specs
Usable Backpack Capacity: 50L
Total weight (backpack + bivy + frame/poles): 25oz
Materials: 300 denier polyester diamond weave ripstop (backpack body), SilNylon (bivy roof), SilPoly (bivy floor)
Frame material: Carbon fiber
Bivy length (head to toe): 7.5 feet (Accommodates people up to 6'6")
Bivy width (shoulders): 30 inches
Sizing
We'll ask everyone their torso size before we ship and send you your appropriately sized pack. Each pack can then be adjusted several inches in either direction as well by tightening the frame yourself, so once you get your pack you can dial it in to perfection.
Rewards
We appreciate you helping us get this project off the ground! Contribute what you'd like and check out the rewards, including the Freestyle BivyPack itself, ready to be shipped to your door by April anywhere in the world.
(Scroll up and look at the right side of the page to actually pledge and get one of these rewards!)
Timeline
2007: I leave New York and start traveling, living out of a backpack full time, ideas start to arise...
2012: Meanwhile, James starts Helium Hiking Equipment.
2013: James and I meet for first time in Georgia, he and his girlfriend Lizzy are set for a big trip and he's been honing in on his ultralight gear fabrication. We talk travel, hiking and gear, including the idea for the BivyPack.
2014: James and Lizzy hike the Appalachian Trail, it's an indescribable type of awesome. Now James is even more focused on making lighter and better gear.
January 2015: I hitchhike on down to Augusta and we start prototyping, we take our first version of the pack out on a small section of the AT.
February 2015: James whips up a second prototype based on our notes in time for my trip down to South America.
March 2015: After about six weeks of travel with the bag, I come back to Augusta and we make some more improvements.
November 2015: I spend several months overseas and in the US hitchhiking, hiking, camping and otherwise living exclusively with the BivyPack. Based on this experience I return to Augusta so James and I can improve the design even more.
December 2015: Launch Kickstarter campaign! The Freestyle BivyPack has reached the point of universal awesomeness. All we need now is backing to support some further fine tuning and testing, and the funding to get everything in place to make these for hikers and travelers everywhere.
January 2016: With your excitement, we'll reach our goal! We can now start getting our gear and materials in place.
February 2016: Crushing out BivyPacks, escaping for hiking trips to maintain our sanity.
March 2016: Begin shipping out BivyPacks to all you good people.
April 2016: Finish shipments, start hiking!
Thanks everyone, check the rewards and pledge what you'd like. We'll see you on the trail, we'll see you on the road, good times!When 6,000 international experts in HIV/AIDS start arriving in Vancouver today for a biennial conference, many will optimistically talk about this point in time as pivotal.
As the beginning of the end of AIDS.
B.C. has had such remarkable success arresting acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, that in the past 25 years, new cases have steadily dropped and are now 90 per cent below what they were at the beginning of the epidemic. New diagnoses of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, have likewise fallen, making HIV an uncommon disease in B.C. now, with 261 people diagnosed in 2014. AIDS cases are rare (about 60 last year) and deaths (44) even more so, according to the BC Centre for Disease Control and other provincial resources.
Still, about 12,000 are living with HIV/AIDS in B.C., having been diagnosed sometime in the past.
So what will so many scientists, researchers and advocates be talking about when they attend the July 19 to 22 International AIDS Society Conference on Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention? For one, the global burden of the disease. The AIDS pandemic could “end” by the year 2030, according to experts. But there are still about 34 million people around the world with HIV/AIDS, the majority (70 per cent) in Sub Saharan African countries. And although cases are falling in wealthy countries like Canada, incremental increases are happening on a global level, year over year, as shown by data from the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
B.C.’s success in halting the HIV/AIDS epidemic is viewed as a model for other jurisdictions. It came about through a dedicated B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CFE) based at St. Paul’s Hospital. It still has about 300 clinicians and researchers who’ve done groundbreaking research showing, among other things, that large-scale testing for HIV, along with early diagnosis and free, timely access to antiviral treatment, helps stop the spread of disease and virtually eliminates deaths from AIDS.
The strategy is called Treatment as Prevention and while B.C. was once one of the worst affected by the epidemic, incidence (new infection) rates per 100,000 population for HIV have in recent years been lower in B.C. relative to the Canadian rate.
The B.C. government will spend $130 million this year on HIV/AIDS testing, treatment, research and prevention.
Dr. Julio Montaner, the world renowned director of the BC-CFE, said in an interview that B.C. is the only province to fund the full array of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), which, on average, costs about $15,000 per year per patient. He credits the Treatment as Prevention strategy for profoundly reducing HIV transmission.
There are about 7,000 patients in B.C. (13 million around the world) on drug treatment to prevent HIV from converting to AIDS, and to also halt the spread of disease to those with whom they are intimate. As Montaner notes, treatment works not just on an individual level but also on a whole population level, which is why he believes the provision of medications to all people infected with HIV is a no-brainer, good public policy.If You Happen To See A Scarf Tied Up Around Your Town This Holiday - Here's What It Means
Cailyn Finkel 11/16/2016
There's a new trend happening around the country and it catching on like wildfire! No, people aren't trying to make trees and lightpoles more fashionable....
It's something much more heartwarming than that!
Thousands of people from all across the nation are taking their old scarves, or making their own handmade and versions, tying them around the base of trees in parks, along city roads and in neighborhoods.
These scarves are generously left for homeless people that are exposed to the frigid (and dangerous) winter temperatures! The warm scarves are free to anyone who needs them and can provide much-needed insulation from below-freezing weather.
Some scarves are even left with messages like:
"I'm not lost! Please take me with you if you are cold. Stay warm. |
. "Inside, I've always felt like I'm a guy, but I haven't been able to express that to people because it's such a taboo topic."
Jay was born "Jazmin." He recalls feeling a sense of confusion about his identity in many of his childhood memories. Early on, he found himself gravitating toward more masculine clothing and hobbies.
"I was always wanting to hang out with the guys, and play basketball or something like that," he explained. "I feel like I should have been given a male body from birth."
After years of trying to understand and accept his feelings, Morgan came out as a lesbian. Still, he said that label didn't truly fit who he was. Last May, he came out as transgender to family and friends. He asked them to call him Jay and begin using male pronouns like "him" and "his."
After undergoing counseling to confirm his decision, he began hormone therapy Jan 22. Morgan learned how to inject the testosterone shots by himself and quickly began to notice changes.
"I just get so excited. I'm growing a mustache now, and I have a lot of leg hair," he said, adding that his voice has also deepened. "My voice, before I started taking shots, was pretty like, high-pitched."
Morgan is hoping to be an advocate for the transgender community by sharing his story.
"You might be comfortable in your own body, but it doesn't mean everyone else is," he said. "You have to be respectful to people. Whether you agree with it or not, they want to be happy and there's nothing wrong with that."
Last month, former Olympic champion turned reality TV dad Bruce Jenner ignited a national conversation on what it means to be transgender. At age 65, he announced he will begin transitioning to become a woman.
It's hard to track how many transgender people are living in the U.S. The U.S. Census Bureau doesn't ask for the information, only giving "male" or "female" as the options for gender.
In West Michigan, Jason Kae-Smith, a certified sex therapist who specializes in gender therapy, is noticing an increase in people who are coming out as transgender.
"I think because of the publicity and the information that's available now, we're going to see people coming out younger and younger," he told FOX 17 News. "Gender is really a socially constructed sort of concept."
Kae-Smith defines transgender as "a term that refers to people who have some sort of experience with their gender identity that doesn't fit their physical body."
He wants to make clear that one's physical body, or sex, is just one aspect of their identity. Gender identity is a different component. Sexuality, or sexual orientation is also something completely separate from gender identity.
Kae-Smith, who has an office in Grand Rapids, said he has counseled patients on gender issues as young as elementary age to a few years past the toddler stage.
"We've come a longs ways, in that now it's recommended that people have therapy before they do any sort of physiological transitioning, but it's not set down as a guideline or a must anymore," he explained. "The advent of the internet and the information that's available there has made a huge difference...By the time anybody shows up in my office, they've already read tons of articles. They know, beyond any doubt, typically, where they're at, where they're headed, and where they want to go."
Kae-Smith will frequently provide referrals, when requested, approving a transgender client to begin the hormone therapy needed to transition.
Jay Morgan has undergone counseling and will be taking testosterone for the rest of his life. He is also hoping to get surgery next year to continue his transition journey.
Although the cost of testosterone shots may be partially covered by insurance, the surgery-- which is considered a cosmetic procedure-- is not. Morgan said it could cost him as much as $7,000.
He has set up a GoFundMe page to raise some of the funds needed.There is a wide variety in animal "families". Some do have a mom, dad, babies, but most do not. Some do not every procreate. Some live in families of friends. Lions live in polygamous prides with 1 male and several females. Chimpanzees in estrus have sex with any male they can get to mate with them. As do domestic cats. Do you have any pets? Have you ever seen a dog or cat in heat? To claim all animals live in a specific type "family" is ludicrous at best and hysterically sadly funny.
As far as teaching bigotry and intolerance to children, shame on you. Shame on your homophobia. Innate inborn qualities like sexual orientation are just how we are born and trying to make a cute little book to continue to spread intolerance and hatred is sick. Yes, sick. Child abuse is wrong and you should be ashamed.
Picking and choosing a verse or 2 from the bible to say is "fact" while ignoring so many more is wrong. Speak out instead against mixed fabric clothing instead, or planting 2 types of seed in a field, and help make the world a better place or even, God Forbid, braiding your hair.
Deuteronomy 22:11 "Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together."
Leviticus 19:19 "You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together."
Timothy 2:9 "I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes".The proposal is part of an effort to keep the tax cuts revenue neutral by increasing the base. But it's already creating a stir in sectors that would be hurt most — retail, autos and refining.
"When you broaden the base, you step on many, many lobbyists' toes, and many industries get hurt by it. That means it's going to be a real feeding frenzy next year," said Citigroup head of North American economics William Lee.
As Wall Street scrambles to analyze the tax's effect on profits, economists say a border-adjusted levy could impede growth. But they also say it could trigger a rise in the dollar, and that would be a positive offset of the effects of the tax.
While it should also make imports less desirable and boost exports, there are a whole range of effects that remain unclear, like what it would do to cross-border services, such as those provided by investment firms, lawyers and others.
"It's extremely difficult to model. It's generally accepted that something like that would cause the dollar to rise, and we would note the dollar has already risen since prior to the election by a degree of magnitude that would imply an earnings headwind of around 2 percent at the S&P 500 level," said Emanuel.
Clifton said there would be winners and losers on both sides. Boeing, for instance, imports parts for manufacturing, as does the auto industry. But then what it makes and exports would no longer be taxed. Clifton said he expects to see proposals made for some industries to be exempted, possibly North American oil for one, or maybe even the entire services sector.
"When you broaden the base, you step on many, many lobbyists toes and many industries get hurt by it. That means it's going to be a real feeding frenzy next year," said Citigroup head of North American economics William Lee.
Citigroup's Lee said the House proposal to end interest deductibility is more worrisome. All companies that regularly borrow funds would see their costs rise, and those that are depend on debt in the high-yield world would feel an especially hard pinch.
"That would change the way financing is done. All this debt financing goes out the window, and it will raise the effective corporate tax rate," he said. U.S. companies have issued a record amount of new investment-grade corporate debt, totaling more than $1.3 trillion. "It would kill our [mergers and acquisition] industry in a heartbeat. It would be quite costly … that effectively raises the tax rate on all companies."
But Lee said the destination tax is still a "battle of the wonks," and it's not clear how far it will go.
"If it does happen, it will take five years to happen. The whole trick is you change the balance of trade. You lower imports and you raise exports. That means the dollar should appreciate. The U.S. is running the reverse. The dollar responds to a lot of things. It responds most to interest rate differentials. Monetary policy has the biggest impact on the dollar, and these trade effects slip in after that," he said.The mere act of cycling in Toronto can seem like a crusade for freedom. We have a godzilla-esque mayor who erases existing infrastructure (read: Jarvis bike lanes) with what many cyclists would characterize as reckless abandon. In London, meanwhile, mayor Boris Johnson is happily skipping about building BIKE HIGHWAYS and talking about how said highways will act as a greening initiative and make for more community-oriented spaces. Hello, opposite-land.
And that's not the only city putting Toronto to shame. Everyone seems to have vague notions of how cruddy our cycling infrastructure is, so we decided to see how it actually stacks up in cities of (relatively) comparable size. And for a city of 2,791,140, we're not doing very well failing hard seriously shitting the bed. Other cities are actively trying to promote cycling. The same cannot be said for us. Behold, the numbers:
What's going on in London
Mayor Boris Johnson has decided to commit $1.5 billion to improve the city's bike infrastructure, including a 24-kilometre bike "superhighway," separated from traffic and connecting the west and east ends of the city. The highway is expected to be the longest of its kind in Europe.
Chicago
Toronto may have surpassed Chicago as the fourth-largest city in North America, but that city is still kicking our ass on the cycling front. Their Chicago Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 was developed by listening to what the people wanted, a virtually unheard of political tactic. It aims to install a 1038 km network of biking facilities, with the goal of "providing a bicycle accommodation within a half-mile of every Chicagoan." The first phase of the project, to be completed by 2015, already has a total of $40 million allocated to it. Thirty-two million of that has been provided by the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) Improvement Program, and $8 million stems from local funds. Currently, the city has more than 273.6 km of on-street protected bike lanes.
New York City
New York City is the king of bike lanes. The New York Times calls the city a "cycling haven," though there is concern that the bike-love may dissipate with the crowning of a new mayor. In any case, under Bloomberg, the city has acquired no fewer than 410 km of bike lanes, and according to a poll by the Times, a full 66 per cent of New Yorkers think bike lanes are "a good idea."
Seattle
It probably seems obvious that Seattle would be a good city for cycling. And when citizens don't feel it's going their way, they get intense about it by creating their own protected bike lanes, as we've also seen the Urban Repair Squad do here.
But when cyclists aren't pushing the situation to action, the city seems to be making a reasonable attempt to enhance Seattle's cycling infrastructure on its own. In 2007, the Seattle Bicycle Master Plan was implemented. Since then, 207 km of on-street cycling infrastructure has been created, and the government has the two-fold goal of tripling the amount of cycling in the city by 2017, and reducing the rate of bicycle collisions by one third in the same time frame. At the plan's inception, it was expected to cost about $240 million in total.
(Seattle's population, for the record, stands at about 620,778).
Montreal
Montreal came in at number eight on the Copenhagenize Index. According to the index, "The city has had bicycle infrastructure since the mid-80s, which should embarrass other cities on that continent." And according to rock-solid expert source AskMen.com, Montreal is the fifth most bike-friendly city in the world. In terms of financing, Montreal isn't quite stacking up to its American counterparts. But it did spend $10 million last year on development projects and bike path revitalization.
In total, the city has about 107 km of on-street bike lanes, which makes for 27 km per 100,000 people.
Vancouver
Vancouver makes use of separated bike lanes, with proposals for more coming in all the time.
In 2010, Vancouver city council voted unanimously to spend $25 million over two years to build 55 km of new bike lanes over ten years. And bike trips in the city have apparently gone up by "150 per cent" over the past 15 years, and about 12 in 100 ventures in fitness-happy Vancouver are made via bike. Vancouver has 60 km of on-street bike lanes, which makes for 26 km per 100,000 people.
So, what's the deal in Toronto?
The topic of bike lanes has always been a controversial one in the fair land of Hogtown. Much mud-slinging has been done on the issue, with motorists becoming more and more claustrophobic in the face of ever-increasing traffic, and cyclists becoming more and more terrified of being killed (or at the very least doored) each time they hop on their two-wheeled steeds.
Though we do have separated lanes on Sherbourne and some others in the works, we don't have much to brag about. Denzil Minnan-Wong, chair of the public works committee, failed to respond to repeated requests for comment over the span of a couple of weeks. And it's safe to say none of us will live to see the day Mayor Rob Ford eschews the motor vehicle in favour of traversing merrily around on a bicycle. The undeniable truth is that we're backpedaling when it comes to cycling infrastructure.
By the end of 2011, the city had -3.2 km fewer bike lanes than it started with due to removals on Pharmacy and Birchmount. And the same thing happened in 2012, after the removal of the Jarvis lanes.
And now? The city can expect to see 14 km of bike lanes upgraded or added by 2014. And 2001's Bike Plan promised 495 km of bike lanes to be added by 2012. What did we get? 23 per cent of that promise, in the form of 112.9 km. That's 11 km per 100,000 people.
Jared Kolb wrote on Cycle Toronto's site last year that, "City Council continues to invest in a legacy of inaction."
"There are fewer kilometres of bike lanes today than there were in 2009," he told me last week over the phone. (In 2009, there were 91).
He says the 14 km that have been added are a start, and so are the proposals for lanes on Richmond and Adelaide. But we're nowhere near where we need to be, he said. Both Montreal and Vancouver have far more bike lanes per capita than Toronto, despite the considerable size-difference in our favour.
"As a city, we need to renew the conversation about how we do cycling on the street. We don't have safe infrastructure connecting to the core," Kolb says. He thinks it's possible, but would just require a reallocation of precious budget dollars.
Jennifer Keesmaat does say she wants cycling to become a viable means of transportation by giving drivers and bikers the space they need, and the latest figures show roughly a third of all downtown travel is made on foot or by bike. But will anything like transportation harmony ever come to fruition?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Photo by Jared KrauseDonald Trump’s lead is slipping in the early voting states of New Hampshire and Iowa, and the Republican Party’s heavyweight donors are spreading cash to his rivals in anticipation that his prospects are in terminal decline.
Wealthy conservatives affiliated with the billionaire Koch brothers have already written $20 million worth of checks to nominally independent political committees known as super PACS, which each support a specific Republican presidential candidate, according to the Guardian. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, an early recipient of the Koch allies’ largesse, dropped out of the race last month.
The donations from people within the donor network of about 200 wealthy conservatives, overseen by Charles and David Koch, include, according to the Guardian:
A $11 million donation into Cruz’s super PAC by hedge-fund executive Robert Mercer, of which $500,000 was subsequently routed to Carly Fiorina’s Super PAC.
$1.5 million donation from Helen Schwab, the wife of investor Charles Schwab, to Bush’s Super PAC
A $100,000 donation to senator Marco Rubio’s Super PAC by conservative donor Randy Kendrick..
Twin $100,000 donations to Super PACs backing Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush by hedge fund executive Ken Griffin.
According to Reuters, the Koch brothers themselves are “taking a serious look” at Fiorina, following a strong performance in the second presidential debate last month. Reuters also reported a $100,000 check to Fiorina’s Super PAC by Dallas philanthropist Elloine Clark. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has not yet picked a candidate to fully back in 2016, but has given a seven-figure sum to a non-profit affiliated with Rubio, according to the Guardian.
In total, the Koch donor network plans to spend almost $900 million on the 2016 presidential campaign. Much of the money will be spent by non-profit groups that do not have to disclose their donors.PoliZette When Hillary Ignored the Rape of a CBS News Journalist in Egypt Clinton lauded Egyptian Spring just days after Lara Logan was brutally attacked in Tahrir Square
Hillary Clinton claims to have championed the cause of women and girls over her years in public service.
But as a woman and a journalist, I can’t forget what she didn’t do for CBS News journalist Lara Logan — when she was in the exact right position to do so much.
Clinton and the State Department cheered the outburst of “populist feeling” in Egypt. And left Logan by the wayside.
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Clinton was secretary of state in February 2011 when Logan was sexually assaulted and beaten by 200-300 men in the middle of Cairo, Egypt. None of the attackers were ever caught, and Egypt did not lose a dollar in U.S. aid or experience any meaningful pressure to deliver justice for the horrific attack. Egypt remains to this day the second largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel.
Four years after the assault, Logan was still in and out of hospitals being treated for internal injuries. This year, she dropped out of journalism, and left the East Coast with her family to live in a small town in Texas.
So little has been written in the last five years about what happened to her in 2011, that some review is necessary.
Lara Logan was the chief foreign correspondent for CBS News in February 2011 when she went to Cairo to cover the celebrations following the fall of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally.
She went to Tahrir Square in Cairo on the night of Feb. 11, 2011, accompanied by her cameraman, a security guard, a producer, a translator, and two drivers, who also served as security guards. After an hour broadcasting in a tight crowd of mostly men, she was set upon by a large group. The group attacking her was so large, so strong, and so violent that it was able to separate her from the six men who accompanied her. Her clothes were torn off and she was assaulted and beaten by many Egyptian men so severely and for such a long time that she believed that she was “in the process of dying.”
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Four days later, CBS News released a statement saying that Logan had “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault.”
A State Department spokesman, when asked about the attack on Logan at the department’s press briefing the next day, said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was “obviously aware” of the case and “very concerned by it” but said he didn’t have any specific information about what was being done about it.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made no public comment about the attack on Logan that day.
The next day, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs P.J. Crowley, when asked about it, called the attack on Lara Logan “deplorable” and said the United States had called for an investigation. But in the same briefing, he called the protests in Tahrir Square “magnificent” and lauded the Egyptian government for not using force on the protesters, saying it was “vital” for Egypt and other nations in the Middle East to “respond to the needs and aspirations of their people.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton still made no public comment about the attack on Logan.
Unbelievably, the same day as Crowley’s comments, Clinton announced that Egypt was going to get more money courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Egypt would get, through the State Department, an additional $150 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money — in addition to its regular $1.3 billion for its military and $250 million in economic assistance. The new funds were ostensibly to help that nation with its transition to democracy, which ended up being a transition instead to rule by the Muslim Brotherhood.
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Further, while there were reports that President Obama called Lara Logan to offer his sympathy, there is no report that Logan received any such call from Clinton, who as secretary of state managed our nation’s relationships with other countries, and who was in charge of the embassies that exist around the world to protect American interests and to help Americans in peril while traveling abroad.
It was as if Clinton’s focus as secretary of state was elsewhere, and the brutal rape of a prominent American journalist by a huge mass of men in the middle of a foreign capital was of no consequence.
None of the rapists were ever caught, though several of them likely appeared in the live CBS broadcast filmed just moments before the attack began. And it doesn’t seem that there was any investigation to speak of.
It would be fairly obvious that Egypt was never going to investigate this crime. Mubarak’s government had just been toppled, and America-hating rapists were roaming the streets. Who would do the investigating?
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In fact, Egypt in the best of times is famous for not investigating rapes. U.S. news organizations have reported on this extensively. Not only do police not investigate rape, but they have a habit of turning on the rape victim, and sexually assaulting her themselves.
Egypt quite clearly wasn’t going to do anything at all, unless it feared losing its allotment of aid from the United States. And of course it didn’t, given that Clinton had promised more money just a day after the CBS announcement of the “brutal and sustained sexual assault” of Logan.
It wasn’t until a year later, when Egyptian police raided the offices of several organizations with offices in Cairo, including the U.S. party-related organizations the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, that the United States started to get seriously annoyed with Egypt.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned in February 2012, one year after the assault on Logan, that if the issue of the raids on the offices wasn’t resolved soon, Egypt could lose the $1.3 billion in military aid it gets from the United States every year, and also maybe the $250 million in economic aid it gets from us.
[lz_infobox]”I didn’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things. Because the sexual assault was all I could feel, their hands raping me over and over and over again … They were tearing my body in every direction at this point … and they were trying to tear off chunks of my scalp.” — Lara Logan, opening up about the attack on “60 Minutes” on April 30, 2011[/lz_infobox]
And three U.S. senators — John McCain (R-Ariz.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) — warned that the threat to the U.S.-Egypt relationship had “rarely been greater.” It was strange phrasing, unless it was hyperbole. Wouldn’t the U.S.-Egypt relationship have been in some danger after a huge mass of men at a public event in the middle of the capital almost raped a journalist to death?
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Why not?
How could raiding offices and rifling through papers possibly be worse?
Two months after the attack, at the end of April of 2011, Logan came forward to describe in detail what had been done to her in Cairo, telling how her bodyguard had been overpowered and pulled from her, but how she had clung to him with one hand as the men ripped off her clothes, beat her, ripped off chunks of her scalp, and raped her with their fingers so severely that she believed she was dying. She told how they had laughed and jeered at her, and how the more she screamed out in pain, the greater their glee, and how they took pictures with their cellphones as she was violated and beaten.
But neither Secretary Clinton nor the State Department issued any comment following this interview.
No leader of the free world stood and condemned this ugly attack in the middle of a foreign capital. No one so much as shook a finger in Egypt’s direction.
At the very least, aid to Egypt should have been suspended and every one of the rapists hunted down and taken into U.S. custody. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton would have been the person to demand this course of action.
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But the act was so atrocious, with so many participants, that it really should have changed our relationship with Egypt forever. It shouldn’t have been treated as just a crime committed on foreign soil: It should have been considered an act of war.
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They shouted “American B*tch!” at her just before the attack. So the target was clear: It was us. The nation. The act was extreme. Our response should have been strong, and swift.
All travel to and from Egypt should have been immediately suspended, all immigration from Egypt should have been shut down indefinitely and all aid stopped. The Egyptian ambassador should have been recalled, and the rapists should have been hunted down and captured, one by one, picked out of their beds at night, pulled out of their cars, ripped from their tea tables. Not to face an American judge who would address them as “sir,” and ask them kindly if they would be seated and wouldn’t mind too much answering such-and-such question — but to face some other end.
None of this, of course, happened. Clinton and the State Department cheered the outburst of “populist feeling” in Egypt. And left Logan by the wayside.
As a woman, and a journalist myself, one who has lived and traveled abroad, I can’t help wonder: How could a woman, who is serving as secretary of state, refuse to do anything, when she is in the exact right position to do so much?
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Margaret Menge is a professional journalist living in Palm Beach County, Fla. She has contributed to the Columbia Journalism Review, U.S. News & World Report, and the New York Observer, and edited small newspapers in Florida and New York. She’s now an editor for United Press International.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
July 12, 2013, 9:31 AM GMT By Matthew Perrone, The Associated Press
Parents who have been fretting over the low levels of arsenic found in apple juice can feel better about buying one of their kids' favorite drinks.
The Food and Drug Administration is setting a new limit on the level of arsenic allowed in apple juice, after more than a year of public pressure from consumer groups worried about the contaminant's effects on children. Nationwide, apple juice is second only to orange juice in popularity, according to industry groups.
Studies have shown that the juice contains very low levels of arsenic, a cancer-causing agent found in everything from water to soil to pesticides. The FDA has monitored arsenic in apple juice for decades and has long said the levels are not dangerous to consumers, in particular small children who favor fruit juice.
But now the agency is putting in place a strict standard on how much arsenic is acceptable in apple juice, limiting the amount to the same level currently permitted in drinking water.
Under the new regulation, apple juice containing more than 10 parts per billion could be removed from the market and companies could face legal action. Agency officials stressed that the vast majority of juices on the market are already below the threshold.
"Overall the supply of apple juice is very safe and does not represent a threat to public health," said FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg, in an interview with The Associated Press. "We decided to put forward this proposed action level to give guidance to industry and to assure ongoing safety and quality."
An FDA analysis of dozens of apple juice samples last year found that 95 percent were below the new level.
The standard specifically targets inorganic arsenic — the type found in pesticides — which can be toxic and may pose a cancer risk if consumed at high levels or over a long period. Organic arsenic occurs naturally in dirt and soil and passes through the body quickly without causing harm, according to the FDA.
In 2008 FDA regulators set a "level of concern" for arsenic at 23 parts per billion in apple juice. The agency has the authority to seize juice that exceeds that level.
But agency officials played down the significance of the older figure this week, calling it a "back of the envelope" calculation that was used to assess one juice shipment detained at the border.
"It was not a full blown, science-based number," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.
The FDA's new number is based on lifetime exposure to arsenic and the potential for long-term cancer risk. Taylor says the number reflects a very cautious approach, since it's unclear how much arsenic exposure can trigger the disease.
"There isn't a known threshold for the carcinogenic effect, so we assume the possibility of effects all the way down to the lowest dose," Taylor said.
The agency will take comments on the draft regulation for 60 days before making it binding.
Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, last year called for a limit as low as 3 parts per billion. While the FDA didn't go that far, the group still praised the agency for taking action.
"While we had proposed a lower limit, we think this is a perfectly good first step to bring apple juice in line with the current drinking water limits," said Urvashi Rangan, the group's director for consumer safety.When Donald Trump was elected, U.S. intelligence officials feared that allies would stop sharing critical intelligence information for fear that information might be passed on to Russia. European countries in particular rightfully worried their secrets would land in the hands of Vladimir Putin even as he meddled in their elections.
Wednesday, it appears those fears were realized.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the infamous Ambassador Sergey Kislyak must have giggled inside, maybe even smirked a little as Russia’s preferred president bragged to them about how “I get great intel. I have people brief me on great intel every day.” Trump’s bravado allegedly revealed highly classified specifics about an Islamic State terror group plot to bomb civilian aviation, one that has triggered months of incremental bans on laptops being carried into airplane cabins bound for the U.S.
He gave that information—which came from an ally as part of what The Washington Post describes as “an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government”—to an adversary, Russia. The same adversary under scrutiny for its widespread hacking of American leaders, including the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, the personal emails of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and former NATO Commander Philip Breedlove—hacking that may have tipped the election in favor of Trump.
By releasing classified intelligence, at best, Trump created a gaffe for which any American other than the commander in chief might be imprisoned. At worst, he revealed and put at risk the life of an essential intelligence source of a critical foreign ally.
Above all, Trump further eroded trust in America and amongst Americans at a time when democracy has come under the intense assault of Russian Active Measures to break up the European Union and the NATO military alliance.
Trump’s classified disclosures undermine trust in several ways. Most damaged in this ad-hoc information exchange is the partner country and its intelligence service providing such valuable support to America. Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe at The Washington Post suggest the information came from a non-traditional, sensitive intelligence-sharing arrangement with “access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.” This points to a highly coveted human-intelligence source likely provided by a Middle Eastern partner that is quite likely an adversary of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—a Syrian regime allied with Russia.
Trump’s revelation may well place this rare human source, a type the U.S. intelligence community has struggled to develop after the Sept. 11 attacks, in physical danger. It badly damages a critical intelligence-sharing relationship now and well into the future.
If the country sharing intelligence information with the U.S. is an Arab partner, which is likely, this undermines the legitimacy of the country’s leadership with their own population by associating them with a vocal, anti-Muslim Trump administration.
Even more complicated is Russia’s relationship with the U.S. intelligence-sharing partner country. If Russia had not received the same intelligence as the Americans, for example, Russia may wonder why this country was holding out. Or if Russia received a different version of the intelligence from the partner country, Trump’s unapproved information dump might undermine or exasperate Russia’s relationship with the partner country.
Trump’s braggadocio “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our allies,” the Post reported and the news that he’s done so will strain trust not just with the country sharing this piece of information, but also among other allies and inside the U.S. intelligence community. America’s greatest intelligence sharing comes from its “Five Eyes” partners in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The U.K. followed the U.S. laptop ban and Canada considered doing the same, but it appears the Five Eyes may not have received all the intelligence from the U.S., and those critical allies may well feel slighted and mistrustful if they didn’t get the full scoop.
U.S. government intelligence leaders must also conduct business with the White House using extreme caution. Those compiling the CIA’s Presidential Daily Brief must now wrestle with the question: “Can I provide this information to President Trump and still protect and maintain the safety of my sources and support of intelligence partners?”
In answering that, true intelligence professionals might hold back critical information from the Leaker in Chief, whose ego and desire to impress preclude sound judgment. That in turn means key decisions would be made by a reckless, emotional, and volatile president with an incomplete picture of the situation.
One slip-up might be excusable, but Trump’s release to the Russians came just one day after his dismissal of FBI Director James Comey for pretenses that almost immediately were exposed as false. Two days later, he further eroded trust among government leaders by insinuating on Twitter that he had taped his conversations with Comey. America’s defense, intelligence, and law-enforcement officials are now more incentivized to hide information and protect themselves than to share and inform America’s top leader—an unprecedented and sad state of affairs.
Talk of some Russia-Trump conspiracy only grows with the American president’s leak of classified information. The day following his dismissal of Comey, Trump held a closed session with Lavrov and where Ambassador Kislyak also appeared—a character whose meetings have been a trademark signature of Russia’s influence of the Trump team, having sullied Gen. Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, Attorney General Sessions and campaign surrogate Carter Page.
When Angela Merkel met with Trump, he treated her with disdain and allegedly served her and Germany, a more than 50-year ally of the U.S. during and after the Cold War, a bill for perceived unpaid NATO commitments. With Lavrov and Kislyak, representatives of a U.S. adversary, Trump laughed it up, as seen in the pictures taken by a Russian photographer after he blocked the U.S. press from observing the event.
The last seven days have forced Americans, including those in the intelligence community, to ask disturbing questions: What is wrong with the president? Is he insane? Incompetent? Why is he furthering Russia’s aims by sowing distrust among America’s allies? Why would he complain of leaks from inside the U.S. government even as he leaks classified information to Russia?
With those questions, loyal Americans serving his administration are searching for ways to sideline or corral the President before the U.S. finds itself devoid of credible intelligence, alone in the world and highly vulnerable to foreign threats.SANAA: Yemen's parliament passed on Sunday a law banning drone strikes, Saba news agency said, days after one such attack reportedly hit a wedding motorcade and killed civilians.
“Lawmakers have voted to ban drone strikes in Yemen,” Saba reported after a parliamentary meeting. The US military operates all unmanned aircraft flying over Yemen in support of Sana's campaign against Al Qaeda, and has killed dozens of militants in an intensified campaign this year.
Saba said lawmakers Sunday stressed “the importance of protecting all citizens from any aggression” and “the importance of preserving the sovereignty of Yemeni air space.”
On Thursday a drone attack in Rada, in the central province of Bayda, killed 17 people, mostly civilians, in a wedding motorcade, triggering protests in the impoverished Arabian peninsula country.
The Supreme Security Committee, headed by President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, issued a statement on Friday insisting that the strike had targeted a car belonging to a leader of Al Qaeda.
In the car “were top leaders who plotted several terrorist attacks against the armed forces, police, civilians and vital government installations,” it said.
The statement did not give a death toll for the strike, nor refer to any civilian casualties or acknowledge that the attack was launched by a US drone.
Security sources and witnesses said two missiles were fired, and that mostly civilians had died.
Amnesty International said confusion over who was behind the raid “exposes a serious lack of accountability for scores of civilian deaths in the country.”
Relatives of the dead blocked roads to protest the killings and demanded an official apology as well as compensation.
“If the government fails to stop American planes from... bombing the people of Yemen, then it has no rule over us,” tribal chief Ahmad al-Salmani told AFP on Saturday.In one brilliant moment, the sun beamed just a little brighter, the bouncing ball was far kinder than it had |
and dedication to the game. We believe that he is the right leader to get our team back to competing towards our goal of winning the Stanley Cup."
Boughner, 46, has served as an assistant coach for the San Jose Sharks for the previous two seasons (2015-17) and has helped the Sharks advance to the postseason twice and the Stanley Cup Final in 2016. He began his NHL coaching career as an assistant coach with the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2010-11.
The native of Windsor, Ontario, served as head coach of his hometown Windsor Spitfires of the Ontario Hockey League for eight seasons (2006-10, 2011-15) winning two consecutive J. Ross Robertson Cups and two consecutive Memorial Cups (2009, 2010). Boughner was named the OHL and the Canadian Hockey League's Coach of the Year in 2007-08 and 2008-09.
In 2006, Boughner headed an ownership group to purchase the Spitfires and serves as the organization's President. Under Boughner's leadership, the Spitfires have won three Memorial Cups (2009, 2010, 2017) and have developed NHL players such as Ryan Ellis (Nashville Predators), Cam Fowler (Anaheim Ducks) and Taylor Hall (New Jersey Devils).
A defenseman in the NHL for 10 seasons (1996-06), Boughner appeared in 630 NHL games for the Buffalo Sabres (1995-98), Nashville Predators (1998-00), Pittsburgh Penguins (2000-01), Calgary Flames (2001-03), Carolina Hurricanes (2003-04) and Colorado Avalanche (2004-06). Boughner originally was selected by the Detroit Red Wings in the second round (32nd overall) of the 1989 NHL Draft.
On July 25, 1994, Boughner signed with the Panthers and played for two seasons for their minor league affiliates, the Cincinnati Cyclones of the International Hockey League (1994-95) and the Carolina Monarchs (1995-96) of the American Hockey League.
Boughner and his wife, Jenn, have four children: Brady, Molly, Emma and Lola.
Boughner will be introduced to the media at a media press conference on Monday at 2:00 P.M., in the Chairman's Club at BB&T Center.
Fans will have the opportunity to learn more about Florida's new head coach at the Panthers Summer Summit on June 29. Click HERE for more information.
Join our House! Game plans start at just $190. Enjoy discounts from box office pricing, monthly payment plans options and priority access to Stanley Cup playoff tickets at BB&T Center. Contact us to learn more about single game suites and group information. Please call (954) 835-PUCK (7825) or visit FloridaPanthers.com/TicketCentral for more information.Liverpool FC has today launched on Dugout – a new digital football platform.
Dugout will feature exciting off-the-pitch content from the Reds and 26 other clubs, plus many high-profile players from around the world.
The content will give fans a glimpse of the lighter side of the club, offering entertaining video content from Melwood and the city, clips from the LFCTV archive, and imagery.
Dugout brings together some of the world’s biggest teams to support the new platform, including FC Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Arsenal and AC Milan.
The platform allows users to personalise which club and player content they view, with Reds fans being able to follow LFC content through a multi-club homepage based on trending content, as well as an LFC-specific content stream of the club’s latest posts.
Dugout is free to access and will host content created by the clubs and players, some up to 24 hours before it is released on any other social media channel.
The platform is live now and available at www.dugout.com. The Dugout app will launch on Monday December 5 and will be available to download by searching for ‘Dugout’ on the App Store or Google Play.Recent research finds that higher-income individuals are less generous than lower-income individuals. This work has received widespread academic and media attention, but the formulation is likely oversimplistic because it neglects the role of economic inequality. We test a new, multilevel perspective on the relationship between income and generosity that incorporates economic inequality. In a nationally representative survey study and an experiment, we find that higher-income individuals are only less generous if they reside in a highly unequal area or when inequality is experimentally portrayed as relatively high. Our findings offer a more complete understanding of the association between income and generosity and have implications for contemporary debates about the social impact of unequal resource distributions.
Abstract
Research on social class and generosity suggests that higher-income individuals are less generous than poorer individuals. We propose that this pattern emerges only under conditions of high economic inequality, contexts that can foster a sense of entitlement among higher-income individuals that, in turn, reduces their generosity. Analyzing results of a unique nationally representative survey that included a real-stakes giving opportunity (n = 1,498), we found that in the most unequal US states, higher-income respondents were less generous than lower-income respondents. In the least unequal states, however, higher-income individuals were more generous. To better establish causality, we next conducted an experiment (n = 704) in which apparent levels of economic inequality in participants’ home states were portrayed as either relatively high or low. Participants were then presented with a giving opportunity. Higher-income participants were less generous than lower-income participants when inequality was portrayed as relatively high, but there was no association between income and generosity when inequality was portrayed as relatively low. This research finds that the tendency for higher-income individuals to be less generous pertains only when inequality is high, challenging the view that higher-income individuals are necessarily more selfish, and suggesting a previously undocumented way in which inequitable resource distributions undermine collective welfare.Khloe Kardashian (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
One of the Kardashian sisters has admitted to researching how to buy tapeworm eggs in her bid to be stick thin.
Khloe Kardashian, 30, said she wanted a tapeworm in her body as she is desperate to be ‘skinny’.
The extreme weightloss measure can be a serious risk to a person’s health, causing jaundice, abnormal pain and malnutrition.
Tapeworms The parasite can grow up to 30ft long inside a person’s intestine and are caught by touching contaminated faeces or by eating undercooked meat.
Khloe made the comment while speaking to her sister Kourtney about her weight, saying: ‘I would do anything to get a tapeworm’.
Their 19-year-old half-sister Kylie Jenner then asked: ‘Why do you want a tapeworm?’.
Responding, Khloe said: ‘Do you know how skinny you get? I googled it to see if I could really have one.’
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The conversation, on Keeping Up With The Karashians, certainly provoked a strong reaction on social media:
@khloekardashian I really hope the comment on #KUWTK about wanting a tapeworm was a joke cause that kinda thing is very serious. — Dysfunktion Design (@DysfunkDesign) March 21, 2015
Khloe Kardashian, who has complained in the past about being ‘the ugly sister’, is often updating her Instagram and Twitter accounts with gym pictures cataloging her bid to lose weight.
She’s previously said: ‘Working out is a huge part of my life. I genuinely enjoy swearing out my frustrations, my workouts are about clarity for my mind and soul.’
We suspect after discovering the dangers, Khloe will reconsider.
She certainly would if she watched this (graphic) video:
MORE: Rob Kardashian compares sister Kim Kardashian to Gone Girl killer in latest outburst
MORE: Kourtney Kardashian reveals increasing concern for ‘social anxiety’ suffering brother RobPittsburgh may seem the last place to call the city of the future. Its population of 300,000 is less than half its peak 50 years ago. The once proud and profitable steel industry is now all but obsolete. New York has Wall Street and Broadway. Los Angeles has Hollywood. Paris has haute couture, and Rome has architecture. Even Philadelphia has the Liberty Bell. Pittsburgh’s biggest claim to fame is its football team.
There is a crisis of the Rust Belt city in this country, and nowhere is it felt more acutely than in Detroit. The 2011 Super Bowl featured a commercial for Chrysler, the struggling automobile manufacturer. Eminem is driving through the city’s streets. A church choir and the beat of “Lose Yourself” is playing in the background as the narrator says:
This isn’t New York City, or the Windy City, or Sin City, and we are certainly not anyone’s Emerald City. This is the Motor City, and this is what we do.
Unfortunately, poetry, no matter how inspiring, can’t save a dying city. Detroit remains on the brink of bankruptcy. To the south, Chicago has witnessed an exodus of 200,000 people in the last decade alone. Baltimore is permanently associated with the urban decay of TV’s “The Wire.”
Enrico Moretti crystallizes the crisis in The New Geography of Jobs, published last year. “The most dynamic areas in this country [in the aftermath of World War II] were manufacturing meccas like Detroit, Cleveland, Akron, Gary, and Pittsburgh. These cities were the envy of the world.”
The identification of America’s prosperity with industrialization reached its height in the 1950s, when Charles Wilson, then-CEO of General Motors, famously said, “What is good for General Motors is good for the country, and vice versa.” In 1978, manufacturing employment reached its peak, with almost 20 million Americans working in factories.
Then suddenly, the engine stopped and the car went into reverse. Since 1985, the United States has shed an average of 372,000 manufacturing jobs every year. “If the current trend continues,” Moretti lamented, “there will be more laundry workers than manufacturing workers in America when my son, who is now 3 years old, enters the labor market.” It is widely acknowledged that Cleveland (population decline since 2000: 17 percent), Cincinnati (minus 10 percent), St. Louis (minus 8 percent), and other metropolises can no longer compete for manufacturing jobs with Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Thailand.
Pittsburgh bucks this trend of failing Rust Belt cities. This city in western Pennsylvania has become a paradigm for the post-manufacturing American economy.
The Austrian-American economist, Joseph Schumpeter, coined the term “creative destruction,” the way in which capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order. Pittsburgh is a perfect case study in creative destruction. Out of the ashes of its moribund steel industry, a new Pittsburgh — one built on technology and research — has emerged, poised and ready to take on the 21st century.
***
In the late 1970s, the U.S. steel industry was failing. Foreign competitors with lower labor costs and lower environmental standards were crowding the market. Coal and iron ore processing had become costly and inefficient. Oil prices, inflation, and interest rates soared. In 1979, the Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel Company suffered the largest quarterly loss — $561.7 million — in American corporate history. The episode evokes the recent travails of General Motors and Chrysler, except no bailout came to the rescue. Within a few short years, 115,500 manufacturing jobs vanished in Pittsburgh. The steel industry alone accounted for nearly 50 percent of the losses. The city was being talked about the way Detroit is now: Its very survival was in question.
Marlee Myers, managing partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis in Pittsburgh, explained what was at stake. “This region had been dependent on the steel industry and the many jobs that it provided. We were really at a crossroads. We could have gone the direction of other failing Rust Belt cities, or we could reinvent ourselves.”
The city’s revival has been part organic and part good long-term planning. With regards to the latter, Clifford Levine, an attorney who specializes in governmental law and chairs the Public Affairs Group of Cohen & Grigsby, gives credit to public-private partnerships. “There is a long tradition of political and corporate collaboration, going back to 1945 when David Lawrence was elected mayor,” he told The Politic. At the time, Pittsburgh was considered one of the most polluted cities in America. A Catholic Democrat, Lawrence forged the now famous bipartisan alliance with Richard Mellon, a member of the WASP establishment and staunch Republican chairman of one of the largest banks in the country. Despite their political and religious differences, the partnership drove a postwar urban renewal.
“In the 1990s, under the leadership of Mayor Tom Murphy, the son of a steelworker, public and corporate leaders came together once again,” Levine continued. “A decade and a half after the steel industry collapsed in the early 1980s, people were still expecting the industry to return. Murphy came in and said, ‘Forget that past. We need to reclaim our city.’” More than 1,000 acres of abandoned, blighted industrial land were cleaned up. Dilapidated steel mills gave way to thriving commercial, retail, residential, and public spaces. Murphy oversaw the development of more than 25 miles of new trails alongside the river, as well as the creation of urban green space. In total, Murphy leveraged $4.8 billion in public-private partnerships.
“The support and growth of the universities can’t be underestimated either,” said Tim White, vice president of development at the Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC). The city is home to a handful of institutions of higher learning: Duquesne, Robert Morris, Chatham, Carlow, Slippery Rock, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Washington and Jefferson. But undoubtedly, the two strongest universities are the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), now one of the top 10 hospital systems in the country, replaced U.S. Steel as the region’s largest employer. An $8 billion health care conglomerate with 50,000 employees, UPMC is now headquartered in the old U.S. Steel Tower, the city’s tallest building. Lest anyone forget how the times have changed, UPMC’s logo sits on top of it.
With the help of grant-funded research, dozens of technology companies were born in the shadows of these universities. Fore Systems, a computer network switching equipment company, was founded by four CMU professors in 1990. A few years after a very successful IPO in 1994, a London-based company acquired it for $6.4 billion, adjusted for inflation. Myers called Fore Systems “a grand slam home run for the region.” It was one of many. Freemarkets Inc., a software company, and Respironics Inc., a medical supply company, are similar success stories. More than 30 robotics companies make Pittsburgh one of America’s major centers for robotic innovation. They are the product of CMU’s Robotics Institute, the world’s only Ph.D. program in robotics.
With the turn of the century, the pace of progress accelerated. Whole Foods, Home Depot, and Trader Joe’s set up shop in the city. Then Google moved into a converted cookie factory — part of $131 million redevelopment project — just outside of the East Liberty neighborhood. East Liberty’s turnaround is Pittsburgh’s renaissance in a microcosm. This neighborhood of about 6,000 residents is wedged between some of Pittsburgh’s wealthiest and poorest areas. Crumbling office and commercial buildings have been converted into apartments, promising “urban chic” for people working at the nearby hospitals and universities. The 2011 average sale price for homes in East Liberty was about $80,000, daylight robbery by Manhattan standards. This modest sum, attractive for many young professionals, is still up more than 60 percent from a decade earlier.
The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, explained the search engine’s expansion into the city. “Much of computer science was invented here,” he told an audience at a Pittsburgh Technology Council event in 2009.
This was a few days before the city would play host to the world’s wealthiest nations at the G-20 Summit. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs explained the administration’s choice of city: Pittsburgh “has seen its share of economic woes in the past, but because of foresight, investment is now renewed, giving birth to renewed industries that are creating the jobs of the future.”
The event was the city’s cherry on top, the irrefutable stamp of approval that Pittsburgh had pulled off an unprecedented Rust Belt recovery. If the 2008 Olympics were China’s coming-out party, then the 2009 G-20 was Pittsburgh’s return to the world stage.
***
Challenges certainly remain. Many of them are not particular to Pittsburgh. Aging infrastructure, bloated public pensions, and underperforming public schools are among its ailments. Other obstacles are unique. “Pittsburgh continues to struggle with maintaining venture capital groups. Major funding comes almost exclusively from Boston and Silicon Valley,” Levine explained.
Scott Stern ’15, a Pittsburgh native whose family has lived in the region for seven generations, pointed to the city’s dynastic politics. Luke Ravenstahl, the current 32-year-old mayor, is a third-generation local elected official. “If politicians are winning elections because of their last names and not their ideas, you’re not going to be electing the best people,” Stern said.
The population of foreign-born professionals is also very low for a large American city. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2006 to 2010, only 7 percent of Pittsburgh’s total population is foreign-born. Compare this with New York City: 3 million of its 8.2 million residents are immigrants.
The city also struggles to retain its youth demographic. Eric Levine ’14 is moving to New York City next year rather than returning home to Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood: “There is no question that New York is the best city to be in when you’re young.” Levine has siblings in New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Will he return home one day? “Pittsburgh is a great city. There is a feeling of unity and pride.” But he is unsure, as is Josh Kalla ’14. “Eventually, I’d love to raise a family in Pittsburgh,” Kalla said. “I enjoyed growing up there. For now, though, I want to go to a Ph.D. program in political science, and there aren’t any good options in Pittsburgh.”
Malia Spencer, a technology and manufacturing correspondent for the Pittsburgh Business Times, has a message for young people out there. “When I arrived here from Silicon Valley, I was surprised to see everything that’s going on. I had no idea about Pittsburgh — I was born and raised in California. I didn’t know what to expect; I thought it was going to be like Detroit. I got here, and it’s beautiful. There are forests everywhere. People are setting up co-working stations, incubators, startup weekends. It’s a small community, but you can definitely be hooked in pretty quickly.”
Spencer captures the moment well. Yale “Yinzers” (slang for Pittsburgher) notwithstanding, according to U.S. Internal Revenue Service data, 1,430 more people moved into the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) than packed up and left between 2009 and 2010. This is welcome news for a region with one of the largest elderly populations in the nation.
Can this success be duplicated? What can other Rust Belt cities learn from Pittsburgh?
“The key is to understand your assets and build on them,” Tim White from the RIDC offered. “It is a matter of leadership and focus. It is about marketing your city to attract capital and talent. If Pittsburgh can escape from the clutches of misery, I am confident Detroit and Cleveland will bounce back.”
Success for the former Rust Belt cities also lies in the diversification of their economies. Finance 101: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Pittsburgh had too many of its eggs in the steel basket. Detroit remains too dependent on the success of its automobile industry. While Pittsburgh is still heavily invested in manufacturing, steel production has transitioned into an industry of specialty metals and sophisticated alloys. Over 300 metals technology firms in the area provide production equipment, engineering services, parts, and supplies.
Pittsburgh has more to offer than just specialized steel, booming technology and healthcare industries. It is working to groom its revitalized film industry (part of “The Dark Knight” was shot in Pittsburgh) and music scene to produce more artists like Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller, prominent Pittsburgh-based rappers. Corporate money in the area, from firms such as Heinz and PNC, has allowed the arts to flourish.
***
“What is good for General Motors is good for the country, and vice versa” is a slogan as antiquated as the typewriter. American prosperity is no longer identified with its manufacturing. And yet, too many of America’s cities are still struggling to grapple with the new economic realities. Yale students, as residents of New Haven, can appreciate this. A 10-minute walk from campus leads to the abandoned Winchester ammunitions factory, once the employer of thousands. A few miles south on the Metro-North is Bridgeport, “the Detroit of Connecticut,” a Third World city in the richest state in the richest country in the world.
The coldhearted consultant would recommend that these cities cut their losses and fold to the change of tides. Cleveland’s loss is Phoenix’s gain. Why not close the chapter on the Rust Belt era to make way for the Sun Belt? Investing in Bridgeport is analogous to investing in.
Should mayors and their municipalities choose not to surrender, they need not look to China. Should they choose to reverse their dwindling numbers and invest in new industries that will attract talent and capital, they need not look to Germany. They need only look to Pittsburgh.
Josef Goodman is a junior in Morse CollegeIn the previous tutorial, had been discussed how to check topology error in QGIS with Topology Checker plugin. Some topology errors such as dangle (overshoot, undershoot), overlap and gaps are successfully detected using the topology checker plugin with defining rules in the topology rule settings. There is one question still remain, how to clean the topology error?The best way to clean topology error is by manual editing, but it's tiring and time consuming. Fortunately, there are some tools that can be used to clean topology error in QGIS such as geometry checker and Grass v.clean tool. But must be kept in mind, using the tools not always working perfectly for any cases, but at least it could save time and speed up the process in cleaning topology error.Firstly in this tutorial let's see how to clean topology error for dangles (undershoot and overshoot). To clean this error we use v.clean tool. The tool can be found in the toolbox. If the toolbox menu does not show up. At the top menu click Processing >> Toolbox as in figure 1.Then the processing toolbox will appear. Type clean, the v.clean tool will appear under GRASS commands tool as in figure 2. Actually there are two tools appear v.clean and v.clean.advanced. What is the difference? The difference is: v.clean allow us to do one process in one time, while v.clean.advanced allow us to do more.In cleaning dangle errors, we use v.clean.advanced tool, because we will apply several steps, such as break, snap and remove dangle. Follow these steps to clean the error.1. Open v.clean.advanced. The window of v.clean.advanced will appear as in figure 3.2. Select Road layer for Layer to clean.3. Then we apply three cleaning process: break, snap and remove dangle. For that, type below Cleaning tools: break,snap,rmdangle.4. In the Threshold, fill with 0,5,5. Those are the threshold for each process. In this case I defined 0 for break. For break it is just a dummy value, because it does not need a threshold value. For snap and remove dangle the threshold value is 5. Threshold means the process will take into account if it is equal or less than the specified threshold value. Otherwise it will ignore it. That's why specifying an appropriate threshold value is very important. The threshold unit is in map unit.5. The other parameters just leave as default. But if you want to explore more please free to change them and observe the result.6. Push the Run button to start cleaning process.Now let's see the result. I captured some parts of the result and compare them before and after the cleaning to see the difference. In figure 4, can be seen there is a gap between two road segments that can be considered as undershoot error. The error was fixed as in left picture. The two segments were joined together.In figure 5 can be seen also undershoot error where a road segment does not connect to another road segment. The error was fixed as in the right picture. Both the error in figure 4 and 5 were fixed with snap process.
Figure 6 shows the overshoot error, where a segment road passes another segment with a length 5 meter or less (because we set the threshold 5, remember :)). The result of cleaning is shown in the right picture, which the overpass segment was cut with break process then the remain part was removed with remove dangle.
Figure 6. Overshoot error and the cleaning result
Clean Topology Error in Polygon Data set
Figure 7. Building dataset with topology error
Figure 8. v.clean.advanced tool to clean polygon topology error
Figure 9. Building topology error cleaned
Clean Topology Error with Geometry Checker Plugin
Figure 10. Geometry Checker Plugin
Figure 11. Check Geometries Tool
Figure 12. Check Geometries window
Figure 13. Check geometries topology error
Figure 14. Set Error Resolutions window
Figure 15. Topology errors are fixed
Figure 16. Different result of topology cleaning using v.clean and Check Geometries
Overall, this tutorial has shown that topology errors can be cleaned using v.clean and Check Geometries tool in QGIS. The result from each tool could be different. And as mentioned earlier, using the tools not always working perfectly for any cases, but at least it could save time and speed up the process in cleaning topology error.
We have seen how to clean topology error for road data. What about topology error in polygon dataset such as overlap, gap and sliver polygon. How to clean these error? To clean the error we also use the v.clean.advanced tool. For this tutorial I used a building dataset with overlap and gap error as in figure7.Let's clean the errors with the following steps.1. Open v.clean.advanced.tool.2. To clean the error, there are three processes are needed to be done: break polygon, remove duplicate and remove area. Therefore, under Cleaning tools type: bpol, rmdupl,rmarea. See figure 8.3. In the third step we must define threshold value. For bpol dan rmdupl we can just give a dummy value 0, but for remove area, I gave it 3. It means an area less or equal with 3 (map unit square) will be removed. Because of that it's very important to know about polygon area in the data. To do this we can make a field containing all polygon area. Sort the field and observe small area to help us in defining threshold value.4. Leave the other parameter as default. You could change them, and observe the result.5. Click Run button to start cleaning.The result can be seen in figure 9. The errors were removed. Checked it with topology error again, no errors were found.Last part of this tutorial we will use Geometry Checker plugin to clean topology error. I would say, this tool more intuitive than v.clean and also can be used to detect geometry validity. Moreover we can use this tool to detect sliver polygon. To use Geometry Checker Plugin. Ensure to enable this plugin in the Plugin window as in figure 10.Then the Geometry Checker plugin can be accessed via menu Vector >> Geometry Tools >> Check Geometries. See figure 11.Using the same building dataset, I cleaned the topology error with Geometry checker plugin with the following steps:1. Open Check Geometries tool. The window will appear as in figure 12.2. In the window can be seen there are a lot of processes could be done such as to check geometry validity, properties, condition and of course topology.3. We just deal with topology. So check No sliver polygons to not allow sliver polygon exist with maximum area 1 in map unit square.4. Under topology checks part. Select Check for overlaps smaller than (map unit sqr) and Check for gaps smaller than (map unit sqr). I gave the threshold value for both 5. It means any area with overlap or gaps smaller than 5 square meter will be marked as error.5. Save the result as a new file in create a new layer option.6. Click Run to start processing.7. The result can be seen in the figure 13. We can see there are 3 errors were found, 2 overlaps and a gap. No sliver polygon error were found. Click the error and the error position will be marked with circular red marker on the map.8. Before cleaning the error, we can set how the error will be fixed with Error resolution settings. Click the button and the window shown up as in figure 14. In the respective window we can see and select how the error will be fixed. Choose what appropriate as your purpose.9. To fix errors, select an error or all errors at once and then click button Fix selected errors using default resolution. A fixed error will be highlighted in green color otherwise in red if it can not be fixed. In this case all errors can be fixed. See figure 15.10. Now let's see how the result look like. It can be seen in figure 16. If you observe the result is different with the result of topology cleaning with v.clean tool. The difference was found in the overlap feature.Look, I like being active. I really do! If I'm sitting all day, I tend to feel like crap by about hour four. I think most of us humans are built to move. (Yeah, I totally understood Wall-E.)
My only issue? I find working out at a gym, or really any organized exercise, pretty boring. Over the years, I've gone through phases of trying different organized sports — gymnastics, rock climbing, yoga, even jogging (bla) — but nothing ever tends to stick. And you know why? Because I'm not having that much fun, and I usually have lots of other sh*t I'd rather be doing instead. Which is why, lately, I've opted to find ways to work out that don't feel like work — (or at least help me get other chores done simultaneously). Call it exercise-multitasking, if you will.
I'm not going to count the calories each of the activities I suggest below burns (except in certain cases to back up my dubious-sounding claim that it is indeed exercise) because I believe burning calories and weight loss just aren't the point of fitness. As someone in recovery from disordered eating for a few years now, to me being healthy means measuring what constitutes "good" exercise not in terms of calories burned — but rather in terms of how it makes my body feel.
Here are 15 activities that I would argue most definitely count as exercise but feel like very little work. This one's for you, my fellow multitasking lady badasses.
1. Take A Really Long Walk And Catch Up With Everyone On The Phone
If you're anything like me, you totally owe your mom, dad, uncle, cousin, and best friend from high school a call right now. Sometimes when I have nothing to do but would like to move, I take a ridiculously long, brisk walk around my neighborhood or the park. I don't stop until I'm either tired or have finally caught up with (or left messages for) everyone I've been putting off talking to on the phone. The health benefits of walking just 30 minutes a day are well documented, so consider this the motivation you need to finally call your mom back.
2. Sway Them Hips While Sorting Out Your Closet
This has always been my favorite fun form of exercise. When I was a teenager and still really excited that I finally had hips, I would put on some Beyoncé, Shakira, or (my favorite) the Save the Last Dance soundtrack, and dance in my skivvies till it was through. Not only was I working on my oh-so-skillful moves for parties, but I was helping remind myself just how hot I was every time I caught a glance of my fine self in the mirror.
RobynVEVO on YouTube
If looking at yourself for prolonged periods of time in the mirror feels like too much self-love to start out with, then consider dancing around your room while trying on outfits from your closet. Put some music on, check yourself out in the mirror in different outfits, and think of it as a fun way to sort through your wardrobe. All that moving around and voguing is bound to get your heart rate — and dopamine — flowing. Even better? In the end, you'll know what clothes to ditch. Which brings me to...
3. Schlep Your Old Clothes To A Consignment Shop
Comedy Central on YouTube
Once you've cleaned out your wardrobe, consider walking your giveaway clothes to the nearest consignment shop or thrift store in your neighborhood. Hello, carrying those bags is just like weight training — only at the end of it, you get cash, store credit, and/or MORE CLOTHES. That is way better motivation than striving for those impossibly photoshopped flat abs.
Oh, and the shopping itself? Obviously counts as exercise. Why do you think you always get hungry after?
4. Have A Marathon Masturbation Sesh
If you've ever read anything else by me about being body positive, you knew this one was coming. I try to spread the gospel whenever I can: not only does masturbation have proven mental and sexual health benefits, but the physical benefits are also huge! Ever wonder why you get so ravenous after having sex or using your vibe for a solid hour? Well, that's because it's mother-effing aerobic exercise, guys.
Getting off gets your heart rate way up, helps you work those abs and kegel muscles (seriously notice what your abs are doing next time you're in the heat of it), and helps you have better sex. But best of all? This exercise can be done from bed while watching the porn, rom-com, or totally asexual sitcom of your choice.
We women are expert multitaskers, so if you consider yourself someone who's just "not that into" masturbation or porn, then I suggest investing in a high-grade vibrator and/or reading this article on how to masturbate, and then going to town while watching something that simply makes you happy or has someone you think is cute in it.
If you tend to put a lot of pressure on yourself to orgasm, then you might find that watching something totally unrelated on TV you'd be binging on anyway helps take you to the point where you finally stop worrying and can keep going and going and going.
Remember, it's for your health.
5. Go On An Epic Grocery Shopping Trip
A lesson I've learned the hard way: Don't do this hungry unless you want to spend a lot of money.
But if you have a grocery store within 30 minutes of you, take some reusable bags or a huge backpack, and make a multitasking exercise adventure out of it. Walking there, plus carrying it all home with either your two raging biceps or a huge backpack? Totally more exercise and more productive than the elliptical. Trust me, you'll feel like you're in Wild. (Only instead you'll get to go home and eat lasagna.)
6. Offer To Babysit/Dogsit/Volunteer
Anyone who's ever done any of these altruistic things knows that running after a toddler, a dog, or working at a food bank is way more fun (and far less humiliating) than Zumba. The added health benefit? You'll probably get some dopamine-inducing cuddles and that self-righteous glow.
7. Find Your Flow
TEDx Talks on YouTube
If you're an artist of any kind, you know what your flow is — that feeling of getting lost in your work where time ceases to matter, let alone what size jeans you're wearing.
For me, my flow happens when I'm writing. For others, it's when they're dancing, cooking, making music, or even cleaning the house. Whatever it is, we all have those activities where we completely lose our sense of time, and even if we're sitting while doing them, they are exercising our brain in a way that has proven health (and yes, even caloric) benefits. Ever heard stories about how those pro chess players are using their brains so hard they end up losing a bunch of weight in just one game? Well, I'm not advocating that, but that should serve as proof that really using your mind is indeed exercise.
8. Prioritize Going Out Dancing With Your Friends Over The Gym
Even if you have a drink or two, this totally counts as exercise, and is, in my opinion anyway, way more fun than the gym. Just be sure to drink lots of water for maximum health benefits (and minimum hangover).
9. Clean Your Apartment To Music
So I know there's been some disagreement lately about "just how many calories" cleaning actually burns. Well, I don't give a sh*t, because every time I've finally motivated myself to vacuum or scrub my shower, I can tell I'm working — hard. Cleaning totally counts as exercise, and is good motivation to improve your space instead of going to spinning. (Just put on the same pop music, and the only difference will be that no one is yelling at you.)
10. Take a Really Long Shower
Yes, I know this is bad for your skin and the environment, but sometimes, a girl just needs to take a long, hot shower. Vigorously wash your hair, shave, brush your teeth, and do whatever else makes you move around in there. It counts! (Pay attention to your heart rate and biceps next time you're washing your hair and you'll see what I mean.)
11. Stretch While Reading Or Watching TV
Next time you're extra lazy, just set up a yoga mat on the floor and do some stretching while you're watching that fifth episode of Gilmore Girls. It doesn't have to be strenuous — just move in whatever way feels good and let yourself be blissfully distracted by Luke and Loreli's sexual tension while you work out your own.
12. Get A Standing Desk (Or Find a Place To Stand At Work)
The health risks of sitting all day are awful. Seriously, if you |
audiences. They can also cast everything that’s come before in a new light. With USA’s Mr. Robot, creator Sam Esmail dropped two enormous plot twists on his audience in one episode, revealing that abrasive hacker Darlene is actually Elliot’s sister and that mysterious Mr. Robot is either Elliot’s father, someone who looks exactly like him, or a construct of Elliot’s subconscious. These revelations upended our sense of the reality we’d bought into for seven episodes and called into question what we think we know.
Should we have known? Were there hints this was coming? More importantly, what do these developments tell us about the future of this captivating series? Besides the obvious decision to sit around and wait for next week (or punch some mirrors until I can “see the truth”), there’s also the more fun option of obsessively breaking down key scenes between Elliot and Darlene until next Wednesday. Grab some popcorn, pour yourself a frosty beverage, and settle in.
Episode 1
USA Network
Darlene doesn’t show up until the final third of the episode, once Mr. Robot has successfully brought Elliot into the fsociety fold. Elliot asks “Where’s your boss?” and instead of answering, she says, “Cut the bullshit. When are you giving us access to the root directory?” What used to come off as weirdly forward now seems like standard familial squabbling, though it seems pretty clear that even though this is their first time speaking to each other in the show, this isn’t their first time speaking at fsociety.
Episode 2
USA Network
If you were not asking yourself what Darlene’s problem was after Elliot found her in his shower, you have a higher tolerance for B&E than I do. This scene plays into the old-fashioned, anachronistic inclination of men everywhere to assume that if a strange woman breaks into your apartment, strips naked, takes a shower, then borrows your clothes, that means she wants to sleep with you. Um, wrong. She could just be the sister you forgot about.
Episode 3
USA Network
Darlene meets Shayla. Of course, we all thought “love triangle,” because this is television. In hindsight, the frosty, skeptical quality in Carly Chaikin’s performance as Darlene is less about jealousy and more about concern and worry for her unstable brother. She has been through this many times. His addictive personality has likely been a problem for them for years, and it might be related to why Elliot is legally mandated to see a therapist.
Episode 4
USA Network
The centerpiece of Episode 4 is Elliot’s hallucination, but there’s a scene early on in which Darlene comes over to drag him back to fsociety. Pivoting away from Darlene for a moment, it’s worth it to reexamine the hallucination. Angela says, “You were only born a month ago” and “You’re not Elliot.” What the hell does that mean? Is there memory manipulation or cloning at play here? Is Elliot someone else entirely? Is that why he doesn’t know who his sister or his family is? Is that why Tyrell Wellick is so interested in him? Oh, and is it weird that Darlene’s ex is blackmailing Angela? Angela and Darlene are clearly longtime friends, so does he know Angela somehow? Did he hack Darlene? Too. Many. Questions.
Episode 6
USA Network
This should have raised more eyebrows. Why is Darlene happy to get involved in Elliot’s very serious conflict with Fernando Vera? This is where Chaikin’s performance — which started at mild annoyance and Woody Woodpecker–style instigating — arrives at genuine affection. She’s all in to help, even if that means putting herself in danger.
Episode 7
USA Network
This is the scene that really makes no sense right now. Mr. Robot and Darlene meet for a drink to discuss Darlene’s attempts to contact Whiterose and the Dark Army. The consensus among many fans is that when Mr. Robot speaks to other characters, it’s a manifestation of multiple personality disorder in Elliot. So, if Darlene is speaking to Mr. Robot, she’s actually just conversing with another side of Elliot. In this scene, Mr. Robot says he wants to meet Whiterose himself, but Darlene scoffs at that idea. In the next episode, Darlene tells Elliot he has to be the one to meet with Whiterose. “You’re definitely the one they want to meet with,” she says. Unless Darlene can tell the difference between the two sides of Elliot’s personality, that throws cold water on the notion that they are the same person. So, if they aren’t the same person, who are they?
Episode 8
USA Network
Throughout the series, Mr. Robot has seemed particularly eager to keep Elliot and Darlene apart. She’s crazy. Don’t worry about her. Don’t have each other’s contact information. Mr. Robot freaks out when he notices Darlene giving Elliot her phone number. Is that just because he’s a careful hacker, or is there a reason why Elliot and Darlene can’t be talking outside of fsociety HQ?
After some poking around Reddit, I came upon a theory that ties up a fair amount of these loose ends. In short: Mr. Robot is Elliot’s dad, he had an affair with Angela’s mother, and Elliot found out and told his own mother. That’s the betrayal discussed in Episode 2 and would explain Mr. Robot’s anger toward his son that led him to push Elliot into that rock pile. His dad didn’t die, but he did go into hiding after getting divorced. His desire to destroy Evil Corp is to enact revenge against the company that killed the woman he loved. There are problems with this theory — namely, why does Angela believe that Elliot’s dad is dead? And really, that’s all we have right now: questions. I have a feeling there will be even more after next week.Stephen Simpson will return to JDC-Miller Motorsports for a full-season campaign in the team’s step up to the Prototype class in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Team co-owner John Church confirmed to Sportscar365 that the former open-wheel ace will join the previously confirmed Mikhail Goikhberg in the No. 85 Oreca 07 Gibson for the entire championship, kicking off with this month’s Rolex 24 at Daytona.
It rekindles a successful driver pairing that delivered two Prototype Challenge class victories and a third place finish in the championship last year.
“It’s good continuity for the team,” Church told Sportscar365. “It will be good. Mikhail loves this car.”
Simpson, who had already been confirmed for Daytona, will take on his first season in IMSA’s top category.
“We’d been talking about this early into last year so it’s something that we’ve been talking about for a while,” Simpson told Sportscar365 about the team’s step up to P class racing.
“We all feel comfortable with it, we feel confident with it. We’re looking forward to a new challenge.
“ORECA has done a fantastic job with the new car. The difference between it and the PC car is big, but it’s still a racing car and it still has four wheels and a steering wheel.”
Chris Miller and LMP2 veteran Mathias Beche will complete the Minnesota-based team’s lineup for the season-opener.
The team posted the 9th quickest time overall in last weekend’s Roar Before the 24.
Ryan Myrehn contributed to this reportLocal son is ‘No. 1’
Ridgecrest native tops Billboard 200 with release of ‘California’
Rebecca Neipp
News Review Staff Writer
While the Indian Wells Valley has seen its share of natives move on to great musical acclaim and achievement, the title for commercial success arguably goes to 1990 Burroughs High School graduate Mark Hoppus, who fronts the hugely popular California punk band Blink-182.
The band’s latest release, “California,” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 charts earlier this week, thrilling fans with a return to the catchy sounds and provocative lyrics that made the band a household name in the late 1990s.
But despite the punk icon’s rise to celebrity, longtime resident Tex Hoppus still thinks of his son as the bright, energetic, down-to-earth son he raised in our high-desert community.
Even amid the normalcy of his childhood, though, Mark showed modest hints at local celebrity, with his classmates voting him “Best Hair” and his likeness appearing on the popular Glen Covert-era menus at John’s Pizza.
Tex traced his son’s piqued musical interest to the purchase of his first guitar during the summer between his sophomore and junior years of high school.
“I had a project that I asked him to help with, and I told him he could chose how he wanted to be repaid. He asked for a Fender bass guitar and a small amp. I offered to get him lessons, but he said he wanted to try and teach himself — and he did!”
Tex said he could not take genetic credit for his son’s innate talent. “When he was a boy, he and I would sing Neil Diamond songs together. I can’t say that added to his musical prowess, but that’s the closest it involves me.”
Mark played with a local group while was in Ridgecrest, and formed a new one once he moved to San Diego to attend college. “At that time, he had plans to get a degree in teaching.”
A representative of a small music label heard Mark and his band perform and was impressed by their connection to the audience. The rep began to promote them and find larger performance venues. That eventually attracted the attention of MCA — a major label that purchased the band’s contract.
Mark “called me up and said he was going to have an opportunity to travel with the band, and he knew he couldn’t do that and keep up with classes,” recalled Tex.
“I said, ‘This is a dream we all have — absolutely you should go. College will be here when you return.”
The band leapt into a rigorous rehearsing, performing and recording schedule, which yielded little payoff at first. But with the 1999 release of “Enema of the State,” which went platinum, the band skyrocked into popular culture, leaving an indelible mark that has seen them compared to “The Beatles of pop-punk” and “The quintessential California band.”
Mark still occasionally returns to his home town, most recently to participate in the 70th anniversary of the Historic USO Building.
“I asked him and his family, as well as my daughter and her family, if they would attend,” said Tex, who is president of the Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert, the organization that owns the building. “Mark said he wanted to do more.”
Mark unveiled a guitar that has traveled the world with him, and been signed by himself and his bandmates, that will be put up for auction with the proceeds benefiting HSUMD.
Blink-182 is currently touring the U.S. and Canada in conjunction with its latest album release. Between tours Mark makes his home with his wife and son in Beverly Hills.
“More than anything, he has remained grounded. He is a good father, a good husband, and has a good head for business,” said Tex. “As a musician he is articulate, charismatic and genuinely connected to his audience.
“Of course to me, Dad, he still is and always will be the boy who would take a pillowcase and run out and catch lizards in the desert with his friends.”
Pictured: Mark Hoppus holds a world-traveled bass he presented at the 70th anniversary celebration of the Historic USO?Building. Also pictured are Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert President Tex Hoppus (center) and?Boardmember Matthew Zubia. -- Photo by Laura Austin
Story First Published: 2016-07-15Publisher: Image Comics
Writer: Chris Roberson
Artist: Paul Maybury
Release Date: 19th March 2014
Three strange pilgrims trek across the vast and empty expanse of a huge, unnamed grassland. These missionaries represent The Luminari, a faith which is not native to the wilds in which they wander. Stumbling across the site of a recent massacre, these holy men (and woman) must lay the bodies to rest before they are raised up and used like puppets by foul daemons. Elsewhere, a cocky young Horse Lord leads a hunt for massive beasts but is confronted with some shocking news, while on a distant sea, a young scientist must decipher the cause and meaning of an attack by an undead leviathan.
This new fantasy series from writer Chris Roberson and artist Paul Maybury is sprawling in scope and shows great ambition in its setting up of a fully realised fantasy world. Much like the massively popular Game of Thrones series, there’s a real diversity of peoples and cultures, which is admirable if a little overwhelming. After all, the wider world of Westeros is gradually revealed over the course of several books (or TV seasons if that’s your thing) rather than all at once as happens here.
The art capably handles the variety of characters and settings and there are some nice little touches like an eerie hallucinatory sequence early on which creates a mood of building purpose and dread. The sense of scale on display is fantastic, prairie lands and oceans are suitably endless and giant creatures are both intimidating and weirdly plausible. Sometimes during battle sequences it can be hard to discern who is fighting whom, but largely the art is clear and easy on the eye.
The script suffers slightly from ‘deep-enditis’ with its allusions to people and places hitherto unheard of; there are several references to a fictional history that can be a bit hard to follow. Cold openings like this are common in sci-fi and fantasy, but with its three-pronged narrative, Sovereign has three such openings in the space of 25 pages or so. It’s certainly intriguing, but also slightly confusing.
Still, the fantasy world on display here is well rounded and with enough depth to allow a lot of interesting stories.
Rating: 3/5.
The writer of this piece was: Joe Morrison
Joe is Freelance film journalist based in Glasgow.
You can also find Joe on Twitter.(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)
Oi, you. The one tapping away on your keyboard between bites of a sandwich from Pret.
Put down the sandwich. Go downstairs. Sit outside and give yourself some time to actually focus on eating your lunch instead of half-working, half-eating.
Switching to flat wine bottles could help to reduce carbon emissions
Have a proper lunch break. You deserve it.
I don’t just mean that in a ‘you’ve done well, treat yourself’ kind of way, to be clear.
You literally deserve a lunch break. Everyone does. If you’re working a full-time job, you should be entitled to a break during the day to eat, run some errands, and do whatever the heck you want.
And to be clear, ‘whatever the heck you want’ should not be work.
(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)
In my days in various offices, I’ve noticed a trend: hardworking people will work through lunch, eat their food at their desk, and never leave their email access for longer than the eight minutes it takes to pop to M&S and back.
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I get the impulse.
There’s so much to do. What’s the point of taking an hour or so to eat? You can just shovel in a sandwich, keep working, and manage to leave on time.*
*You won’t actually leave on time though, will you?
It feels more productive to work through lunch and nibble at things instead of taking a break.
Plus you worry that if you budge from your desk, all your colleagues and bosses will notice and silently tut in their heads, judging you as a bad worker who doesn’t care about your job.
Which is absurd, clearly.
It plays into this overwhelming idea of presenteeism – the concept that showing up and spending as much time as possible at your desk is what should be valued above quality of work.
Presenteeism, and working through lunch, values long hours as a sign of dedication and hard work, instead of valuing creativity, time management, and the brilliance of the things you do or make.
For a while, presenteeism has been the status quo. Flexible working hours are a rarity, and people who come in early and stay late are often viewed as harder workers who take their jobs more seriously than those who stay on time.
But that needs a serious shake-up.
In a time when stress levels and anxiety keep rocketing, maintaining a decent work-life balance is more important than ever. And a big part of that is tackling the spectre of presenteeism.
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And how to tackle such a large monster? By proving it’s nonsense. By leaving on time, and taking a lunch break, and proving that your work will be better as a result.
Which it will be, to be clear.
Research has shown, time and time again, that we aren’t designed to work constantly without any breaks. That’s why we have lunch breaks in the first place. Not because we desperately need an hour to consume food (we all know we can wolf down a sandwich in three minutes flat), but because we can’t function without taking a break mid-work.
The human brain can’t focus for long periods of time. Your brain needs a break to think about other things, so that it can return to work fresh and ready to take on tasks again.
(Picture: Mmuffin for Metro.co.uk)
When you’re overworked and have spent your lunch break half working and half eating, you’re less likely to notice mistakes, more likely to struggle to come up with ideas, and your problem solving turns to sh*t.
And the idea that working through lunch is a productive option? It’s a total myth. When your brain is crying out for a break and you force it to multi-task, you fail to do either job properly. You’re not eating and relaxing properly (hence why you can’t tell when you’re full and don’t really enjoy your food), and you’re not entirely focused on your work.
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Scrolling through emails or staring at your screen while you eat doesn’t help, either. It just makes you look busy while actually wrecking your productivity and your mental health.
Working through lunch is rubbish for your physical health, too.
(Picture: Shutterstock/ Ella Byworth)
Your eyes are strained. Your wrist hurts from continuous clicking and scrolling. Your shoulders ache from hunching over in your chair.
You’re supposed to stand up and walk around for a bit, change up your position. But you don’t, and end up sore and stiff as a result.
Attempting to work through your lunch isn’t good, or productive, or clever. It’s a clear sign that you don’t value yourself as anything more than a worker. You’re not even giving into your basic human needs – to rest, to think about something other than work, to eat without typing in between bites.
So you need to start taking a proper lunch break.
By which I mean this.
You get up from your desk, you leave your office, and you go somewhere else. It doesn’t have to be for the full hour. It can be just for 15 minutes.
Woman smears period blood on her face to show the beauty of menstruation
While you’re out there, in a shop, in a cafe, in the park, wherever, you need to be doing something entirely unrelated to your work.
That can be eating a lunch you actually enjoy. It’s as simple as that. If you’re really worried about being away from your desk, just taking the time to eat away from your computer is a step in the right direction.
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But it can be other things, too. Anything you want, in fact. Because your lunch break is your time. It’s time your workplace has agreed to give to you to do with as you please.
You can read. You can nap. You can call your mum. You can do errands. You can fit in a workout. You can take a stroll around the park.
(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)
You can do anything that makes you feel good. But it needs to be something other than your work. Because your entire life is not your work and you are not just a worker.
If you’ve already eaten at your desk (maybe there’s free pizza, or you brought in soup and needed to use the office microwave), you should still be taking that time away from your desk. You don’t need to explain it to anyone or make up an excuse. You are entitled to a break that you’re supposed to use as a break from work.
The reason your workplace has given you a lunch break is because they know that the most productive, happiest, most creative people are that way because they have time away from work. Your employers know that you need a break, and if they’re making you feel bad for taking one, that needs to change.
You’ll return from a proper break feeling refreshed, less stressed, and full of new ideas – because you’ve actually given your brain some time to relax and come back to work refreshed.
(Picture: Shutterstock/ Ella Byworth)
Once you take back your lunch break, you’re starting a subtle workplace revolution.
You’re showing people that it’s totally okay to take a lunch break away from your desk – and that this should be encouraged.
So if you’re a manager or someone higher up, you, especially, should be taking a proper lunch break. To prove that working better is more important than working longer, to show that you can be brilliant and have a lunch break, and to encourage a good work-life balance with the people you work with.
Take a f***ing lunch break. Carry your sandwich downstairs, loudly and proudly. Don’t check your emails and return to your desk at a leisurely pace.
And for the love of god, stop scattering your keyboard with soup spatters and sandwich crumbs. You’re better than that.
Stuff you can do on your lunch break: Eat a fancy lunch and take your time with it. Go to a restaurant if you’re feeling posh.
Catch up with a colleague and chat about non-work things
Call your friends. Call your mum.
Hit the gym or work out in the park
Meditate
Do a lunchtime class to pick up a new skill
Learn a language on DuoLingo
Read a book
Meditate
Take a nap (set an alarm so you don’t end up sleeping away the whole day)
Masturbate
MORE: Let’s make this the year we stop feeling guilty for taking sick days
MORE: How I’m using self-care while I’m on a massive waiting list for therapy
MORE: We tried masturbating at work for a week and this is what happened
Advertisement AdvertisementThe Seoul Metropolitan Government on Wednesday awarded a W500,000 allowance to some 2,800 handpicked young unemployed people (US$1=W1,118).
The Ministry of Health and Welfare immediately condemned the move, which went ahead despite increasingly frantic attempts by the ministry to stop it.
The ministry said it "cannot allow" what it called "populist" welfare policies aimed at bribing young voters. It gave the city government an ultimatum of 9 a.m. Thursday to cancel the policy and threatened to revoke the city's powers. Seoul city officials countered by threatening to take the ministry to court.
The unemployment allowance is paid for up to six months to select young people between 19 and 29 who have lived in the capital for more than a year and work less than 30 hours a week. The aim is to help them out as they search for jobs.
The city has set aside W9 billion this year and hopes to expand the number of recipients in the future. Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, a top presidential contender in the liberal camp, has repeatedly vowed not to back down.
The city received 6,309 applications and last week chose 3,000 of them based on their household income, duration of unemployment and number of family members. The payments started immediately to 2,831 people who signed an acceptance form.
The ministry had apparently hoped to stop the payments at the last minute, but too late. A ministry official warned, "This could prompt other regional governments to undertake similar policies aimed at wooing voters."A company logo is placed on the roof of the Google building in Zurich May 25, 2010. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Search giant Google Inc, facing a broad antitrust probe into its business practices, has hired 12 lobbying firms, a spokeswoman from the company said on Friday.
The Federal Trade Commission, which investigates violations of antitrust law, is expected to look into complaints that Google’s search results favor the company’s other services, among other issues. Google, which runs an estimated 69 percent of Web searches worldwide, can make or break a company depending on its search ranking.
The 12 newly hired lobbying companies are Akin, Gump; Bingham; Capitol Legislative Strategies; Chesapeake Group; Crossroad Strategies; Gephardt Group; Holland & Knight; Normandy Group; Prime Policy; The First Group; The Madison Group; and The Raben Group.
“We have a strong story to tell about our business and we’ve sought out the best talent we can find to help tell it,” the spokeswoman said.
Google, which has an office in Washington, previously hired six other lobbying firms: Crowell Strategies, Dutko Worldwide, Franklin Square Group, McBee Strategic Consulting, Podesta Group, and RB Murphy & Associates, according to government filings.
The firms will be working on the FTC investigation as well as on several other issues that Google is interested in, the spokeswoman said.
Government filings show Google has lobbied on issues as disparate as copyright, taxes, cybersecurity, privacy and patent reform.
Veteran antitrust regulators say hiring lobbyists will not affect the FTC’s investigation.
“I don’t think it matters, quite frankly,” said Robert Doyle, at the law firm Doyle, Barlow and Mazard PLLC. “I don’t care who they hire or how many they hire. Having spent 20 years at the FTC, I know the staff will look at this fairly, honestly and objectively.”Description
The very first Community Collaboration Collection formed by the Test Chamber Development Union that is almost certain to amaze. This particular collection features the following tests:
Portalarity 1- Tanger 2b
Water Hazard- Professor Paradox
Power Interferance- USCobra11
Treviso's Three Floors-Treviso
House of Paint- Yojaka
Each test is specifically designed to teach the player about some of the numerous methods, tips, and tricks that test chamber developers both new and experienced will use in an effort to trump your best efforts. Although each solution varies, one thing is certain: You must not only think outside the box, but outside the Portal as well. You are almost guaranteed to learn something new from this particular collection's tests and possibly gain a mild IQ boost!
*Disclaimer: The Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device will be required to enter these tests.The excuses have started again. Despite the atrocities in Paris, tech companies continue to stubbornly insist that they have no business helping the government catch terrorists.
Governments have upped the pressure on Silicon Valley recently, pointing to tech companies’ support for encryption as a major obstacle to their efforts to anticipate terror attacks. Encrypted devices and encrypted communications, which prevent even the owners of software or hardware from observing a user’s activities, are fast becoming the norm amongst big tech companies.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, has rebuffed fresh calls to assist the authorities by installing such a “back door” to allow security services past their encryption. While Cook insisted he “appreciate[s] law enforcement’s and the national security community’s work to protect us,” he maintained that any weakening of encryption would eventually be exploited “by the bad guys.”
This argument is, of course, nonsense. It is fully within the capabilities of Silicon Valley companies to provide access to government security agencies and no-one else. It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they don’t want to. Why don’t they want to?
It’s because Silicon Valley at its heart remains a progressive paradise. Just as tech companies are obsessed with ending mansplaining and microinequities, they also seem to care little for national security. In their utopian vision of the world, tech companies cannot be directed by society or its representatives, but will instead reshape the world in their own image. Other, lesser companies may bow to the whims of government, but not Silicon Valley.
This sort of pushback against state interference in the private sphere would be admirable, if tech companies had a better way of dealing with the terrorists who use their platforms. But they don’t. In fact, they don’t even seem to care. For years, Twitter harboured thousands of ISIS accounts, making no effort to track them down. It took the vigilante hacking group Anonymous to track down and report their accounts before Twitter got serious.
DDoS-protection service CloudFlare, which prevents websites being taken offline by denial of service attacks, is even more brazen. When challenged on its track record of protecting Islamic militants’ websites from takedowns, its founder and CEO simply said it “wasn’t in their philosophy” to judge the content that they were protecting.
This kind dereliction of moral duty is typical in Silicon Valley, which believes that technology can solve all problems – even when, in the form of unbreakable encryption, it’s clearly creating them.
Silicon Valley’s resistance to government on the matter of surveillance is also strangely at odds with its attitude to government in other areas. In his crusade against “global warming,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now calling for what is effectively socialism. Silicon Valley is also a haven of progressivism, and tends to overwhelmingly back Democrats at the ballot box. They’ll help government regulate healthcare, energy, marriage – they just won’t help them stop you from getting blown up.
There are further double standards. Companies like Google and Facebook are built on the idea that collecting and analysing your personal data is in your best interests. Google wants to know you so well, it will remind you about your every appointment, guide you to your every destination, and answer your every question before you’ve even asked.
Facebook treats its users as guinea pigs, conducting mass experiments on their emotional responses. Somehow, these companies want us to believe that this is less creepy or dangerous than the NSA monitoring terrorists. After all, despite the paranoid visions of the Snowdens and the Assanges, that is all they’re being paid to do.
Silicon Valley’s idealism and naïveté makes for good comedy material when they obsess over diversity quotas and micro-aggressions. But on the subject of encryption, it’s dangerous – and hypocritical.
ALLUM BOKHARI RESPONDS: “Destroying Web Privacy Won’t Destroy Islamic State”
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Twitter and Facebook, or write to him at milo@breitbart.com. Android users can download Milo Alert! to be notified about new articles when they are published.The following guide has been contributed by: Matthew Miller Pharm.D is an experienced homebrewer who authors the sour beer education website www.sourbeerblog.com under the pen-name "Dr. Lambic". He is also a frequent guest on The Sour Hour podcast. He makes use of his scientific background to both further his own brewing and help educate others on the complexities of brewing sour beer.
Hello Homebrewers!
As recently as a decade ago, sour beers were a relatively obscure group of styles. The handful of examples on the commercial market were mostly Belgian imports with a few rare beers being produced locally by craft or home brewers. Back then, to say that a great deal of confusion existed regarding sour brewing techniques would have been an understatement. A swirling cloud of misunderstanding, myth, and fear may more accurately describe the sour brewing mindset at that time. Luckily, the times they are a changin'... and today, the sour brewing community is armed with more science, experience, and enthusiasm than ever before. Despite this, it still seems that many beginning homebrewers find themselves hesitant to attempt their first sour brews. If you fall into this group, and you're ready to tumble down the sour brewing rabbit hole, then this guide is for you!
When I write for my own site, SourBeerBlog.com, I have developed a reputation for lengthy and very detailed articles, so I took the three-page format of this guide as a personal challenge! As this is a guide for beginning homebrewers, I will assume that you've got at least one or two batches of non-sour beer already under your belt. From that starting point, this guide will give you the recipes, techniques, and understanding that you will need to get your first sour beer from brew day to bottle. Let's get started!
Just like yeast choice is what separates an ale from a lager, sour beers are defined by a special collection of yeast and bacteria that give them both their acidity and unique flavors. One of these yeasts, Saccharomyces (Sacc), is the same "Brewer's Yeast" that you've already used for other beers. This yeast will create the majority of the alcohol in our sour beer. In addition to Sacc, we are going to add a new character, a bacteria called Lactobacillus (Lacto). These bacteria will produce the acidity in our sour beer. Lastly, we are going to introduce a third member into the fermentation, another family of yeast called Brettanomyces (Brett). It's going to be Brett's job to give the sour beer it's unique aromas and flavors. These characteristics can range anywhere from yogurt or sourdough to things like lilacs, chocolate, candy, or tropical fruit. For your first sour beer we are going to avoid using another variety of bacteria that you may have heard of called Pediococcus. These colorful characters can be challenging to deal with and aren't a requirement to make a delicious sour beer.
When using proper cleaning and sanitizing techniques, there is very little risk of infecting your "clean" batches of beer with these sour beer organisms. However, I do recommend segregating any plastic or rubber gear that comes in contact with these beers to be used exclusively for sour beers from that point forward. This typically includes plastic buckets, transfer hoses, bottling wands, rubber stoppers, and airlocks. Any equipment made of glass or stainless steel is easy to sanitize and can be used for both sour and clean beers without worry.
I've chosen two recipe options for this guide. One will create a classic golden sour and the second will produce a sour red ale. Regardless of whether you brew extract or all-grain, or use partial or full wort boils, you can make these sour beers. After your initial brew day, all other steps in the guide will apply equally regardless of your recipe choice:
If step mashing, target a protein rest at 130° F for 15 minutes then raise to a saccharification rest at 154° F. If infusion mashing, simply grain-in at 154° F and hold the mash for 60 minutes. If you're worrying over a few degrees up or down, I will refer you to the sage advice of Charlie Papazian... Likewise, fly sparging, batch sparging, or brew-in-a-bag will all work equally well for these beers. Target the pre-boil gravities listed above but don't get discouraged if any of the mash temps or pre-boil / post-boil numbers aren't dead-on, the heart and soul of these beers are forged in fermentation.
Give the wort a gentle rolling boil for 60 minutes, add Whirlfloc or other kettle finings 15 minutes before the end of the boil, then cool to 95° F. At this temperature, transfer the wort into the primary fermentation vessel of your choice. To this wort, add one of the following Lactobacillus options:
One carton Goodbelly Probiotic Drink
One package of Omega Yeast Lacto Blend (OYL-605)
One package of Gigayeast Fast Souring Lacto (GB110)
Wrap your primary fermentation vessel in a sleeping bag or other insulating wrap, then let it slowly cool to room temperature over the next twelve hours or so. At this point, it will be time to oxygenate the wort and pitch our Saccharomyces. You can aerate the wort via vigorous shaking for 5 to 10 minutes or bubble pure oxygen into the wort for around a minute or so. Use of a sintered stone with filtered air or pure oxygen is also an option that helps get more oxygen into the wort.
After the wort reaches room temp and has been oxygenated, we are going to choose one of the following Saccharomyces strains:
For a balance of fruity and funky character - White Labs WLP001 (California Ale Yeast)
For a fruitier character - White Labs WLP007 (Dry English Ale)
For a funkier character - White Labs WLP568 (Saison Blend)
Allow the beer to ferment until signs of active fermentation are complete. Now it's time to taste a sample. At this point the beer may range in acidity from lightly tart to puckeringly sour. The beer may not taste particularly good right now but that is okay. It will get better! There are two specific flavors that we are looking to avoid, if either of the following are present, it's best to dump the beer and try again:
A strong, unpleasant taste or smell of parmesan cheese, stinky feet, or rotten milk.
A strong, unpleasant taste of vomit or bile.
Don't become discouraged if you have to dump a batch, any sour brewer worth their salt has to dump batches from time to time!
As long as things are tasting alright (or at least not too bad), then we are ready to move forward. From this point onwards, we are going to avoid any oxygen exposure if possible. We will now transfer the beer from its primary fermentation vessel into a sanitized 5 gallon carboy. The goal will be to add our final microbe, Brettanomyces, and fill the carboy up to the neck with beer so that a minimal surface area touches the air (this helps reduce oxygen exposure).
When it comes to choosing a Brettanomyces strain or blend, you have a variety of options. Here are a few strains that I think work very well:
White Labs WLP650 Brettanomyces bruxellensis (Fruity & Funky)
White Labs WLP653 Brettanomyces bruxellensis 'lambicus' (Barnyard & Haylike)
East Coast Yeast ECY34 'Dirty Dozen' Brett Blend (Earthy, Sweaty, Animalistic Funk)
The Yeast Bay 'Amalgamation' Brett Blend (Tropical Fruits)
Once you pitch your Brett and fill up the carboy, the only thing you have to do now is wait and keep the airlock topped up. I would recommend visually checking in on the beer from time to time. You may or may not notice a pellicle (white |
of bliss and clarity. And, if attained, does enlightenment persist? Are the enlightened more creative subsequent to attaining satori, to use the Zen term for enlightenment? Are they kinder, wiser, or more creative than the unenlightened?
None of the teachers I asked gave unequivocal answers to these questions. Nor did any of them unambiguously exemplify the supposed benefits of enlightenment. Many identified with traditional religious rituals or techniques, and saw their job as grafting these onto contemporary American culture. The language of enlightenment tended to be esoteric, obscurantist, and elitist, and the teachings attracted more credulous dabblers than credible seekers.
In the end, I concluded that while certain people do attain an unusual degree of insight into the workings of the mind, their default consciousness did not seem different in kind from that of other extraordinary individuals who made no claim to enlightenment and indeed were skeptical about the idea.
During quiet moments, when our current identity is withdrawn, “off duty” as it were, we can see ourselves as nothing special no matter how grand our public persona, or nothing shameful no matter how lowly our social status. We just are what we are, unburdened of opinions, free of judgment and guilt, released from striving, perhaps inclined towards empathy, perhaps not. We take things in, and we witness ourselves doing so. We see the world whole and are not separate from what we behold. We may experience euphoria, or just tranquility.
Regardless, neither euphoria nor tranquility lasts. Presently, when the world calls us back to the ho-hum of everyday life, we have to assume a working identity because not to have one is to have no way to participate in the life game. Even gurus who style themselves as having no identity are assuming the identity of someone who fancies himself or herself to be egoless.
I’ve come to think that the eradication of ego is no more workable than doing without the other pillar of being—the body. Rather than downgrading either, it’s better to give them both their due by maintaining them in good working order. Take care of the body, and it’ll support your identity; take care of your identity, and it will support your quest.
In my quest, I did not come across anyone who could be said to dwell in a state of permanent enlightenment. No doubt, some gurus experienced bliss, but it was intermittent, as in other people.
The term enlightenment is sometimes used to denote the knowledge of the insubstantiality and malleability of identity and sometimes to refer to an experience of the insubstantiality of self. Knowledge may last, but an experience can’t be bottled. In this regard, enlightenment is like happiness: treasured all the more for its intermittence.
Enlightenment practices, not unlike mathematics and physics, are often obfuscated. A few centuries ago, reading and writing were such rare skills that possessing them set people apart. In the same way that literacy has spread, so too will people everywhere become conversant with experiences of enlightenment, recognizing them as the unmoored feeling of pivoting from an old model (which may range from a single belief to a personal identity) to a new one.
Robert Fuller
Breaking Ranks: Dignity Is Not Negotiable
Posted: Thursday, 26 July 2012WHEN is a debt not a debt? When the money is promised to prospective pensioners. That appears to be the underlying message of a package unveiled this month by the Polish government.
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The Polish pension system, set up in 1999, has two tiers, in which workers make mandatory contributions into a state system (ZUS) and into funds run by private fund managers (OFEs), with their retirement income determined by a complex formula. The authorities are planning to absorb the government bonds held by OFE schemes, cancel them and thereby reduce the state’s debt-to-GDP ratio by around eight percentage points. The government says the pension rights of OFE scheme members will be unaffected.
The headline debt-to-GDP ratio will indeed fall, which might impress the markets. But in effect, Poland intends to replace an outright liability (the bonds) with a contingent liability (the state-pension promise). Fitch, a ratings agency, dismissed the reforms as “broadly neutral” for the country’s debt rating.
But if Fitch is right, what is the point of the reform in the first place? One possible explanation is that the Polish government was approaching a debt-to-GDP ratio of 55%, a threshold it had legally promised not to cross. But the government has said it will lower the threshold to take account of the impact of the pension reform.
Polish workers have a right to be cynical. Defaulting on a government bond, even in a small way, is a highly public and market-moving act. Reducing the value of a state pension is a much easier trick to pull off. A standard sleight-of-hand is to adjust the inflation-linking formula behind pension payments so that the real value of the pension falls over time.
The assumption that governments will default, at least in part, on pension promises is one reason why public-debt-to-GDP numbers do not include the present value of future pension promises. If they were included, the numbers would look a lot worse. A report from Fitch earlier this year suggested that the pressure of ageing populations could push up the average debt-to-GDP ratio of European Union nations by almost seven percentage points by 2020 and a staggering 111 points by 2050.
The sheer scale of this liability means that pension “reforms” (in plain English, benefit reductions) will have to be pushed through to prevent fiscal meltdown. But that leaves politicians in the awkward position of promising voters benefits that simply cannot be delivered.
Many governments have sought to head off the fiscal burden of their pension promises by encouraging the establishment of private schemes. In theory, workers on private pensions are less likely to become dependent on the state; in addition, private pension funds create a potential investor base for the country’s capital markets. It might seem odd, therefore, that many private pension schemes invest in government bonds, particularly at current low yields. Why set up an elaborate pension-delivery system if retirement incomes still end up, in effect, being another claim on the taxpayer?
The reason is that a pension is in essence an annuity—an agreement to pay an individual an income for the rest of his or her life. And annuities are bond-like: the income they generate falls as bond yields fall. As more of their members approach or pass retirement, pension schemes tend to buy more bonds in order to hedge their liabilities. Some public schemes do the same. The Bank of England’s scheme is mainly invested in inflation-linked government bonds. America’s Social Security trust fund is entirely invested in Treasury bonds.
Governments issuing debt to pay their own IOUs looks to some people like a Ponzi scheme. But all pension schemes have a pyramid-like element in that they represent a claim on the incomes of future workers. A fund invested entirely in equities depends on future workers to generate the profits needed to make those equities valuable. If, as seems likely, the size of the workforce in European countries is set to decline over the next 20 years, that is a problem whether pension benefits are paid via the tax system or via a separately funded scheme.
The best way to absorb the cost is for workers to retire later. Since 1971 life expectancy has risen across the (mainly rich-country) OECD by four to five years, yet only now are retirement ages being adjusted upwards. Such changes will barely keep pace with projected longevity gains. It would be far better for citizens to work longer and get a decent pension for a shorter time than to see their benefits eroded by cash-strapped governments.What could possibly have gone wrong, you racist, bigoted Islamophobe? Don’t you regularly find pipe bombs planted in your luggage by persons unknown to you?
“Ryanair passenger found with pipe bomb in luggage was allowed to fly again days later,” Irish Independent, February 14, 2017 (thanks to MH):
A PASSENGER who was boarding a Ryanair flight with a pipe bomb in his hand luggage was allowed to continue his journey days later, a court heard on Monday.
Nadeem Mulhammed (43) was arrested by police on suspicion of terrorism after “batteries wrapped in brown tape” was found in his bag.
However, after allegedly telling officers the device had been planted by someone else, he was released on bail and allowed to travel.
He subsequently flew to Italy but in the meantime, tests revealed it was a “viable device” containing sufficient explosives to cause “serious damage and loss of life” on a plane, the court heard.
Mr Muhammed was arrested on his return back to the UK at Manchester Airport on Sunday and charged with being in possession of an explosive substance.
He had been boarding a Ryanair flight to Bergamo, Italy when he was held under the UK’s Terrorism Act following a security screening.
The device found consisted of a “small pipe, like a large market pen’ and was filled with “smokeless propellant often found in ammunition.”…China’s propaganda authorities have ordered its online media firms to take a tough stance on Japan following Tokyo’s historic decision this week to allow greater use of its armed forces in defending other countries, sources familiar with the situation said Friday.
The directive says that the media must keep “criticizing” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government for approving the reinterpretation of Japan’s pacifist Constitution, which will permit its military to assist allies under armed attack by legalizing the use of “collective self-defense,” sources close to the authorities said.
The authorities have asked the media to “guide the public to have the right view” on Japan, the sources said, adding that the order was issued after Abe’s Cabinet decided Tuesday to reinterpret war-renouncing Article 9 of the post-war Constitution.
As for their print counterparts, it is most likely that the Communist Party’s spin control team and the government have issued a similar order to China’s newspapers.
The instructions also refer to Abe’s planned visit to Australia and New Zealand later this month, saying “there will likely be some remarks from him (about China) but they should be treated in a way not to stand out.”
Since Abe’s visit in December to controversial Yasukuni Shrine, China has mounted large-scale, anti-Japan media campaigns at home and abroad, alleging that Tokyo is returning to its militaristic ways and that Abe’s government has failed to show genuine repentance for the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during World War II.
The directive points to the possibility that China’s leadership, led by President Xi Jinping, might use the loosening of the constraints on the Self-Defense Forces as an additional factor to condemn Abe’s government.
Xi, on his first trip to Seoul after becoming China’s president in 2013, expressed concerns with South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Friday about Abe’s decision to lift the government’s ban on using collective self-defense, according to South Korean media reports.
In the latest series of attacks linked to Japan’s war of aggression, China on Thursday started posting online what it claims are the written confessions of 45 Japanese who were convicted there as war criminals.
The State Archives Administration said the original texts with Chinese translations and abstracts in English would be released once each day for 45 days.
The release started as China on Monday observed the 77th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the clash between Chinese and Japanese troops that is considered the starting point for Japan’s entry into World War II.The wonders of Minecraft never cease. This time around, someone has built a cellphone in the game itself which can browse the internet and make video calls.
The someone who built it? Verizon Wireless.
YouTuber CaptainSparklez---aka Jordan Maron---can be seen below demoing the phone. It's all part of a paid ad campaign to promote Verizon using the game and its most popular streamers (CaptainSparklez just bought a $4.5 mansion with his YouTube earnings.)
Here's the demo which---although part of an ad campaign---is pretty sweet:
And here's YouTuber SethBling demoing the phone:
In-game you'll see the boxy version of the person calling on the other end. The other person will see your Minecraft avatar. The whole thing is sort of mind-boggling in a way that only Minecraft creations ever are.
Verizon describes what's going on in a blog post:
With the help of Wieden+Kennedy and BlockWorks, we built custom functionality that lets players browse the Internet, make video calls and create a selfie stick to send an MMS selfie to a friend. [...] In the world of Minecraft, almost everything is made of blocks. We’ve created a web application, Boxel, that translates real web pages and streaming video into blocks so they can be built on a Minecraft server in real time. Our server plugin uses Boxel-client to handle the communication between Minecraft and the real world as translated by the web application. We’ve open-sourced these libraries — so if you can write a little code, you can try it for yourself.
You can find instructions on how to do it yourself at the above link.
Now that we have a working cellphone in Minecraft, we can once and for all say that Microsoft's $2 billion purchase of the game was actually worthwhile. And tongue-in-cheek aside, this is all pretty extraordinary.
I envision a future where the lines between the boxy world of Minecraft and the less-pixelated real world are blurred; a future where our children hold conference calls within the Microsoft's augmented reality headset, Hololens, and Minecraft at the same time. Or something like that. Who, truly, can predict the future of tech?
If nothing else, we can say without a doubt that the nature of advertising is always evolving. Verizon is very clever to tap into the Minecraft buzz.
And after looking at that mansion CaptainSparklez just bought---and I don't even need to mention the mansion Minecraft creator Notch purchased not long ago---I can't help but think I got into the wrong line of work. Who knew there was so much money in Minecraft?The 2007–08 Toronto Maple Leafs season began October 4, 2007. It is the 91st season of the franchise, 81st season as the Maple Leafs.
In an effort to return to the playoffs in 2007–08, the Leafs made two significant moves during the off-season. The first was to acquire goaltender Vesa Toskala, along with Mark Bell from the San Jose Sharks for three draft picks.[1] Toronto also signed free agent Jason Blake to a five-year, $20 million contract. Blake topped the 40-goal mark for the first time in 2006–07.[2]
With the Leafs struggling in the Northeast Division, the future of John Ferguson, Jr.'s tenure as general manager has been widely debated after Team President Richard Peddie admitted that hiring Ferguson was "a mistake."[3] According to TSN, the Leafs asked former Toronto GM Cliff Fletcher to serve as interim GM early in January.[4] On January 22, it was announced that Ferguson's time with the club had ended, as the board of directors at Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment voted to make a change. Fletcher was named interim general manager of the team.[5]
Defenceman Tomáš Kaberle was selected to represent the Maple Leafs and the Eastern Conference at the 2008 All-Star Game in Atlanta, Georgia.[6] He hit all four targets in four shots to become the winner of the accuracy competition.
Regular season [ edit ]
On October 8, 2007, newly acquired winger Jason Blake announced that he had chronic myelogenous leukemia, a treatable form of cancer. He continued playing during treatment.
In mid-November 2007, Jiri Tlusty was caught in a scandal when nude photos of him appeared on the Internet. Tlusty apologized for this incident and admitted he made a mistake.
The Maple Leafs struggled on the penalty kill during the regular season, allowing an NHL-high 77 power-play goals.[7]
Divisional standings [ edit ]
Northeast Division GP W L OTL GF GA Pts 1 z – Montreal Canadiens 82 47 25 10 262 222 104 2 Ottawa Senators 82 43 31 8 261 247 94 3 Boston Bruins 82 41 29 12 212 222 94 4 Buffalo Sabres 82 39 31 12 255 242 90 5 Toronto Maple Leafs 82 36 35 11 231 260 83
Conference standings [ edit ]
Divisions: AT – Atlantic, NE – Northeast, SE – Southeast
bold – qualified for playoffs, y – division winner, z – placed first in conference (and division)
Playoffs [ edit ]
For the third straight year, the Leafs did not qualify for the playoffs.
Schedule and results [ edit ]
October [ edit ]
Record: 5–5–3; Home: 3–4–2; Road: 2–1–1
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 1 October 3 Ottawa 4–3 Toronto OT Raycroft 19,476 0–0–1 1 2 October 4 Toronto 2–3 Ottawa Toskala 19,857 0–1–1 1 3 October 6 Montreal 3–4 Toronto OT Toskala 19,476 1–1–1 3 4 October 9 Carolina 7–1 Toronto Toskala 19,224 1–2–1 3 5 October 11 N.Y. Islanders 1–8 Toronto Raycroft 19,319 2–2–1 5 6 October 13 Pittsburgh 6–4 Toronto Toskala 19,479 2–3–1 5 7 October 15 Toronto 4–5 Buffalo OT Raycroft 18,217 2–3–2 6 8 October 18 Florida 2–3 Toronto Toskala 19,349 3–3–2 8 9 October 20 Chicago 6–4 Toronto Raycroft 19,314 3–4–2 8 10 October 23 Atlanta 5–4 Toronto SO Toskala 19,210 3–4–3 9 11 October 25 Toronto 5–2 Pittsburgh Toskala 17,051 4–4–3 11 12 October 27 Toronto 4–1 N.Y. Rangers Toskala 18,200 5–4–3 13 13 October 29 Washington 7–1 Toronto Toskala 19,316 5–5–3 13
November [ edit ]
Record: 4–6–3; Home: 1–1–3; Road: 3–5–0
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 14 November 2 Toronto 2–3 New Jersey Toskala 14,523 5–6–3 13 15 November 3 Toronto 3–2 Montreal Toskala 21,273 6–6–3 15 16 November 6 Toronto 1–5 Ottawa Toskala 19,613 6–7–3 15 17 November 9 Toronto 3–0 Buffalo Raycroft 18,690 7–7–3 17 18 November 10 † N.Y. Rangers 3–2 Toronto SO Toskala 19,503 7–7–4 18 19 November 13 Montreal 4–3 Toronto OT Raycroft 19,595 7–7–5 19 20 November 15 Toronto 2–5 Boston Raycroft 16,373 7–8–5 19 21 November 17 Ottawa 0–3 Toronto Toskala 19,596 8–8–5 21 22 November 20 Boston 4–2 Toronto Toskala 19,441 8–9–5 21 23 November 23 Toronto 1–3 Dallas Toskala 18,409 8–10–5 21 24 November 24 Toronto 1–5 Phoenix Raycroft 17,190 8–11–5 21 25 November 27 Montreal 4–3 Toronto SO Toskala 19,608 8–11–6 22 26 November 29 Toronto 4–2 Atlanta Toskala 14,031 9–11–6 24
December [ edit ]
Record: 6–5–2; Home: 3–2–0; Road: 3–3–2
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 27 December 1 Pittsburgh 2–4 Toronto Toskala 19,534 10–11–6 26 28 December 4 Nashville 1–3 Toronto Toskala 19,400 11–11–6 28 29 December 6 Toronto 6–2 N.Y. Rangers Toskala 18,200 12–11–6 30 30 December 8 Boston 2–1 Toronto Toskala 19,441 12–12–6 30 31 December 10 Tampa Bay 1–6 Toronto Toskala 19,454 13–12–6 32 32 December 14 Toronto 4–0 Atlanta Toskala 16,424 14–12–6 34 33 December 15 Toronto 1–4 Montreal Toskala 21,273 14–13–6 34 34 December 18 Toronto 2–3 Carolina OT Toskala 17,045 14–13–7 35 35 December 20 Toronto 1–2 Tampa Bay Toskala 19,131 14–14–7 35 36 December 22 Toronto 2–1 Florida OT Toskala 18,500 15–14–7 37 37 December 26 Toronto 3–4 N.Y. Islanders OT Raycroft 15,301 15–14–8 38 38 December 27 Toronto 1–4 Philadelphia Raycroft 19,727 15–15–8 38 39 December 29 N.Y. Rangers 6–1 Toronto Raycroft 19,408 15–16–8 38
January [ edit ]
Record:5–8–1 ; Home: 4–2–0; Road: 1–6–1
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 40 January 1 Tampa Bay 3–4 Toronto SO Clemmensen 19,347 16–16–8 40 41 January 3 Toronto 2–6 Pittsburgh Clemmensen 17,074 16–17–8 40 42 January 5 Philadelphia 3–2 Toronto Raycroft 19,412 16–18–8 40 43 January 9 Toronto 0–5 Anaheim Toskala 17,174 16–19–8 40 44 January 10 Toronto 2–5 Los Angeles Raycroft 18,118 16–20–8 40 45 January 12 Toronto 2–3 San Jose Toskala 17,496 16–21–8 40 46 January 15 Carolina 4–5 Toronto Toskala 19,444 17–21–8 42 47 January 17 Toronto 3–2 Boston SO Toskala 13,907 18–21–8 44 48 January 19 Buffalo 2–4 Toronto Toskala 19,436 19–21–8 46 49 January 20 Toronto 2–3 New Jersey Raycroft 15,291 19–22–8 46 50 January 23 Washington 2–3 Toronto Toskala 19,479 20–22–8 48 51 January 24 Toronto 1–2 Washington Toskala 14,094 20–23–8 48 52 January 29 St. Louis 3–2 Toronto Toskala 19,363 20–24–8 48 53 January 31 Toronto 2–3 Carolina OT Toskala 15,159 20–24–9 49
February [ edit ]
Record: 8–4–1 ; Home: 5–3–0 ; Road: 3–1–1
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 54 February 2 Ottawa 2–4 Toronto Toskala 19,543 21–24–9 51 55 February 5 Florida 8–0 Toronto Toskala 19,430 21–25–9 51 56 February 7 Toronto 4–2 Montreal Toskala 21,273 22–25–9 53 57 February 9 Detroit 2–3 Toronto OT Toskala 19,510 23–25–9 55 58 February 13 Toronto 0–1 Buffalo Toskala 18,690 23–26–9 55 59 February 14 NY Islanders 5–4 Toronto Toskala 19,227 23–27–9 55 60 February 16 Boston 3–4 Toronto OT Toskala 19,481 24–27–9 57 61 February 19 Columbus 1–3 Toronto Toskala 19,347 25–27–9 59 62 February 21 Buffalo 5–1 Toronto Toskala 19,467 25–28–9 59 63 February 23 Atlanta 1–3 Toronto Toskala 19,390 26–28–9 61 64 February 25 Toronto 5–0 Ottawa Toskala 19,861 27–28–9 63 65 February 27 Toronto 4–3 Florida SO Toskala 14,557 28–28–9 65 66 February 29 Toronto 2–3 Tampa Bay OT Toskala 20,641 28–28–10 66
March [ edit ]
Record: 8–5–0; Home: 2–4–0; Road: 6–1–0
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 67 March 1 Toronto 3–2 Washington Toskala 18,277 29–28–10 68 68 March 4 New Jersey 4–1 Toronto Toskala 19,507 29–29–10 68 69 March 6 Toronto 8–2 Boston Toskala 15,483 30–29–10 70 70 March 8 New Jersey 2–1 Toronto Toskala 19,469 30–30–10 70 71 March 11 Philadelphia 3–4 Toronto OT Toskala 19,507 31–30–10 72 72 March 12 Toronto 3–2 Philadelphia Toskala 19,642 32–30–10 74 73 March 15 Buffalo 6–2 Toronto Toskala 19,462 32–31–10 74 74 March 18 Toronto 3–1 NY Islanders Toskala 13,134 33–31–10 76 75 March 21 Toronto 4–1 Buffalo Toskala 18,690 34–31–10 78 76 March 22 Toronto 5–4 Ottawa Toskala 20,183 35–31–10 80 77 March 25 Boston 6–2 Toronto Toskala 19,562 35–32–10 80 78 March 27 Toronto 2–4 Boston Toskala 16,659 35–33–10 80 79 March 29 Montreal 2–4 Toronto Toskala 19,584 36–33–10 82
April [ edit ]
Record: 0–2–1; Home: 0–1–1; Road: 0–1–0
Game # Date Visitor Score Home OT Decision Attendance Record Points 80 April 1 Buffalo 4–3 Toronto SO Raycroft 19,288 36–33–11 83 81 April 3 Ottawa 8–2 Toronto Toskala 19,466 36–34–11 83 82 April 5 Toronto 1–3 Montreal Raycroft 21,273 36–35–11 83
† Hockey Hall of Fame Game
Playoffs [ edit ]
On March 27, 2008, the Toronto Maple Leafs were eliminated from postseason contention for the third straight season following a 4–2 loss to the Boston Bruins.
Player statistics [ edit ]
Final stats [8]
Skaters [ edit ]
Regular Season Player GP G A Pts +/- PIM 74 32 46 78 17 76 72 26 30 56 10 92 82 8 45 53 -8 22 82 15 37 52 -4 28 76 15 27 42 0 32 72 11 29 40 5 116 66 18 17 35 3 36 74 18 16 34 -8 100 82 16 17 33 -11 47 54 5 18 23 -2 81 59 8 13 21 -12 0 81 5 16 21 -9 44 ‡ 63 2 18 20 0 52 62 7 11 18 -6 24 53 10 7 17 1 18 58 10 6 16 -12 14 † 38 4 10 14 7 14 35 4 6 10 -2 60 50 3 6 9 -10 18 48 2 7 9 5 54 28 2 4 6 -4 10 33 1 4 5 -4 10 11 2 2 4 -1 6 18 2 0 2 -3 4 28 1 1 2 -7 32 ‡ 30 1 0 1 -2 66 9 0 1 1 -2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 -1 5 13 0 0 0 -6 7 18 0 0 0 -2 7
Goaltenders [ edit ]
Regular Season Player GP GS TOI W L OT GA GAA SA SV% SO G A PIM 66 64 3837 33 25 6 175 2.74 1824.904 3 0 5 4 19 16 965 2 9 5 63 3.92 509.876 1 0 0 0 3 2 154 1 1 0 10 3.90 62.839 0 0 0 0
†Denotes player spent time with another team before joining Maple Leafs. Stats reflect time with Maple Leafs only.
‡Traded mid-season.
Bold/italics denotes franchise record.
Awards and records [ edit ]
Records [ edit ]
On October 11, 2007, in an 8–1 victory over the New York Islanders, Mats Sundin scored his 390th goal as a Leaf, and earned his 917th point in a Leaf uniform breaking Darryl Sittler's team record as the all-time points and goals leader.
Milestones [ edit ]
Transactions [ edit ]
The Maple Leafs have been involved in the following transactions during the 2007–08 season.
Trades [ edit ]
Free agents [ edit ]
Claimed from waivers [ edit ]
Player Former team Date claimed off waivers Dominic Moore Minnesota Wild January 11, 2008
Draft picks [ edit ]
Toronto's picks at the 2007 NHL Entry Draft in Columbus, Ohio.[9]
Roster [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]Israel and the US on the wrong side of history The question for Israel and its friends to address the risks of recognition of a Palestinian state, and to calibrate their reaction accordingly.
Shortly before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist in November 1995, I met him in Tel Aviv. I was visiting Israel as Australia’s foreign minister to argue the case for rapid implementation of the Oslo peace accords – all the way through to negotiated acceptance of Palestinian statehood. I concluded my pitch by saying, with perhaps a little more cheek than was appropriate: “But of course I’m preaching to the converted.” Rabin’s response is etched in my memory. He paused, then said with a little half-smile: “To the committed, not the converted.”
For all his deep emotional attachment to the idea of Israel embracing all of historical Judea and Samaria, Rabin knew that the only way to ensure a democratic Jewish state with viable, secure borders was to accept a Palestinian state alongside it, equally secure and viable. They would share Jerusalem as a capital, and find a mutually acceptable solution to the enormously sensitive issue of the return of Palestinian refugees.
Rabin’s murder was a catastrophe from which the peace process has never recovered. No Israeli leader since has shown anything like his far-sighted vision, commitment, and capacity to deliver a negotiated two-state solution.
Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert came close, but not close enough. And since then Binyamin Netanyahu has lived down to every expectation of his statesmanship. His routine capitulation to the demands of the most extreme elements of a manifestly dysfunctional Knesset, and his continuing support of his impossibly divisive and pugnacious foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, have earned him little praise at home or abroad. One need not be naïve or in denial about the Palestinians’ multiple problems and missteps over the years to recognise that most of the recent obstacles to progress have been erected in Israel.
Now, with negotiations at an impasse, settlement building continuing unabated, no end in sight to the never-ending humiliation of occupation, and all other forms of leverage evidently exhausted, the Palestinians are going to the United Nations to seek recognition in some form of their statehood. They want full UN membership, but – facing inevitable veto of that option by the United States in the Security Council – are willing to accept as a fallback a majority vote by the General Assembly recognising Palestine as a non-member ‘observer state’, the status now enjoyed by the Vatican.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his colleagues know perfectly well that UN recognition by itself will not deliver an end to occupation and the full realisation of a sovereign Palestine. Only negotiated agreement on all of the critical outstanding issues – boundary definition, Jerusalem, security guarantees for Israel, and refugees – can do that. But they have persisted on this course in the face of a fierce campaign to dissuade them – including threats of Israeli sanctions and a cut-off of financial support to the Palestinian Authority by the US Congress – owing to their wholly understandable lack of confidence that anything will move without some new spark.
Despite frantic efforts by the US and the European Union to find some compromise that would head off a UN vote by kick-starting real negotiations, it is much more probable that, even after a US veto in the Security Council, an early UN General Assembly vote will deliver a strong majority for observer-state status. The question for Israel and its friends to address is what the downside risks of that outcome really are, and to calibrate their reaction accordingly.
The argument has been made that recognition as a state, even in limited form, will give Palestine the standing that it probably lacks currently to seek prosecutions in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged violations of international law. Even if right, it is difficult to see why Israel and its friends should accept that as a make-or-break argument. The ICC is not a kangaroo court, and allegations without substance can be expected to be treated accordingly.
Recognition as a state will not change the situation with respect to Hamas. Of course, its current ideological hostility to Israel’s very existence is a serious issue; but Israel and the West should not compound their grievous mistake of not recognising the legitimacy of its electoral victory in Gaza by rejecting any Palestinian state in which Hamas plays a governing role. The door to dialogue with Hamas should remain open.
The more positive argument – as Rabin would certainly have understood – is that it is overwhelmingly in Israel’s own interest to defuse this issue by accepting, once and for all, that Palestinian statehood is an indispensable requirement of its own long-term peace and security. Indeed, Israel should treat the UN vote as an opportunity for a new start to negotiations, rather than an excuse for renewed confrontation. Such a constructive outcome has become more urgent than ever, given the Middle East’s new geopolitical realities following the Arab Spring.
Moreover, a perceived change of direction on the Israeli-Palestinian issue would be hugely beneficial for the West in its relations with the Islamic world. Recent polling to mark the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has shown alarming persistence of the animosity generated by the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is difficult to imagine Israel’s leadership changing course at this stage, and it is probably too late for the administration of US President Barack Obama to escape from the domestic political vice in which it seems pinned on this issue. But being on the wrong side of history is never a comfortable position. And that is exactly where the US, Israel, and its closest friends – including my own country, Australia – will be if they resist the tide of international sentiment in favour of moving now to recognise Palestinian statehood.
Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister from 1988 to 1996 and president emeritus of the International Crisis Group, is chancellor of the Australian National University. © Project Syndicate, 2011.A study published this week by the Pew Hispanic Center found that over the last five years, immigration from Mexico to the United States has dropped to its lowest level in decades, hitting the key “net zero” benchmark just recently, where more Mexicans are moving out of the U.S. than there are coming in.
The study’s most startling finding: while the population of legal Mexican immigrants is growing faster than it has in many years, the undocumented population is shrinking even faster. There were a total of 6.1 million undocumented Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. in 2011, compared to nearly 7 million in 2007 — a statistic that, according to Pew, represents the first significant decrease in illegal immigration in nearly two decades.
That’s happened thanks to the interactions of economic “push-pull factors,” Clarissa Martinez-De-Castro, director of immigration |
this only after the withdrawal of 150-250 gallons per minute," argued Peggy Case, the president for Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation.
The majority of the 471 people who packed a hall at Ferris State University in Big Rapids for the hearing did not want the MDEQ to approve Nestle's request. One person suggested that if the MDEQ OKs it anyway, residents should file for an injunction to stop it.
Three people, two of whom work for the company, spoke in favor of the permit.
"In our opinion Ice Mountain is an exemplary corporate citizen in our region and has demonstrated a track record," Mecosta County Development Corporation President Jim Sandy said in front of the crowd.
Those opposed had varying reasons, but one woman said the MDEQ must pick between Nestle's profits and a proper water supply for future generations.
Nestle started its bottling operation in 2001 at a pumping rate of 150 gallons per minute, according to the state. A cumulative increase to pumping more than 200,000 gallons per day requires state approval, according to the MDEQ.
Last month, MDEQ announced it was extending the public comment deadline to April 21 at 5 p.m. to give department staff enough time to prepare the draft permit. So far, MDEQ says it has received about 50,000 comments and 340,000 signatures for a petition against the increase of water.
"Certainly we're gonna work through this as quickly as possible, but obviously the volume of information we're receiving both from Nestle and the public comments simply take time to get through," said Melody Kindraka, an MDEQ public information officer.
MDEQ officials say they are still looking into if the water is going to be safe to drink, as well as if there would be a negative impact to the resources and water shed in the area. They hope to have a decision on Nestle's application in the next couple of months.
Written comments about the project to the DEQ can be submitted by email to deq-eh@michigan.gov or by mail to:
Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance
P.O. Box 30241
Lansing, MI 48909-7741
Wednesday night, Nestle released this statement about the MDEQ hearing:
"We thank the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) for holding a public hearing to give people an opportunity to express their opinions about our White Pine Springs permit application. The information session preceding the public hearing also provided important facts regarding our application. "Although people cite various reasons in opposition to our request for additional water withdrawals, and we differ with their conclusions, we do agree on one essential point. Like you, Ice Mountain, and our parent company Nestlé Waters North America, have a deep commitment to the state, people and natural resources of Michigan. We have made a long-term investment in Michigan, and take great care to operate in a responsible and sustainable way to preserve and protect our shared water sources and the surrounding environment for generations to come."Our pending application is based on over 15 years of extensive studies and regular monitoring of groundwater, surface water and the local ecosystem. Our network of more than 100 monitoring points allows us to predict with great certainty both the immediate and long-term effects of the proposed withdrawal. This monitoring network allows us to verify that the groundwater is being naturally replenished and that our water use is managed for long-term sustainability."We also contribute significantly to the economic well-being of the communities where we do business and to the state as a whole. Since our operations began in Michigan we have made investments of about $270 million, much of which goes toward ensuring the sustainability of the water system, including the monitoring points, the scientists who do the monitoring, and everyone involved in taking good care of the groundwater supplies. We offer high-paying jobs with good benefits to our employees and have an annual payroll of over $19 million. Ice Mountain is one of the largest employers in the Mecosta / Osceola area with around 270 full-time employees and around 25 seasonal employees. Another $20 million in annual spending supports Michigan-based vendor companies."Again, we thank the MDEQ and everyone who participated in the public hearing. We support the MDEQ commitment to a careful, thorough and transparent review of the permit application."
—Learning Goal: To practice Problem-SolvingStrategy 7.2 Conservation of energy with conservative forces.
Problem-Solving Strategy 7.2 Conservation of energy with conservativeforces SET UP Identify the system youwill analyze, and decide on the initial and final states (positionsand velocities) you will use in solving the problem. Draw one ormore sketches showing the initial and finalstates. Define your coordinatesystem, particularly the zero points for gravitational and elasticpotential energies (the point at which in the case of gravitational potentialenergy or at which the spring is relaxed in the case of elasticpotential energy). List the initial andfinal kinetic and potential energies?that is,,,, and. Some of these will be known and someunknown. Use algebraic symbols for any unknown coordinates orvelocities. Keep in mind that potential energy includes both gravitational and elasticpotential energy. SOLVE Writeexpressions for the total initial mechanical energy and for thetotal final mechanical energy, equate them, and solve to findwhatever unknown quantity is required. REFLECT Take a hardlook at your results to see whether they make sense. Are theywithin the general range of magnitudes you expected? If you changeone of the given quantities, do the results change in a way you canpredict?
SET UP
Before writing any equations, organizeyour information and draw appropriate diagrams.
Part A
Which of the following statements about theproblem are true?
Check all that apply.
The spring is initially unstretched. After the brick has been placed in the basket,the spring is stretched. When the brick is first placed into the basket,it has zero velocity. When the brick has stretched the spring to itsfull extent, it has zero velocity. The brick’s final position is lower thanits initial position.
1500. If you suddenly put an adobebrick of mass 3.00in the basket, find the maximum distance thatthe spring will stretch.Harvey Updyke (WRBL)
(CBS/AP/WRBL) Police have released the mug shot of Harvey Almorn Updyke Jr, a 62-year-old unemployed man who is accused of the poisoning of the 130-year-old Toomer's Oaks, the landmark gathering place of Auburn University victory celebrations.
Updyke has been charged with one count of first-degree criminal mischief.
Bond was set at $50,000. If convicted, Updyke could face one to 10 years in prison.
University officials reported on Wednesday that the trees had been given "lethal amounts" of herbicide.
CBS affiliate WRBL reports that the story started with a phone call. On Jan. 27, a caller to "The Paul Finebaum Show," a sports talk radio show out of Birmingham, claimed he poisoned the live oaks shortly after the Iron Bowl with an herbicide known as Spike 80DF.
"The weekend after the Iron Bowl, I went to Auburn, Ala. - I live 30 miles away - and I poisoned the two Toomer's trees," the caller said on the show. "I put Spike 80DF in them." Show host Finebaum then asked the caller if the trees had died, to which "Al in Dadeville" responded, "They have not died yet, but they will die."
Updyke is from Dadeville, say police.“ You had a great sleep, and feel alert and invigorated! +10% XP earned for a limited time. ”
Well Rested is a temporary perk in Fallout 4. It lasts 8 in-game hours, and is obtained by sleeping in any bed in a settlement under the player character's control, or any rented bed.
Contents show]
Requirements Edit
Rented rooms always work and beds built by the Sole Survivor in settlements work, if no settler has been assigned. Assigning a settler to a bed will prevent the Sole Survivor from using it, as it is now owned.
In Survival mode, the player character must sleep for at least 7 hours to obtain the perk, meaning sleeping bags and mattresses cannot be used, as they only permit 3 and 5 hours of sleep respectively. However, in this mode, any bed may be used to obtain this perk, so long as the bed is not considered owned by someone else and the player character is not currently trespassing or incurring radiation damage.
Effects Edit
+10% XP for a limited time (8 in-game hours).
In Survival mode, the effect also grants +2 to Endurance and Agility.
Notes Edit
If sleeping while in the company of a companion with whom the Sole Survivor is in a romantic relationship, instead of the Well Rested perk one will receive the Lover's Embrace temporary perk, which increases XP earned by 15%.
Fast-traveling jumps the in-game time forward by an amount that depends on the distance traveled, up to a little over 14 hours from the farthest corners, which would negate the well rested bonus. The Sole Survivor can mitigate the traveling time by using the Institute as a jumping platform as it only takes 1-game-minute to teleport to and from the Institute. PC
It is possible to sleep for zero hours by canceling the sleep as soon as the background goes black without time passing. The bonus lasts for twelve hours from the time of waking up, regardless of the time spent sleeping.
Sleeping before the perk has run out causes the perk to be refreshed for another 8 in-game hours.
Bugs EditFacebook
Facebook is finally jumping on the hashtag bandwagon, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal today.
Unnamed sources told the Journal that Facebook is working on adding the hashtag feature into the network, but it won't roll out anytime soon. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment, saying, "We do not comment on rumor or speculation."
Popularized on Twitter, the hashtag has become synonymous with social media. Google+ and even Instagram, the photo-sharing service Facebook acquired last year, have the hashtag function on their networks.
Hashtags, words marked by a pound sign, are used to organize posts by topics or events, or to express how users are feeling at the moment. Users add hashtags to their posts and then can click on them to bring up all the posts labeled with the specific tag.
Hashtags are useful shortcuts, but all the companies that use them also make their networks searchable by keywords. Facebook is clearly trying to up its game in search with the introduction of Graph Search, so it wouldn't be surprising if the social network finally added hashtags to better organize content.
Just today, the company said it was going to start indexing its posts and comments to make them searchable on Graph Search.Kassi Luja
[follow id = “KassiLuja”]
Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) is bringing “sunshine” to your day with its latest announcement: Hip-hop duo Atmosphere is slated to perform at Cal Poly on April 24.
“We’ve been looking into bringing Atmosphere to campus for a while,” ASI Events musical entertainment assistant and business administration senior Gage McGinnis said.
Atmosphere is comprised of rapper Slug (Sean Daley) and DJ/producer Ant (Anthony Davis). The duo is most known for hits such as “Sunshine” and “Yesterday.” The show comes in support of the group’s seventh album, Southsiders, which is expected to drop May 6.
The announcement of Atmosphere’s on-campus concert comes after February’s speculation that ASI would bring a hip-hop act to campus.
A Mustang News poll was one of the factors influencing ASI’s decision to bring Atmosphere to campus, McGinnis said, backing up what ASI already thought about Atmosphere’s on-campus following.
At the time of publication, Atmosphere tied hip-hop artist Chance The Rapper for first (with 547 votes each) in the Mustang News poll asking students who they would like to see perform on campus, based on an unconfirmed list of performers ASI was considering.
ASI brought electronic DJs XXYYXX and Steve Aoki, hip-hop duo Blue Scholars and country duo Love and Theft to campus this past year alone. In adding Atmosphere to this list, McGinnis said ASI is keeping with the variety of genres while trying to make students happy. McGinnis added that ASI has seen good responses from students in bringing a hip-hop act.
“There are a lot of students that are really into Atmosphere,” McGinnis said.
McGinnis said they have heard Atmosphere puts on a “fabulous live show,” has “tons of high energy” and is interactive with students.
“I think students will be excited,” McGinnis said.
The concert is slated to begin at 11 a.m. in the main gym of the Recreation Center and is free to Cal Poly students with a Poly ID.And a guy in a lucha libre mask with dong arms. And if you answer a question incorrectly in a flash game put together by London, Ontario's health service, he, uh, well... jizzes on you. NSFW at the jump.
But if you answer correctly, you put up a super condom shield and splash back this villain, the "Sperminator." The game "Adventures in Sex City" was produced by the Middlesex London Health Unit, in an effort to teach teens about safe sex and their sexual well-being. You can play one of four characters to save Sex City from this creature, who apparently got his bulging penis-arms because he contracted an STD and didn't go down to the free clinic in time.
Advertisement
Gee, a health department telling kids arms will turn into giant penises if they get an STD? That sounds responsible.
If you're playing, protip: Pretty much every worst-case scenario is the correct answer. Although, no, you can't get the clap from a toilet seat. Unless you have unprotected sex with a toilet seat. In which case the clap is the least of your worries.
Adventures in Sex City [NSFW? Yeah, it's NSFW. Middlesex London Health Unit via Montreal Gazette]Local Dispatch: It's hardly polite to be outside Pittsburgh
My dad died last month. This has nothing to do with that.
What I have to tell you is how I pulled up in front of my childhood home the day of the funeral and the woman who lives there now stepped outside, looked at me and said, "Are you OK?"
I said, "No, my dad died."
She tilted her head. "You used to live here?"
"Yes."
"Do you wanna come in? I'm just going down to the market, but no rush, come on in."
And she proceeded to let me walk around her home, asking if I needed anything, asking who had lived in what rooms, what doors to the porch we had used, and was my mother the one who planted the perennials, and how has it changed? All the time smiling and encouraging me to stop when I needed to, cry if I had to, she said,
"Please. Go upstairs. Which room was yours?"
My brother's very sick. He has cancer. He's now blind in one eye and has to live in the hospital one week a month. Every time Phil goes in there's a chance he won't come out. This has nothing really to do with that.
What I want to tell you is we played golf his last day before going into the third chemo round. A course in San Diego, out in an old olive grove that's now a casino. We signed in as a twosome, wanting to just spend the time together, but the course pairs you up with others if they need to. When we arrived at the first tee, there was a guy waiting for us.
"Hey I'm your third wheel, 21 handicap. Sorry"
"All good, we're serious amateurs."
"Where you from?"
There's that question I love so much. When we said "Pittsburgh," he gave the appropriate answer.
"Git 'aht!"
He's a doctor named Mike who grew up in McKeesport and lives with his family now in Lancaster, Pa.
Laughter, handshakes all around. Where'd you go to high school?... What's your other brother's name?... Oh, really, I worked at National Tube summers to pay for school.... Etc, etc, et-Western Pa-cetera.
No carts. We walk. It was a good morning of golf.
Until the 10th hole. We'd stopped at the lunch shack after the ninth. Phil's working with one eye and compromised balance, so his game is nowhere near good. He's a little slow. But his short game's great and he putts like a champ.
We buy some hot dogs, Polish dogs actually, with Mike the MD saying, "I gotta get one of these since you're here."
Then a woman walks by us saying, without any eye contact or the slightest inclination of a greeting, "So you're letting us play through, yes?"
My brother laughs and says, " Would you like to play through, ma'am?"
She snorts -- still no eye contact, no pause, at her sarcastic best. "Uhm, yes."
So we let the four go by, no problem. They take their carts on the fairway, they play at a run -- they are filled with a lot of things, none of which is joy.
Then the twosome behind them, a couple, come rolling up at the 11th. My brother tops the ball.
"At least you got it past the ladies tee!" says the wife.
Mike steps up. Another golf cart comes rolling right to the edge of the grass. It's a younger couple -- three holes in front of us, I later learn -- and the man yells, "Get off the course!"
Literally.
Now I may have gone to Kiski Prep, where I was taught some manners. I may have been raised in the church by my mother. I may have been shown at camp summer after summer that "love conquers all." But right then I didn't want "all" -- I just wanted some southern California suburban heads on a platter.
I start walking toward the younger duo.
"Excuse me," I hear behind me.
It's Mike, our third wheel, waving me off.
"Excuse me," he says to this well-kept pair. " I can prescribe something for that condition, because you need to chill the hell out."
"You don't play golf well enough to be on this course."
"This public course? Actually, we do, and see that guy, the bald one with the 7-inch scar?"
"Oh."
"Well, he's blind in one eye, has a cancer you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, the stamina of a emphysemic, and this could be the last 18 holes he ever plays."
It got quieter.
"Well, if there's nothing you want to add, I'm gonna go hit this ball. Dave, wanna join me?"
What this all has to do with is how damn decent Pittsburghers are compared to vast swaths of their countrymen. Call me prejudiced, call me an unreliable source; what I would call me is well-traveled.
It's the simple damn truth: You come from here, you learn to look people in the eye when you greet them. You learn to give them the benefit of the doubt till they screw up. You learn not to mouth off to people you don't know. You don't say crap about people's families. You hold doors open. You say "Hello" and "Thank you" to someone's face and "You're welcome" when it's needed.
It's just simple decency, and yet the more I move about this gigantic country, the more I see and feel it becoming the same nervous, overburdened, resentful gaggle of selfish golf cart drivers who can't feel anything but their own imaginary needs. It's a pity. And it's a shame.
And it's great to come home and have the door guy at the Fairmont Hotel smile at me at 3 in the morning and then laugh at me leaving my car keys in my jacket. He's got a job to do, he doesn't have to kiss my ass to do it -- he treats me like an equal.
It's great to have a conversation with the waitress at the Original Fish Market, who tells me I'm way off about movies and need to watch this list she's about to give me.
It's great to sit in a cab with a guy who knows more about European history and theology than a Ph.D., but who shares it with me like it's a gift we've both been given.
And it's great to walk out of my childhood home in the late winter sun and have a woman I just met tell me how happy she is I just slowed her day down by an hour.
My father used to tell me something I hated, something that his father had told him.
"Know your place."
And I'd rail about how controlling and meek and subvervient that sounded. And in some ways yes it is, but there are times, more and more of them these days, when I hear his voice: when I'm complaining to a person who's not responsible for their bosses' mistakes; when I'm talking over someone older and more experienced; when I rush to get into a line in front of just that one extra person.
Then I catch myself and say, "Come on, Dave, know your place here."
Know what you're doing, honestly. Know where you work best in a situation, and who you can serve. Know where you're from. Know your "place."
Me? My place is Pittsburgh.
David Conrad of Braddock, an actor who starred in the CBS television series "Ghost Whisperer," can be reached at David Conrad of Braddock, an actor who starred in the CBS television series "Ghost Whisperer," can be reached at dconrad02@gmail.com The PG Portfolio welcomes "Local Dispatch" submissions and other reader essays. Send your writing to page2@post-gazette.com; or by mail to Portfolio, Post-Gazette, 34 Blvd. of the Allies, Pittsburgh PA 15222. Portfolio editor Gary Rotstein may be reached at 412-263-1255.
First published on April 24, 2011 at 12:00 amThe landing of the spacecraft is a first in space exploration
I'm on the surface but my harpoons did not fire. My team is hard at work now trying to determine why. #CometLanding - Philae Lander (@Philae2014) November 12, 2014
© Thomson Reuters 2014
The European Space Agency (ESA) landed a probe on a comet on Wednesday, a first in space exploration and the climax of a decade-long mission to get samples from what are the remnants of the birth of Earth's solar system.The box-shaped 100-kg (220-pound) lander, named Philae, touched down on schedule at about 1600 GMT after a seven-hour descent from spacecraft Rosetta around half a billion kilometres (300 million miles) from Earth.After touch-down, the Philae lander tweeted:Scientists hope that samples from the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will help show how planets and life are created as the rock and ice that make up the comet preserve organic molecules like a time-capsule.Comets come from the formation of Earth's 4.6-billion-year-old solar system. Scientists believe they may have brought much of the water in Earth's oceans."We are ready to make science fiction a science fact," ESA director of human spaceflight and operations, Thomas Reiter, said at the European Space Operations Centre in Germany before the landing.Rosetta reached the comet, a roughly 3-by-5 km rock discovered in 1969, in August after a journey of 6.4 billion km that took 10 years, five months and four days - a mission that cost close to 1.4 billion euros ($1.8 billion).Rosetta is the first spacecraft to orbit a comet rather than just flying past to take pictures.Wednesday's launch went ahead despite a problem with the thruster that meant the probe had to rely mainly on its harpoons to stop it bouncing back from the comet's surface.The three-legged lander had to be released at exactly the right time and speed because it cannot be controlled on its descent. On its way down, Philae gathered data and images, which were relayed back to Earth.Engineers designed the lander not knowing what type of terrain they would find on the comet's surface. Rosetta has been taking pictures of the comet and collecting samples from its atmosphere as it approaches the sun, showing it is not as smooth as initially hoped, making landing more tricky. The surface is also more dusty than expected, limiting light needed to charge its solar panels and power its instruments once its batteries run out after two and a half days.QaziJam is a monthly game jam that started out on QaziTV's Twitch channel. The idea is that there are no hard and fast rules or guidelines to follow, other than gearing yourself up to make a game in a short amount of time! Qazi streams the development of his jam game live at https://www.twitch.tv/qazitv and encourage you to stream your development as well! Remember to use #qazijam whenever you do! The goals of QaziJams are to either help you get started as a gamedev or to help you get better if you already make games. No matter what you make, you'll always increase in power level after a game jam.
Theme:
There Can Only Be One
Bonus Theme (optional): You're A Wizard
The themes are voted on by the QaziTV twitch community on the first day of every jam! Tune into twitch.tv/qazitv to get in on the voting for the next jam! Feel free to integrate the bonus theme into your game for extra awesome-ness.
Rules:
The rules for the jam are simple
Follow the theme
Alone or on a team
Premade stuff is fine
Any engine, any tools
Submit your game here in the itchio jam page by Wednesday July 12th at 3:00pm
You'll need an Itch.io account to do all of this stuff. You can also use the #qazijam hashtag on Twitch or Twitter. If you post anywhere else, be sure to tag it with "qazijam" as well so anyone can find your progress more easily and know you're participating!
To submit your game, just create and upload your finished game to itch.io from your Dashboard, and then it will be visible to choose as your submission for this game jam when you click the Submit button at the top of this page.
Note: The submit button does not appear until the jam begins, but once it starts, you may submit your game at any time!
Ownership:
You retain ALL rights to your creations. NO distribution rights to ANYTHING you post on this website are claimed by the admin staff or affiliates of QaziJam. You can do whatever you want with your finished game. Expand it, sell it, release it, delete it. It's up to you. That being said, be aware that all of the terms and conditions of Itch.io stand on their own and must be agreed to upon creating an account and uploading games to their service.
The organizers do request the right to use your game for purpose of publicizing the competition.
The following paragraph should go without saying, but:
If you used any resources within your game that you personally did not create (graphics, music, sounds, whatever), the creators of those resources retain whatever rights they originally specified when you retrieved the resources. You will also be considered a significantly better person if you provide adequate credit to the original creators within your game as well over if you do not include credit. DO NOT USE resources that you do not explicitly have permission to use or else you will be rightfully subject to the consequences of doing so.
Prizes:
You just made a freaking game!!Share. It's all in the audio. It's all in the audio.
“Mario is quite complex,” explains Kevin Satizabal. “It has so many shifting scenes and shifting elements.”
It’s not often that the original Super Mario Brothers is described as “complex.” But video games are naturally perceived very differently by sighted and visually impaired players. Blind since birth, Satizabal — a Marketing and Communications Assistant at the London Royal Society for Blind People — struggled at times with Mario’s level structure, yet still managed to enjoy Nintendo’s perennial side-scrolling platformer in his formative years.
“ "Each level had its own theme and those were integral to me knowing what was coming up next."
Have you ever tried playing a video game blindfolded? It’s obviously not easy, and is a task that requires more than your average amount of determination and perseverance to succeed. But success doesn’t hinge solely on well-refined mental traits — certain design techniques can help the process. Sound cues, directional prompts, and binaural indicators on the development end are but a few tangible considerations which can assist blind players in enjoying standard video games.
In other words, the strength and depth of a game’s sound design can be the difference between a blind (or blindfolded) run being achievable, or downright impossible.
Don't Look - Listen
“The first level requires a lot of jumping, collecting coins and if you picked up a star you could zoom to the end of the level,” recalls Satizabal of his time in level 1-1. “A lot of that was done by listening out for musical cues when you collect certain things. When you found a coin there’d be a bell-like ‘ting’, when you would jump there’d be a rising pitch, and when you’d get a star there’d be really fast-paced music. I basically used those cues to be able to play the game.
“The cues became part of the background theme and vice versa. Each level had its own theme and those were integral to me knowing what was coming up next. It definitely was an enjoyable experience, although it was challenging. I think I was experiencing it in a very different way to how someone would experience it visually. Sometimes things were a little more hit and miss if maybe I would’ve been able to play it with sight. Nonetheless, it was still really enjoyable. The fact that I liked the music and the cues made it really good fun to play.”
There are some quite astounding — and entirely inspirational — tales of blind gamers tackling games primarily designed for sighted players. After all, video games are in essence visual experiences — the term ‘video’ in itself an obvious implication — yet there are countless stories of visually impaired players defying the odds and completing games which aren’t designed with their physical restrictions in mind.
Take the story of Terry Garrett — an engineering graduate of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs — who, working alongside NASA, plans to be the first blind person to enter space. His video game career has seen him finish both Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, and the sprawling Zelda: Ocarina of Time, painstakingly navigating his way around these game worlds by ear. Relying on but a few simple aids along the way — such as user-written online walkthroughs which detail each world on paper, thus allowing him to visualise the world’s surroundings — Garrett has successfully traversed both Hyrule and Rupture Farms. It’s hard to imagine just how demanding this process must be.
Laser Precision
Another visually impaired gamer challenging perceived conventions is Brandon Cole who, like Satizabal, also enjoyed Mario’s debut on the Nintendo Entertainment System, but at first from a very different perspective. Born with a rare type of eye cancer named Retinoblastoma, Cole underwent surgery at just two months old. Fortunately, the procedure successfully eradicated his cancer, but unfortunately cost him his vision in the process. Five years later and Cole would have his first experience playing a video game after being offered the chance to play Super Mario on his older brother’s coveted NES console.
“ "...it was a case of trial and error - I learned when to start moving, how many steps to take before dropping into a crawl..."
“Video games were something I’d dismissed,” says Cole. “I fully expected to play for a few seconds, fail, and move on with my life. My brother started the game and told me to hit some buttons. So I hit some buttons and from my perception I was completing levels super fast, breaking bricks, saving princesses — all that stuff. We got through the entire game this way — the entire game — and then, once it was all over he dropped the punchline which of course was that he’d handed me the unplugged second player controller, allowing me to press whatever I wanted, whilst he cruised on through the game.”
Cole explains how crushed he was by this realisation, but that it upset something within that would ultimately push him forward throughout his life. He decided there and then that he’d beat a game in its entirety on his own — without his brother or anyone else’s help. Cole went back to Super Mario and completed level one after hours upon hours of failure. Years later he bested Killer Instinct after learning scores of combos — an accolade he heralded to his mother who, although failing to really understand video games, shared Cole’s enthusiasm nonetheless.
“I spent time learning all the sound effects in the game,” says Cole. “Every character in the game has their own voice, so I learned who the characters were. I learned all the button combinations for the moves by listening to the sounds they each made. I learned combos because that’s how a blind person learns a fighting game — that’s how it’s done. When I finally beat the game, I ran up the stairs to tell my mum, who is 100% not interested in video games — not even a little bit. I told her this great thing that I’d done and she, to her credit, politely came downstairs, looked at the credits screen of Killer Instinct, and politely oh-ed and ah-ed in amazement. Thinking back on it, I totally know that she didn’t get the significance of it.”
Exit Theatre Mode
Perhaps better still, Cole went on to apply his unwavering fortitude and steadfast desire to Konami’s complex stealth ‘em up Metal Gear Solid. Do you remember the large hangar room on the basement floor of the interior warehouse near the beginning of the game? The one which leads to the showdown with a tank-operating Vulcan Raven out in the snow? That’s right — the room with the all those bloody lasers, which, if set off, led to Snake being locked inside and gassed to death? I certainly do. Forcing Snake to demonstrate his contortionist skills was damned hard.
“ "I did it over and over and over again, and finally I truly, honestly made it..."
After 30-40 attempts Cole could’ve given up — after all, this section felled many a sighted player — and no one would have faulted him. But he didn’t. He got through it.
“My stepdad was playing through Metal Gear Solid and I was listening to him playing it. There’s a room where there are criss-crossing infrared beams which don’t just sit there — they go up and down all the while crisscrossing the entire room. If you break one, the doors shut and you die. So he gets frustrated with it, he says, ‘I’m done for now, I’m not playing anymore’ and throws down the controller. I say, ‘Let me try it. Just because’. He says okay and leaves the room not expecting success in this — which makes sense, why would you?
“Although we’re talking PSOne where there are far more audio cues, infrared beams don’t make sounds. Again it was a case of trial and error — I learned when to start moving, how many steps to take before dropping into a crawl, how many crawl movements to make, when to pop back up to take more steps. I did it over and over and over again, and finally I truly, honestly made it to the other side of that room outside to the next area. I had to learn it in steps because every time I failed I knew I’d did it right up to a certain point. I’d then try something else — pausing a little bit longer before moving again, or taking another step forward before dropping into a crawl, for example.”Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne is not a big fan of the economics of his company's electric car. (Photo11: AJ Mast, AP)
The CEO of the newly combined Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is urging people not to buy his company's electric car.
It's a strange request from a world in which automotive CEOs are usually doing everything they can to hype their product lines, lure customers to showrooms and as they say in the trade, "put butts in seats."
But Reuters reported that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne told a Washington, D.C., conference this week that he would prefer no one buy the $32,650 Fiat 500e, a beautifully done, practical electric car.
"I hope you don't buy it because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000," he is quoted as having said.
The 500e was created to meet mandates of states such as California that require automakers to offer zero-emissions cars for sale. For the moment, electric cars are the easiest way to meet the mandate -- and automakers approach the challenge with varying amounts of enthusiasm.
Stock market wonder Tesla Motors, for instance, sells only fully electric cars.
It's not the first time that plain-speaking Marchionne has decried the costs of electric cars. Previously, he pegged the losses at $10,000 a car. Lucky for him, electric cars are still generally a tough sell with consumers because of their limited range. The Fiat 500e goes 87 miles between charges.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1nvGzcsEverything you need to know about the much-anticipated adaptation of Neil Gaiman's acclaimed novel.
Fantasy fans, your prayers have been answered: Starz is bringing Neil Gaiman’s acclaimed novel American Gods to life with an ambitious new series debuting next year. And it only gets more intriguing when you learn who’s involved, from a cult-favorite showrunner to a cast that’s, well, heavenly.
But what if you don’t know the first thing about American Gods? Then consider this your Sunday school of sorts: a quick guide to everything you need to know about the Starz series, so you can get as excited about it as everybody else is. Let’s go ahead and answer some of your burning questions:
So this was a book?
Yes, written by legendary fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman in 2001. It imagines a world where all the gods we’ve ever prayed to aren’t in the heavens above, but down here on Earth with us. Gods centers on Shadow Moon, a thief fresh out of prison who starts working as a bodyguard for a mysterious con artist known as Mr. Wednesday — who’s actually the Norse god Odin. With Shadow in tow, Wednesday travels across America recruiting |
cat customization (incl. accessories) options that we have envisioned.
The next step was to define the character’s cat-type. We’ve studied and conceptualized different types of cats, of different ages, sizes, and different body shapes. We decided to go with one cat type, which players are able to customize through various skins (color schemes) and a range of accessories (more about this in a future post!). This process led us to the creation of what has become Ganbatte’s mascot: Dexter! Dexter likes random things, he’s 6 years old and he’s easily distracted. The image you see above is a very early sketch, and we’ll iterate and expand on the design as we move forward.
Having defined the body system and cat type, our next step was to combine these two design choices and create the character’s final shape. During this process, we narrowed it down to 3 variations. The first one, which we lovingly called the “katana-chop” was quickly (slightly regretfully) abandoned for being A: a bit gruesome B: not really allowing for cool accessories like necklaces (where’s the neck!). The second one felt more like it! While the third option was a version we hadn’t considered before, featuring separate feet (or “hind paws” in cat anatomy). We ended up going for a variation of the second (bottom middle) design, of which we’ll show more of in a future post. Next week we’ll dive into Dexter’s expressions!
Thanks for reading, we’re happy to have you on board and we hope that you enjoy following the development process of Ganbatte! Learn more about the game and sign up for our newsletter over at ganbattegame.com
-Thomas
ps. I’ll leave you with a GIF captured during one of our playtest sessions: omnom nom nom!
Like this: Like Loading...Mumbai: Since January, the rupee has depreciated by 15%, the most among Asian currencies. Jokes about the currency have appreciated at a faster pace.
Social network users are trading jokes about the state of the rupee with the dedicated regularity of business channels rolling out doom-and-gloom headlines on the economy.
“The dollar is on an escalator and the rupee is on a ventilator" goes one witticism.
“I heard the rupee is falling, please tell me where I can collect it?", one network user wants to know.
“Finally it has happened…After decades, beer is now cheaper than petrol! There will be a new slogan: Just Drink, Don’t Drive!" and “A kg of onions can now be bought at the Dollar Store."
Faking News, a local takeoff on the satirical American website The Onion, had the headline: “India is ready to talk to dollar to strengthen rupee-dollar relationship."
Everybody has something to say about the falling rupee and rising prices of petrol and onions, from stand-up comedians on Twitter (Tanmay Bhat: I think if the Chinese knew how bad the rupee was doing, they’d leave Arunachal Pradesh alone). Jokes using Hindi movie and song references flooded Facebook accounts and mailboxes, such as a fake news item about the third part of the Hindi movie Race, saying, “Race 3: Who will reach hundred first, dollar, petrol or onion?"
Cartoonist Hemant Morparia, who has done a series of cartoons in the tabloid Mumbai Mirror on the economic crisis, said humour thrives in crisis situations. “One of the cartoons I did was on the rupee heading into a dustbin in which there is also Manmohan Singh’s PhD in Economics," he said. “All non-lethal yet stressful situations that are life-threatening lend themselves to humour. Amateur comics yet to be discovered are producing a lot of the jokes, such as the one about the dollar being on an escalator and the rupee on a ventilator. The more, the merrier."
From policy paralysis to political unwillingness to push reforms, experts have a range of reasons for the rupee’s alarming decline. One of the most interesting theories put out is that it is the symbol of rupee which is responsible for the bloodbath. According to a report published on Washingtonpost.com, Vaastu shastra experts in the country say that the rupee symbol debuted on an inauspicious day and the horizontal line across the symbol appears to “slit the throat" of the currency.
Celebrity astrologer Bejan Daruwalla disagreed that the problems lay with the rupee’s design. He said, in all seriousness, the bloodletting would cease from November. “From November, the position of Jupiter, the planet of good luck and fat money comes in the chart of India very strongly," he said over the phone. “The rupee will improve against the dollar and so will the share market. There is nothing to panic. The prime minister, whom I like very much, is under the influence of Saturn and Saturn itself means slow growth, delay, scams coming out and rupee getting weaker day by day against the US dollar. Even the PM’s stars will improve from November."
Meanwhile, the man who designed the rupee symbol, Udaya Kumar Dharmalingam, was unperturbed. “Things were different at the time I designed the rupee symbol and things are different now," he said in a phone interview. “I don’t think I’m the right person to comment on economic affairs—I’m a designer. If you ask me about the design, I can tell you," said Kumar, who teaches visual communications at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati. He added, “I do hope things change for the better."
With inputs from Nandini Ramnath and Geetika Rustagi.
Here’s a quick compilation of the more interesting social media takes on the rupee:
Twitter and Facebook
‘@rahul_vedant : Dollar on escalator.. Rupee on ventilator... Nation on ICU... We are in coma... Sonia in honeymoon... Onion in showroom... God bless India.’
‘@sidin: Hard Truth: If we had not invented zero then 1 rupee would be equal to 1 pound sterling right now.’
‘@fakingnews: Total number of missing files related to coalgate is 60. Rupee is still ahead.’
‘@RantingIndian : Rupee is now below Poverty Line! “ #Rupee to soon get a job under NREGA ‘
‘@papacj: Disneyland is opening a new ride in which you free fall a great height in just a few seconds. They’re calling the ride ‘The Indian Rupee’!’
‘@dhume: At [insert number] Indian rupee hits record low. #recyclabletweet’
‘@vikasagarwalll: @SrBachchan The only way to save the Rupee is to have it tie a Rakhi to the Dollar and say “Meri raksha karna! :D’
‘@thetanmay: I think if the Chinese knew how bad the rupee was doing they’d leave Arunachal Pradesh alone.’
‘@scaryhairyman: Since Rupee is falling down, let’s start using rupee in normal conversations like a verb. I tripped and rupeed.’
‘@shakti_shetty: Indian Rupee has become more down-to-earth than necessary.’
‘@coolfunnytshirt: Agle janam mohe dollar he kijjo – Rupee’
Vivek Raj: 64 Rupees = 1 Dollar, 100 Rupees = 1 GBP, #Rupee Making kids learn squares of numbers better than teachers since 2013!
Gaurav Chopra: If Newton ws alive today.. he’d hav redefined gravity based on d falling #Rupee n we’d hav a new value... Apples fall slower...
Roopalee Parswani: What should be the surname of #Rupee? “Girpade"
Achint Jain: It has been announced that the concept of free falling in physics will be explained using Indian #rupee as an example.
Ravish Kumar: Sun raha hai tuu #Dollar, Ro raha hu maiii #Rupee
Santosh Nalamothu: #Money can’t buy happiness especially if it’s #Rupee and invested in Sensex.
Rohan Hegde: Dollar is faster than a Temple Runner
Ramesh Srivats on Twitter: Everyday a new record. Truly the Sergei Bubka of currencies.It’s with great pleasure to announce that Channels DVR is now available in a Public Beta.
Nine months ago we announced that we were going to build a DVR. With a ton of support from you all, one hell of a summer of code, and an amazing Alpha test period, we’re ready to finally say: Holy crap we built a DVR!
So what does this mean? It means that anyone (in the US or Canada) can now subscribe to and install Channels DVR. Today’s update to Channels for Apple TV has all of the DVR support built into it. All you need to do is go subscribe, install, and setup Channels DVR. Be sure Channels on your Apple TV has been updated or you won’t see any of the DVR features.
Public Beta?
So why is this a Public Beta and not just a normal release. Well, while Channels DVR is really feature rich, there’s still a ton of things we think it needs to do before we think it’s a true 1.0.
We didn’t want to hide it away any longer. It’s working so well that it doesn’t make sense to not release it. We also know that we can’t get it to be as good as we expect, without feedback from early adopters.
Why isn’t it good enough to release?
So what should you expect from this Public Beta that 1.0 might have?
iOS
The first is, iOS support. iOS support will be developed during the Public Beta. We know that Apple TV is where Channels really shines and purposely avoided DVR integration for iOS so that we could move faster. But don’t fret, iOS support will start trickling out throughout the Public Beta, and it’s going to be awesome.
Polish
While we’re really happy with how the DVR integration turned out in Channels for Apple TV, there’s still a lot more we want to do.
Documentation
As of now, there’s no real documentation for Channels DVR. This is one of the things we’ll be working on throughout the Public Beta.
More Regions
We hope to expand our region support outside of US/Canada during the Public Beta.
Awesome Super Secret Features
We’re excited about being so close to laying down the base of Channels DVR. Once we’re happy with that we can start working on the real features we’re excited about. Stay tuned!
Features
So, what does Channels DVR do now? A lot.
Series Passes that record all/new episodes for any show.
Team Passes that record every game of your favorite teams.
Precise retention rules to auto remove recordings.
Adjust the padding of recordings to make sure you don’t miss the end of that game.
14 days of guide data.
Robust search to find things to record or to create Passes.
Fully manageable directly from Channels for Apple TV.
Use as many HDHomeRun devices as you want.
Prioritize HDHomeRun devices for recording or ignore some completely.
Commercial indexing to allow you to quickly skip through commercial breaks.
Remote access to your DVR and HDHomeRun devices.
Watch live TV or recordings via browser through the Channels DVR web admin.
Auto updating. Channels DVR will always be up to date without having to do anything.
Tons more!
Hardware support
So how do you run Channels DVR? Channels DVR is a software service that runs in the background on your computer. You can run it on macOS, Linux, or popular NAS devices.
The minimum requirements for the Channels DVR software is a 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. Older NAS models and inexpensive units like the single-drive WDMyCloud are generally too under-powered to run Channels DVR.
Some advanced features like commercial indexing and video transcoding will be unavailable on lower end hardware.
If you’re in the market for a new NAS, we recommend something with a modern Intel CPU. These CPUs have hardware-accelerated video encoders and it is easy to optimize software for them. NAS models like the WD PR4100, QNAP TS-x51+ and Synology DS216+II all use Intel CPUs and offer hardware transcoding.
Current NAS support
Channels DVR supports the most popular NAS devices right now, with hopefully more support in the future.
Synology
QNAP
WDMyCloud
Netgear ReadyNAS
Seagate/Lacie NAS OS
unRaid
Windows support
There is no native Windows support at the moment. We’ll be experimenting with that soon. For now, you can run Channels DVR on a Hyper-V or VirtualBox VM. Within the community, there has been a lot of success doing this.
Windows is now supported on all 64-bit versions of Windows 7, 8 and 10.
Is your device not listed?
If you have something that Channels doesn’t run on or aren’t sure if it runs on it, check out the Hardware Category. Feel free to mention an unsupported device or ask the community how well Channels DVR runs on something you have. There’s lot of activity happening in there already.
Wrap up
We hope you all have fun with Channels DVR and it works great for you. It’s taken a ton of time and effort to get to this point. We couldn’t have done it without our amazing Alpha testers. Thank you so much.
But this is definitely not the end, it’s just the beginning. Keep up with new features added to Channels DVR right here on the Channels Community.
Please feel free to discuss issues or neat things you’ve learned about Channels DVR in the Public Beta category or discuss your hardware setups in the Hardware category here on the Channels Community. Thanks!CNN Botches Major ‘Bombshell’ Alleging Contacts Between Don Jr. And WikiLeaks
Chuck Ross
Reporter
CNN misreported key details of an offer made to Donald Trump Jr. last year of a batch of stolen Wikileaks documents.
The story, which CNN published on Friday and covered extensively on TV, was touted as the first evidence that the Trump campaign was given a heads-up about documents stolen from Democrats.
But the story appears to have been riddled with errors, while also lacking key context.
Perhaps the most jarring error in the CNN report is the date on which Trump Jr. was sent the email. The network reported that a person named Mike Erickson emailed Trump Jr. and others on the Trump campaign on Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to Wikileaks documents as well as a decryption key to access them.
The email also offered access to emails that had been stolen from former Sec. of State Colin Powell, according to CNN.
But a copy of the email provided to The Daily Caller shows that Erickson sent the email on Sept. 14.
That date is significant because WikiLeaks had released a batch of stolen documents on Sept. 13. The group touted its release of the DNC documents, which were published by Guccifer 2.0.
The email shows that Erickson messaged Trump Jr. stating that “Wikileaks has uploaded another (huge 678 mb) archive of files from the DNC.”
“It is too big for me to send you by e-mail attachments, but you can download it yourselves,” he added, providing a link to the same website cited by Wikileaks the day before.
He also included a link to a decryption key that could be used to access the documents.
The Washington Post first reported on the true date and wording of the Erickson email.
The site that Erickson linked to leads to a page where a file with the same file name referenced in the Wikileaks tweet could be downloaded.
Powell’s emails were also published online on Sept. 13. DC Leaks, a group that has been affiliated with the Russian government, published the documents online. The group granted access to the documents to several news organizations, including The Daily Caller. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Colin Powell’s Emails Hacked, Published Online)
How CNN got its report so wrong is unclear.
The article states that its information was based on a read-out of the Trump Jr. email provided by multiple sources, none of who are identified. Trump Jr.’s lawyer, Alan Futerfas, speculated on Friday that the source was on the Democratic side of the House Intelligence Committee, which interviewed Trump Jr. earlier this week.
The spokesman for the committee Democrats did not respond to a request for comment.
Erickson also appears not to be a super-secret Kremlin agent. The Post identified him as the president of an aviation management company.
Attempts made by The Daily Caller to contact him were unsuccessful.
Futerfas, the lawyer for Trump Jr., said that the real estate executive received “tons of unsolicited emails” during the campaign.
“The email was never read or responded to — and the House Intelligence Committee knows this,” he said in a statement.
“This email arrived after published media reports disclosed 12 hours earlier that hacked documents had been posted. The suggestion that this information was not public is false.”
Futerfas blasted the House Intelligence Committee over what he says is its leak of the story.
“It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document, with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public, when they know that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the email,” he said.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/08/cnn-botches-major-bombshell-alleging-contacts-between-don-jr-and-wikileaks/
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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commentsInvestigators unable to determine exact cause of crash that killed August Atkinson
A cyclist who died after colliding with a dry-stone wall had shouted how her brakes had broken just moments before crashing on a high-speed descent in the Peak District, an inquest has heard.
August Atkinson was descending Winnats Pass in Derbyshire on April 12, 2014 when she apparently lost control of her bike on its steep 25 per cent gradients, hitting a wall at the bottom of the pass at around 40mph and being pronounced dead at the scene.
The Mirror reports how Ms Atkinson had only ridden her Genesis Equilibrium “a handful of times” before heading out for what was meant to be a 25-mile ride, but which turned into a 40-mile ride after a wrong turn, with university friend Kieran Patel.
>>> Three club cyclists injured in collision with car in Huddersfield
Mr Patel told Chesterfield Coroner’s Court that Ms Atkinson had noticed an issue with the quick release lever on her front brake shortly after starting the ride, but had fixed the problem before continuing, with the pair coming towards the end of the ride when they came to descend Winnats Pass.
“I guess we had a little bit of apprehension about going down Winnats Pass, but nothing major. Going down I was cycling in front. I was constantly using my brakes on and off,” Mr Patel said. “August was behind me, coming down steadily, my speedometer said I was going at about 20mph.
“Then, August came past me on the right-hand side. She was getting faster; She must have been travelling at 30 to 40mph. She shouted ‘My brakes have gone’. She was freewheeling, she couldn’t stop.”
Other witnesses described how Ms Atkinson managed to make it around the left-hand bend midway down the pass, before veering off to the right-hand side after seeing traffic blocking the narrow cattle grid near the bottom. She then then left the road and hit a dry-stone wall at around 40mph, suffering serious injuries and being pronounced dead at the scene.
>>> Charity cycling group has all 11 bicycles stolen in ‘callous theft’
Despite Ms Atkinson’s shouts, forensic investigators said that they could not find any major fault with the brakes on her bike, although her rear tyre was slightly under-inflated at the time of the crash.
“We could not pinpoint what caused August to lose control. There are multiple issues,” said PC Ian Phillips.
“She may have been affected by tiredness. And the brakes may have overheated, increasing her stopping distance. And the under-inflated tyre may have affected her ability to control the bike.
“Something affected her ability to bring the bike to a safe speed. We don’t know exactly what happened.”
Peter Nieto, Derbyshire’s assistant coroner, told Ms Atkinson’s relatives that he though her death had been the result of an accident, although reserved his conclusion until a later date.Now, the next time you want a stereo microphone, you can hit print.
Well, okay – that’s not entirely correct. But a combination of last-century DIY (circuits for making the mic) with this-century DIY (3D printing for making a convenient housing) means a custom microphone you can build that’s exactly suited to your needs. And, oh yeah – it’s both cheap and fun.
Frank Piesik shares this project via Google+ and his blog. The plans are open-sourced and available on GitHub, so you can try making your own if you like; you’ll just need a 3D printer or 3D printing service for the housing (or you can try making your own via another, more traditional means).
Most importantly, the results sound terrific. Have a listen to some sound samples:
The ingredients:
First, the original project: Panasonic WM61 homebrew microphone design [Wildlife Sound Recording Society]
3D files on Makerbot’s Thingiverse
pMic on GitHub
Features:
On/off switch
Gain boost (which could be converted to gain damp)
Preamp (which could be removed and replaced with phantom power)
9V battery (for powering the capsules, adding headroom)
And in this case, an old iRiver h120 with Rockbox firmware does the recording – another abandoned product saved from turning into toxic waste. Upcycle!
Best of all, because of the design here, modifications are easy, which isn’t true of most consumer mic products. And it looks pretty:
Thanks, Frank!
http://frankpiesik.wordpress.com/2013/11/20/pmic/With the seemingly never-ending Red Bull engine crisis appearing to be nowhere near a satisfactory resolution, Formula 1 still faces the very real possibility of the Austrian team packing up its bags and leaving.
And the consensus among the F1 fanbase is that, should they exit the sport, they would've had it coming.
Whether that's true or not, whether Red Bull treated its partners fairly, gave Renault enough credit or demanded too much from Mercedes and Ferrari is a topic for an entirely different column, but it might just be irrelevant in light of the possibility of F1 coming up four cars short next season.
And, perhaps, the most tragic outcome of that potential exit would be the loss of Scuderia Toro Rosso – a team that has been a driving force of change in the stagnant, risk-averse F1 driver market.
Talent logjam
The massive, expansive junior ladder below F1 produces potential future stars every year and it is crucial that the sport somehow finds a way to slot them into the sport.
Usually, that role is played by the minnows, but the uncompetitive nature of F1's newer teams (and their subsequent demises) combined with the fact more established midfield squads have been swimming in debt means that the best and brightest juniors are not having an easy time entering the sport.
This is how we've arrived at a situation the likes of Robin Frijns and James Calado have not gotten a shot at F1 despite superb stints in FR3.5 and GP2 respectively – and a situation where Stoffel Vandoorne, who ruled GP2 with an iron fist in 2015, is facing a 2016 on the sidelines.
Hiring juniors is, understandably, a risk, and you shouldn't expect financially embattled teams like Sauber, Force India and Lotus to do so unless absolutely necessary.
Ferrari and Mercedes on the other hand can theoretically afford to take a punt on the best juniors out there - but they don't, unwilling to sacrifice one of the points-paying seats for the goal.
Toro Rosso, meanwhile, means Red Bull has no such problem.
Table of newcomers and driver changes (2006-2015) Team Debut GPs Rookie seasons (>50% of GPs) Number of drivers Lotus (Renault)
4 4 12 McLaren 2 2 9 Ferrari 0 0 7 Williams 5 5 10 Mercedes (Honda, Brawn)
0 0 5 Red Bull 0 0 6 Sauber (BMW)
5 4 12 Force India (Midland, Spyker)
1 1 8 Toro Rosso 8 10 11 Manor (Virgin, Marussia)
6 6 8
Over its 10 years in Formula 1, Toro Rosso gave eight drivers their debuts – and 10 racers spent their first full season with the squad. No other organisation can boast that record and understandably so, for providing a launchpad for emerging F1 careers is STR's very purpose.
But while lots of very valid questions can be raised about STR's treatment of its drivers, the famous late December firings of Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari being a vivid example, the fact remains that its services have been invaluable to F1.
Four-time champion Sebastian Vettel had his debut season with Toro Rosso, Daniel Ricciardo honed his skills under the team's wing to later become the sport's 'MVP' last year, and it now fields two spectacular drivers in Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz.
Perhaps all of those four would have been able to find a place in F1 without STR being around, but it would've been at someone else's expense – and the sport didn't exactly have many drivers undeserving of their seats over the past few years.
Stagnation at the top
Despite having Toro Rosso at their disposal, it's arguable that Red Bull held on to its Webber/Vettel line-up for a bit too long – five seasons, between 2009 and 2013.
But its approach seems to have changed more recently as it opted for the relatively unproven Ricciardo over a more experienced candidate like Kimi Raikkonen when Webber retired, and then replaced Ferrari-bound Vettel with Kvyat with little hesitation.
Meanwhile, the Brackley squad, despite having gone through two major identity changes, has switched all of three drivers over the past 10 years. Ferrari's record, if you exclude replacement drivers Luca Badoer and Giancarlo Fisichella, is basically identical, despite the fact the team's second drivers have gotten slack for being uncompetitive year after year.
That's not to say frontrunning F1 teams have completely refused to take chances with rookies or, at the very least, line-up changes – McLaren has given two drivers their debuts and both, in their first F1 race, stood on the podium.
For some reason, however, it's no longer fond of that approach, and an obvious third debutant will have to wait until at least 2017.
Fallout
If Red Bull and Toro Rosso exit, the grid could be stuck at 18 cars and four super-strong drivers will be out of a seat.
Even if we assume that that quartet won't be in the hunt for '16 seats with other teams, that still leaves the market in a rather precarious position, with no changes at Mercedes, Ferrari, Williams, Force India or Sauber.
And while Romain Grosjean's decision to switch to Haas could've shaken things up, Enstone's remaining driver Pastor Maldonado has made it clear he wants an experienced teammate alongside – while Haas is extremely unlikely to take on a rookie as well.
In other words, all ports of entry to F1, save for Manor (which could very well keep its current line-up), will be closed.
Of course, the solution could be third cars – it certainly seems favored by Mercedes' boss Toto Wolff among others – but for that to be meaningful in terms of opportunities for juniors, F1 would probably have to write in a rule, limiting those cars to drivers with less than a certain number of Grands Prix under their belts.
But would that really make up for a loss of four cars, supplied by an organisation that has been willing, able and successful at introducing new stars into the sport?Golf can beat you up. Take the case of Hal Sutton, a Tour player in the 1990s. Sutton went into a horrific slump early in the decade. It got so bad he almost lost his playing card.
Instead of doing what most guys would do (practice more, press more, keep plugging away), he took some time off. It was a game-changing decision for Sutton—maybe the best of his career.
While Sutton was away, he visited Jackie Burke, a gifted golf instructor. Jackie helped Sutton assess his game objectively and identify what he was doing wrong with his swing. He also provided Sutton with some fresh ideas on how to get his game back on track.
The visit paid off. Sutton found his game again, and went on to win a bunch of tournaments, including the Players Championship in 2000.
Weekend golfers don’t always have a Jackie Burke to turn to when their game goes south. They often have to make do with what they have, which is resources like this newsletter, and themselves. To help golfers in this predicament, I’ve provided six game-changing, self-diagnosing golf tips below that can help you get back on track and reduce your golf handicap:
1) Swing faster to regain distance: If you’ve lost some distance off the tee, it could be because you’ve lost some flexibility or strength as you’ve aged. Ramping up your swing speed will help you regain the distance you’ve lost. One exercise to do that is to hit 30 shots with your driver as hard as you can. Don’t worry about where they go. Just try to hit the shots on the clubface’s center.
2) Use a weighted club to regain strength: Another way to regain distance off the tee is with a weighted club. They’ve been around for years. But with the advent of lighter and lighter clubs, we’ve gotten away from using them. A weighted club can help you strengthen your arms, forearms, and wrists. Take 20 or 30 swings a day. Just make sure you swing it slowly and you copy your golf swing closely—don’t overcompensate for the extra weight.
3) Get help for a shank: If the reason you’re slumping is because you’re shanking, you’re in deep trouble. The shank is the worst of all shots because of the impact it has on your psyche. Shanking can completely obliterate your confidence. Stop trying to figure it out on your own. Take some golf lessons. You’ll be glad you did. A teaching pro can help get you back on the right track, and tailor the prescription to your unique needs.
4) Check your eyes to fix your putting: If you’re missing those critical five-footers, your eyes could be at fault. A subtle shift in your eye alignment can be the cause. At address, check that your eyes are parallel to the target line and that they’re directly over the ball or just inside the line of play. Correcting the change in eye alignment helps you aim more accurately and square up the clubface better. Within no time, you’ll see more and more putts drop.
5) Learn to play around injuries: Golfers seldom play a round where they don’t suffer minor injuries. We’re talking about things like the everyday bumps and bruises we’re all prone to now and then. If you want to go low consistently, you must learn to play around these injuries. Of course, if the injury is serious, stop playing and see a doctor.
6) Do the exact opposite: One Tour player recently went into a deep slump with his chipping game. Unfortunately, he couldn’t correct the problem by making minor adjustments to his swing. During the off-season, he practiced doing the exact opposite of what he was trying to do. This effort helped him get his chipping game back. Admittedly, he went to the extreme here. But sometimes that can work.
These six game-changing golf tips can help you get your back on track when your game goes south. They can also help you go low consistently and chop strokes off your handicap. One last game-changing golf tip: If you’re getting back to golf after a really long hiatus, expect a whole new reality. Equipment and even courses can change a lot in a short amount of time. Know that, and you’ll ease your transition somewhat, and help yourself go lower than ever before.A rough time for Copenhagen’s polar bears. Lars K. Jensen/CC BY 2.0
The ice in the Copenhagen Zoo’s Arctic Ring is cold, but the gossip is hot: as the Local reports, one of Denmark’s sexiest polar bear couples is breaking up. Ivan and Noel, two of the exhibit’s main attractions, will soon be going their separate ways, the Zoo recently announced.
The two have made it work since 2007, when Ivan left the Moscow Zoo to move in with Noel. But in recent months, things have fallen apart. “They simply don’t like each other,” zoo spokesman Bengt Holst told a local broadcaster, who added that Noel “often swims back and forth in the enclosure because she is stressed.”
Ivan will soon pack his things and move to the Scandinavian Wildlife Park in Djursland. Among his welcoming party is a female named Nuno, who, insiders say, is single and ready to mingle.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.* French experts support ASN findings on Flamanville reactor
* Source says EDF in talks to order new reactor cover
* Japan’s JSW, not Areva’s own foundry, would forge new cover
* Greenpeace calls on minister to halt reactor construction (Adds detail, Greenpeace reaction, ASN press conference)
By Geert De Clercq
PARIS, June 28 (Reuters) - Utility EDF’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor in northwest France has been cleared by a group of experts for start-up despite weak spots in its steel, confirming the findings of the ASN nuclear regulator, a source close to the situation told Reuters.
Completion of the third unit at Flamanville, where two reactors have been operating since 1986-87, had been thrown into doubt after the discovery in 2015 of weak spots in the steel prompted an extensive safety review by the ASN.
The ASN report on the reactor, which has yet to be released but a copy of which has been seen by Reuters, concludes that the reactor is fit for service, though it will need to be monitored throughout its lifetime and the lid of the containment vessel will probably need to be replaced in a few years.
The “Groupe Permanent” experts, appointed to provide an independent second opinion, discussed the report on Monday and Tuesday and drafted its recommendation late on Tuesday evening, the source said.
The group’s non-binding recommendation, which will be used by the ASN to formulate a final ruling on Flamanville this autumn, is expected to be published by the ASN at a news conference at 1400 GMT on Wednesday, along with its report.
The source also said that representatives of EDF had told the group of experts that the utility had started a procedure to order a new reactor cover from manufacturer Areva.
The new cover would be forged by Japan Steel Works, not by Areva’s Creusot Forge foundry, which manufactured the piece with carbon concentrations that were found to have made the steel more brittle. The new cover will still be tooled by Areva, the source added.
EDF plans to build two of the same Areva-designed European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) models in Hinkley Point, Britain.
EDF declined to comment.
HIGH STAKES
The stakes are high for EDF and Areva because it would cost billions of euros and take years to repair the vessel if ASN rules that the steel is too brittle.
The ASN’s green light for Flamanville, slated for start-up in late 2018, is also a European Commission precondition for approving EDF’s planned takeover of Areva’s reactor business.
The source said that the ASN may publish a provisional ruling on Flamanville on its website around July 11 for public consultation.
Following input from the public and industry, it will then publish its final ruling in the autumn. Industry watchers say it its unlikely the final ruling will differ much from the original report and the experts’ recommendation.
Greenpeace called on energy and environment minister Nicolas Hulot to halt the Flamanville construction.
“The ASN is no longer able to decide on safety in all independence and cannot resist industry pressure, simply because the survival of the entire French nuclear industry is at stake with the approval of this reactor vessel,” Greenpeace said.
Greenpeace and other anti-nuclear activists argue that the group of experts is too close to the ASN and the nuclear industry to be able to contest the ASN’s conclusion that Flamanville will be safe to operate.
The ASN does not detail the experts’ professional backgrounds, but a spreadsheet obtained by Reuters shows that eight of them work or have worked with the ASN or IRSN, the technical arm of the regulator. Another eight work or have worked for EDF or Areva.
Critics say that only three of the experts are independent of the nuclear industry.
“The ASN is using an expert committee that is at its feet, with a text it has drafted itself, to legitimise a highly controversial decision on the safety of a device whose failure could have implications for millions of people,” said Mycle Schneider, author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report.Lost to History When War Records Go Missing
WELLSVILLE, Kan. — The day after Jim Butler learned his son had died in Iraq in 2003, a U.S. Army casualty officer showed up at the family's small ranch to explain what happened.
Your son was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in the city of As Samawah, the officer said. But he had no other details to offer, nothing about how the fighting came about or what Sgt. Jacob Butler was doing when he was killed. For the grieving father, it wasn't enough. The question of how Jake died gripped him in the days after, in part because he'd made an unusual promise before his son left: If you are killed, I will go and stand where you fell.
So Butler made a simple request to the Army — |
Hit 1,200 Locations). The problem is so bad that some security experts have suggested that any organization that uses POS terminals should assume that it's been breached, until it can repeatedly prove otherwise.
The epidemic is often compounded by poor security practices at many organizations, according to Verizon's recently released 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report.
"While hotels likely come to mind first, restaurants also fall into this industry and comprise the majority of the victim population," the report reads. "Often food service victims are smaller businesses without IT departments, [or] CISOs... but they do accept payment cards and are therefore a target for opportunistic attack."
Card-scraping malware, meanwhile, has become commoditized and can be easily procured in underground forums. Security experts say hotel, retailer and restaurant payment card data breaches can too often be read as shorthand for firms that have failed to restrict access to remote access to restaurant networks that handle POS data; rolled out POS devices without changing their well-known, default passwords; or failed to use white-listing controls with POS terminals and related servers that would prevent unknown applications, including malware, from being allowed to execute on the devices.Greetings, Eurogamers. It is Halloween week or Goth Christmas, as Andy calls it, and we have taken the opportunity to dwell on some of the scarier games available this autumn.
Having finished gruesome survival horror The Evil Within, we are left with several burning questions. Questions such as: how many is too many terrifying physical manifestations of psychological trauma? Spoilers abound as Andy and Jane try to make sense of it all.
Elsewhere, our intrepid horrornauts uncovered this Xbox Live Indie Game gem called One Night Two Crazies, which is like a lower budget Night Trap, if you can imagine a lower budget Night Trap, or Five Nights at Freddy's without the animatronic animals.
Finally, Show of the Week proves a game doesn't have to be dark to be scary. Sunset Overdrive is as bright and cheery as you can imagine, but we are supremely grossed out by the gooey mutant enemies and their jiggle-physics-enabled wobbly bits.
That's all for this week, but if you remain resolutely unscared then our only solution is to link to this, without commentary. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more of this sort of thing and have a very happy Halloween.At Monday’s Parliament question time, Bill Shorten was handed a golden moment. Scott Morrison was wriggling on the end of a hook following his admittance that the death of Reza Berati on Manus Island last week did occur inside the centre. The Greens had just called for his resignation. It was a “political gotcha” and everyone awaited Mr Shorten’s response.
Unfortunately, it was … nonexistent.
It is worrying that the Australian Opposition appears to be doing very little to stem the rapid unraveling of Australia’s human rights record on asylum seekers.
Even when questioned directly, Bill Shorten seems unable to provide a definitive opinion. In an ABC interview on February 7th, he says, “In terms of the asylum seekers, our position is, what is the government doing?... we would just like them to tell us what they’re doing.”
As would we all. And we wouldn’t mind some clarity from you too, Mr Shorten. What are you doing?
The recent violence on Manus Island is only one part of the Abbott government’s secretive and increasingly dangerous asylum seeker policy.
In the last week, the Australian public has learnt three more disturbing facts. First, that at least one other boat has made it to Australian waters, despite Scott Morrison’s “guarantee” of ‘stopping the boats’.
Second, that a former Sri Lankan military commander is currently heading operations at Manus Island, overseeing the safety of 30 Tamil asylum seekers who escaped that very regime.
And, third, that the government has asked Cambodia, whose human rights record is one of the worst in Asia, to resettle some of Australia’s refugees.
If this isn’t reason enough for the Opposition Leader to intervene, then Australia’s reputation as a decent and generous nation is going to sink faster than a leaky boat. Pun intended.
The government has a duty of care to people seeking asylum from persecution. It’s written in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia is a signatory. Yet they are blatantly disregarding that duty and people are dying. This is Bill Shorten’s moment to stand up and mark himself as a man of principles.
And yet… he isn’t.
What is even more remarkable is that Bill Shorten is ignoring the golden opportunity to make the most of the government’s recent misinformation blunders on Manus Island. Were the shoe on the other foot, Tony Abbott would never have kept silent.
In fact, the harshest criticism Mr Shorten has made in relation to Mr Morrison’s gaffe is that “we need people who know what they’re doing.”
Hmm, that’s telling ‘em.
“Parliament has yet again missed the point. “A man has been killed while in our care. We should be debating why this happened and how we can stop it happening again, not wasting time in another Liberal/Labor tit-for-tat. “Where is Parliament’s moral compass? Today’s politicised theatre was a waste of everyone’s time.”
Greens MP Adam Bandt
Far from a return to the badgering and heckling that Abbott was so famous for in Opposition, there are times when it is necessary for the Opposition to do its job and oppose policies that are in neither Australia’s best interests, nor the vulnerable people languishing in our offshore detention centres.
And distasteful though it may be, heckling the government and prodding public outrage is what shapes the political views of many Australians.
Yet Bill Shorten and company continue to stand silently by in the face of increasingly haphazard and disgraceful action that the UN labels “cruel, inhuman and degrading”.
Labor remains welded alongside the government for a hardline approach to asylum seekers. How deeply disappointing that on the extremely rare occasion of such government unity it comes at the expense of thousands of vulnerable, suffering men, women and children who have put their lives at risk asking Australia for help.
Yet, there may be some change afoot in the Labor Party, led by the ambitious young NSW Senator and powerbroker, Sam Dastyari. Mr Dastyari, who as a child came to Australia as an Iranian refugee, advocates a “compassionate” approach to the asylum seeker debate. It’s a welcome relief that at least one Labor MP is willing to stand up to mainstream opinion.
Mr Shorten, if you haven’t figured out a definitive asylum seeker policy, why not take a more compassionate approach? Treat people as people. The number of refugees in the world is growing. No ‘guarantee’ to ‘stop the boats’ is going to make them disappear. As Malcolm Fraser wrote recently, “They are not fleeing for a sea change, but for their lives.”
Compassion may not appeal to today’s popular hardline approach. But just as you give asylum seekers a chance, you give Australians a chance. A chance to understand the issues and reasons why people become refugees. And a chance to discard the fear-mongering and racist propaganda that has polluted this debate and attitudes to asylum seekers for so many years.
You may need one heck of a marketing policy, Mr Shorten, but I reckon you could pull it off.
Lilani Goonesena is a freelance writer based in Canberra.For his recent solo show earlier this year at Pippy Houldsworth, Japanese artist Yuken Teruya (previously) transformed the waste products of consumerism—luxury gift bags—into cut paper trees that rise like fragile silhouettes from inside each bag. Via Pippy Houldsworth:
Discussing how Teruya’s bags are made, Megan Ratner explains that he ‘begins with photographs of trees, which he transfers to his computer, superimposing this image on the logo-ed side of a shopping bag. Using the original shape as a guide, he deftly cuts a two-part silhouette – lower branches/trunk and leafy top – folding and twisting the two halves into the interior of the bag, rooting the trunk with a single drop of glue.’
The works are part of Teruya’s ongoing Notice – Forest series and seems like almost a miracle that each piece comes together as it does, somewhat similar to the cut paper works by Peter Callesen. You can see much more over on Pippy Houldsworth. (via My Amp Goes to 11)VANCOUVER — A panel struck to restore faith in British Columbia's besieged real estate industry is calling for hefty fines of up to $500,000 for misconduct and measures to end aggressive sales tactics.
The advisory group was launched by the Real Estate Council of B.C. in February amid allegations that some agents were deceiving clients to rack up commissions and inflate prices in Metro Vancouver's overheated housing market.
The panel released a sweeping report on Tuesday with 28 recommendations, including that the province hike maximum misconduct fines to $250,000 for individual realtors and $500,000 for brokerages — a significant increase from the current maximum fines of $10,000 and $20,000.
A "sold" sign in Vancouver. (Photo: Jonathan Hayward/CP)
It's also calling for a ban on agents representing buyers and sellers in the same transaction, for any profits received from misconduct to be returned to the client, and for a confidential hotline for whistleblowers to report complaints.
The real estate council is the industry-funded body that oversees licensed real estate agents in B.C. It's currently made up of 14 industry members and three government appointees, and the panel recommended Tuesday that the portion of government appointees be increased to 50 per cent.
The superintendent of real estate, Carolyn Rogers, chaired the eight-member advisory group and she said its mandate was to examine whether the current regulatory regime adequately protects the public.
The panel didn't examine affordability, she said, but skyrocketing prices were having an impact on the council's role as a regulator and the recommendations were meant to address that.
A "sold" sign on a Vancouver home. (Photo: Jonathan Hayward/CP)
"Any time there is extreme price fluctuation, you have people that rush into the market that try and make a quick buck,'' she told a news conference.
"The regulatory regime for real estate services was designed for people who buy and sell homes, not people who are buying and selling investments. That is a different market. It requires a different regulatory rules, approaches and powers.''
She said the panel often began meetings by discussing predatory sales tactics they had seen, such as Realtors approaching homeowners on their property and pressuring them to sell. It recommended that council increase detection and deterrence efforts to end marketing and sales practices that target vulnerable members of the public, including seniors and immigrants.
The council quickly promised to adopt the 21 recommendations that were directed to it. The province is responsible for enacting the other seven, including raising the maximum fines.
"Incredibly damning"
Finance Minister Michael de Jong said in a statement that the government would announce actions to strengthen consumer protection on Wednesday.
"The report is a comprehensive examination of the practices and challenges plaguing the real estate industry right now, and paints a troubling picture,'' he said.
Robert Fawcett, the council's executive officer, said the council has created a committee that will establish timelines for swift adoption of the recommendations.
"We understand that for many British Columbians, buying or selling a home is the biggest financial transaction they will make in their lives,'' he said.
"It is a stressful, often emotional experience and they count on real estate professionals to provide them with the information, guidance and advice they can trust.''
The advisory group didn't consider a move away from self-regulation of the industry. Rogers said the decision to take away self-regulation rests with the government, but she is confident that the recommendations in report will create a more independent regulator.
David Eby, the provincial NDP's housing critic, called the document an "incredibly damning'' report into a failed regulator and demanded an end to self-regulation of the industry.
"When you add it all together, it is no surprise that they have recommended the near wholesale replacement of the board,'' he said.
"I am surprised that they didn't come to the inevitable conclusion, which is that self-regulation has failed here.''
Also on HuffPost:Washington (CNN) Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the likely general election presidential nominees, are running neck-and-neck in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, results driven by wide gender and racial gaps among voters, a new general election poll shows.
Clinton edges Trump in Florida and Pennsylvania, while Trump leads in Ohio, a ccording to the Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday
In both Florida and Pennsylvania the poll shows Clinton narrowly over Trump, 43% to 42%. In Ohio, Trump leads Clinton 43% to 39%.
"At this juncture, Trump is doing better in Pennsylvania than the GOP nominees in 2008 and 2012. And the two candidates are about where their party predecessors were at this point in Ohio and Florida," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, in a memo accompanying the poll results.
The poll also tested general election matchups between Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders, who currently trails Clinton, for their party's nomination. Sanders fares slightly better than Clinton in all three states, even topping Trump in Ohio, 43%-41%.
For Clinton and Trump, wide gaps in support among women and men and minorities drive the close contests.
In all three swing states, Clinton leads Trump among women by nine or more points, while Trump wins men by double-digits. And while white voters consistently favor Trump, non-white voters back Clinton by huge margins.
"The gender gap is massive and currently benefits Trump," Brown said. "In Pennsylvania, Clinton's 19-point lead among women matches Trump's 21-point margin among men. In Ohio, she is up 7 points among women but down 15 points with men. In Florida she is up 13 points among women but down 13 points among men."
Both Clinton and Trump are plagued by high unfavorability ratings among voters in each state.
Majorities of voters in the states say Trump would do a better job handling the economy, and in Florida and Ohio, voters said he would be the best dealing with terrorism.
Clinton, voters in all three states said, is more intelligent and has higher moral standards than Trump. Majorities in all three states also say the former secretary of state has the temperament to handle an international crisis.
The poll surveyed 1,051 Florida voters, 1,042 Ohio voters, and 1,077 Pennsylvania voters between April 27-May 8th and each state's polling has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.Kashmiri Journalist Arrested for Exposing Felling of Historic Trees
By Zafar Iqbal
NEELUM VALLEY, Jammu and Kashmir, July 27, 2012 (ENS) - A journalist has been arrested by police and is being detained after the publication of photos he took of historic trees chopped down by government officials.
Elderly eyewitnesses say the trees that were cut down were 54 years old. They were planted by the hands of prominent personalities of national fame, including the first Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Abdul Hamid Khan.
One of the trees felled by government workers (Photo by Khawaja Fiaz Hussain)
The photos show trees that were felled before the July 18 visit of Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf to Athmuqam in the Neelum Valley of Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Khawaja Fiaz Hussain, a correspondent for a leading Urdu daily newspaper and a freelance photojournalist, released a collection of images of the felled trees, both pines and other species.
The images were widely carried by local newspapers and aroused public anger over the logging by the government workers, whom local people describe as being primarily responsible for the protection of forests and environment.
In the Neelum Valley, the forests of pine fir and deodar trees provide habitat for endangered species of wildlife.
The police claim that Hussain was arrested for involvement in the production of forged educational documents.
Detained in a police station in the Neelum Valley, Hussain denied the charges in a phone interview with this correspondent.
Journalist Khawaja Fiaz Hussain (Photo courtesy Khawaja Fiaz Hussain)
"Police officers called me into the police station where I was shocked to see that I have been charged for making forged documents for school students," said Hussain.
"Earlier, police requested me to visit them because they said they wanted to question me about some community matters," he said.
Hussain said that some of the government departmental officials "were furious over the coverage of the photos about the felling of these historical trees."
"When I saw government high-ups brutally chopping the trees, I performed my professional duty to highlight this insane act," he said.
Local journalists say that police had already arrested another person on same charge but he was released when police forced him to name the journalist for involvement in the scam.
A broadcaster who also filed footage of the incident to his TV channel describes this logging as illegal and unreasonable.
The town of Athmuqam on the Neelum River received a visit from Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf on July 18, 2012. (Photo credit unknown)
"Trees were chopped unnecessarily by the government workers in pretense of ensuring a safe landing for the plane of the Prime Minister," said Amiruddin Mughal, who has widely covered environmental issues of this region.
"In the past U.S. humanitarian forces had used the same landing area without any intervention in local forests to provide aid to the victims of the Kashmir earthquake in October 2005. They came in Chinook helicopters, which are larger than plane of our Premier," said Mughal.
Environmental groups and members of the community are angry that the head of the Pakistani government, who has vowed to protect the local forests, was making his speech on the same ground where trees were chopped by his government functionaries.
Community workers also criticize the government for carelessness and demand justice for the arrested journalist who publicized this exploitation of forests.
In this disputed Kashmir region, five activists have been languishing in a jail for more than two years for advocating the plight of victims of climate change.
In January 2010 a large population was displaced due to torrential rains and landslides that created Attaabad Lake in the Gilgit Baltistan region of Kashmir, an incident that is chalked up to the planet's warming climate.
Pakistan is a signatory to all the major international environmental agreements, but governments have been blamed for overlooking the significance of natural resources.Update
Click here for more details about the game, but also a new trailer, some artworks, pictures of the amiibo, plenty of screenshots, and more!
Click here for a trailer and some details for the anime series!
*** Today, Capcom held a press conference for Monster Hunter Stories, and it looks like the company had some big announcements to make. First, the one that’s been on the mind of fans for months: the release date. Monster Hunter Stories will be released in October 8th in Japan, a little over a month before Pokémon Sun and Moon (November 18th).
But there’s more to it. Not only the game will be compatible with amiibo, but it will also get its own amiibo figures… three in fact! Scanning them will allow you to unlock a special Otomon in-game. Right now, it’s not clear whether non-Monster Hunter Stories amiibo will do anything in the game.
There’s two types of amiibo figures:
2 of them have the male or female protagonist riding the Rathalos: those cost 1 800 Yen + taxes
1 is just one of Nabiru (your partner in the game): it costs 1 200 Yen + taxes
What’s more, Capcom announced that players with Monster Hunter X / Generations save data will be able to unlock special armour for their partner, Nabiru. Players getting the game at launch will get special armour based on the Rathalos.
Here’s what the amiibo look like (courtesy of Inside Games):
Here’s some pictures of the press conference, showing the boxart, the retailer bonuses, and more:
Pre-orders for the game will start on June 2nd.
Monster Hunter Stories (3DS) will be released on October 8th in Japan. Our Upcoming Releases page has been updated!
Source: 4Gamer.netOriginal Airdate: January 23, 2012
Written & Storyboarded by: Tom Herpich & Bert Youn
Another Way is probably the most absurdist episode since season one. It’s not particularly strong in story; it’s just sort of a sequence of occurring events with Finn screaming a good chunk throughout. However, it’s one of those episodes where the jokes and visuals easily outweigh the necessity for an especially strong story, so it’s something that doesn’t bother me much. It’s jam packed with a lot of amusing moments and surreal humor that we haven’t seen much of in quite sometime.
First of all, the episode starts off with the most baffling fucking thing in AT history: Finn actually reading the Enchiridion. I can’t believe my eyes! It’s a darn shame this book hasn’t gotten more use in the grand scheme of things up to this point. The only time it was ever seen outside of its debut episode was when Finn threw it at a worm in Evicted!. I know it’s used for a very crucial story arc later on, but I really kinda wish it was used a bit more frequently early on. Could’ve been cool to explore bits of the book more, what it’s capable of, and make it more effective when it’s reintroduced a bit later on. Also, Jake’s recurring foot fetish returns in this one. That dog loves him some feet.
I really love all the unusual Ren & Stimpy type humor in this one. The clown nurses are really creepy and well-designed, and their demeanor is just completely ludicrous. There’s one farting bubbles out of a wand, one that looks completely distorted, and the main one, who gets a lot of grotesque close-ups of kissing Finn’s feet and breaking a sweat while doing so. It’s a really great episode for Bert Youn’s artwork. Youn is one of the only storyboard artists up to this point who still retains an aesthetic of the earlier days of the show. Of course, I like the individual artwork of the storyboard artists and think the general design and quality has advanced significantly over time, but it’s always nice to see Youn’s work that pales so similarly to the show’s roots.
The moments between Finn and the civilians he encounters are really hilarious. I love all of the wacky characters he comes face-to-face with. The stump voiced by Maria Bamford is great, I really never get tired of hearing that woman’s voice in the show. She always hits the right notes between goofy and completely sincere. The bush voiced by Gregg Turkington cracks me up; I don’t know why he’s so angry and passive aggressive, but I just love his attitude and general dislike of Finn. What the hell did Finn even do to deserve to be called an “ugly tramp”?? There’s also Pan and his wife Rainy, who are a cute little bunch to drive the conflict further during the second act.
I really love the moral conflict Finn is put through in this one. He doesn’t immediately acknowledge that he was wrong, but rather ponder if his way is incorrect or not. It’s admirable to watch him go about his own way and succeed throughout the episode, but also for him to realize that sometimes doing things completely individually can backfire, and the idea that occasionally not everything can be within your direction. It’s important to follow your own direction, but also crucial to analyze every given situation before doing so. It’s really driven home by Finn’s song, complete with auto-tune and some really terrific angles and shots by Tom Herpich. Awesome symbolism as well: there’s a river with three different streams, with two going in a direction where they’re able to flow freely, and one that is pouring over a waterfall and crashing, alluding Finn’s decision to choose his own path. It’s a perfect combination of philosophy and humor that’s especially fascinating to me. Also, there’s a cute little bit in this one where, for some reason, all of the trees have eyes. Not sure if it was just to go along with all of the other sentient elements of nature, but it’s always really funny and silly to just simply watch them blink and emote in the background.
Ultimately, Finn is able to get an accurate view on the situation when he realizes that he can still use his way to help others as well, even bring a sandwich to life with the tears from a Cyclops! And what a great lesson that is! I really like how it diverts from the typical message of listening to others and the idea that irrational plans are always likely to fail. It sides with the idea that, following your own path could get you into very possible trouble, but it can also lead you to independence and better options. It’s a lovely message of learning that there’s always another way, and that just might be your own way. Of course, it’s also accepting of the fact that everyone else has their own way too, and sometimes that way is accepting foot kisses from clown nurses.
So yeah, I enjoy this one. It’s not one of my faves from season three, but it’s very, very funny and engaging throughout. I love all the trippy and grotesque visuals, the side characters, and most of all the message. It’s one of Finn’s strongest lessons in independence yet, and it’s done so in the least preachy way possible. A very amusing adventure for our little man. That ugly, fat-smelling fathead.
Favorite line: “The current is so fast, it’ll turn your butt inside-out for real, doofus.”
AdvertisementsWith multiple oil refineries shutting down due to Hurricane Harvey's impacts on the Gulf Coast, customers in the Austin-area and throughout Texas are reporting a shortage of gasoline.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton said there is no shortage of fuel in Texas because of Harvey, but many stations are running out due to a high level of demand. He also acknowledged that prices are expected to climb in the coming days.
"As a region - there will be gasoline. There may be pockets that take a few days to get refueled but I don't believe a week from now this will be an issue," Sitton said. "There's just so much gasoline in inventory, pipelines are coming back online, logistical problems are working out, so that is not going to be a long-term issue."
KVUE viewers have reported multiple gas stations with shortages.
Commenters on the KVUE Facebook page are sharing locations that they say do not have fuel. Redditors started a thread sharing which locations were running empty.
KVUE reached out to several gas stations in Austin and the surrounding areas. Here is what we found as of Thursday afternoon:
Mobile app users click here to see the list
(Gas stations with all types of fuel are in green. Gas stations that are out of some fuel or running low are in yellow. Gas stations that are completely out of fuel are in red.) Manor (78653) Exxon - 12250 Harris Branch Pkway - Has all types of fuel
Valero - 12300 Harris Branch Pkwy - Only out of premium
Exxon - 12130 FM 973 - Has all types of fuel
Exxon - 16419 FM 969 - Has all types of fuel
Manor Grocery - 102 Parsons St - Has all types of fuel
Walmart - 11809 US 290 - Has all types of fuel
Texaco - 12836 US 290 - Has all types of fuel West Lake Hills (78746) Texaco - 7110 Bee Caves Rd - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 6111 Bee Caves Rd - Only has regular and diesel
Shell - 3310 N Capital of Texas - Has all types of fuel, but has a long line
Shell - 98 Redbud Trl - Has all types of fuel
Chevron - 2710 Bee Caves Rd - Has all types of fuel
Chevron - 6804 Bee Caves Rd - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 2451 S Capital of Texas - Has all types of fuel Del Valle (78617) Shell - 2475 SH-71 - Has all types of fuel
Texaco - 12800A Pearce Ln - Has all types of fuel Pflugerville (78660) H-E-B - 1434 Wells Branch Pkwy - Out of all types of fuel
Shell - 1701 Grand Avenue Pkwy - Has all types of fuel
Circle K - 2609 Pecan St - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 17511 Schultz Ln - Has all types of fuel, but expected to run out by end of Thursday
Shell - 410 W Pflugerville Pkwy - Has all types of fuel
Citgo - 13900 Immanuel Rd - Has all types of fuel
Chevron - 14815A Dessau Rd - Has all types of fuel
H-E-B - 201 N FM 685 - Has all types of fuel
Shell 1909 Kelly Ln - Has all types of fuel North Austin (787857) Shell - 3310 Northland Dr - Has all types of fuel
Shamrock - 7401 Burnet Rd - Has all types of fuel
Exxon - 7844 Burnet Rd - Has all types of fuel
Chevron - 8218 Burnet Rd - Out of all types of fuel
Shell - 8224 Burnet Rd - Has all types of fuel
Citgo - 1809 Anderson Ln - Out of all types of fuel (plan to refill Thursday night) South Austin (78704) Shell - 2125 W Ben White - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 2820 S Lamar Blvd - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 601 W Ben White Blvd - Out of all types of fuel
Exxon - 201 W Ben White Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Sunrise Mini Mart - 915 W Oltorf St - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 3906 S Congress Ave - Has all types of fuel
Mobil - 1403 S Lamar Blvd - Out of all types of fuel
Exxon - 1222 S Lamar Blvd - Out of unleaded, has plus and supreme
Chevron - 3909 S Congress Ave - Has all types of fuel
Exxon - 2907 S 1st St - Has all types of fuel through Friday evening
7-Eleven - 2103 S Congress Ave - Has all types of fuel
Chevron - 400 S Congress Ave - Has all types of fuel, but running low
Conoco - 2000 S IH-35 - Has all types of fuel
Mobil - 3630 S Congress Ave - Has all types of fuel Southeast Austin (78745) 7-Eleven - 8010 Brodie Ln - Out of regular, still has midgrade and premium
Valero - 8205 Brodie Ln - Has all types of fuel, but expects to be out by end of day
Texaco - 2800 W William Cannon Dr - Has all types of fuel
Xpress Fuel - 7200 Manchaca Rd - Has all types of fuel
Exxon - 5625 West Gate Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 4545 S Lamar Blvd - Has all types of fuel, but running low
Shell - 5401 Manchaca Rd - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 500 W William Cannon Dr - Has all types of fuel
E-Z Mart - 6400 S 1st St - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 6607 Circle S Dr - Out of all types of fuel Central East Austin (78723) Food Mart - 5327 Cameron Rd - Has all types of fuel
Texaco - 5517 Cameron Rd - Has all types of fuel
H-E-B - 1801 E 51st St - Has all types of fuel, but running low
Shell - 6615 Berkman Dr - Has all types of fuel
Conoco - 5029 Manor Rd - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 5210 Manor Rd - Has all types of fuel
Gulf - 5301 Manor Rd - Has all types of fuel
Valero - 4311 Springdale Rd - Has all types of fuel
Mobil - 4607 Loyola Ln - Has all types of fuel, but running low
Shell - 7101 Ed Bluestein Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Exxon - 1660 E 51st St - Has all types of fuel Downtown Austin (78710) 7-Eleven - 408 W 15th St - Ran out Thursday morning, won't have more for a few days
7-Eleven - 1814 Guadalupe St - Ran out Thursday morning, won't have more for a few days
Gulf - 717 E 7th St - Has regular and diesel fuel only
Shell - 900 N IH-35 - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 4429 Duval St - Has all types of fuel, but running low West Campus/Central Austin (78705) 7-Eleven - 2600 Guadalupe St - Out of all types of fuel Tarrytown/Old West Austin (78703) 7-Eleven - 2624 Lake Austin Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Phillips 66 - 2407 Lake Austin Blvd - Out of diesel, $15 limit per person
Chevron - 2402 Lake Austin Blvd - No diesel, has everything else
Texaco - 2400 Exposition Blvd - Has regular and diesel, no premium
Shell - 2701 Exposition Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Chevron - 1200 N Lamar Blvd - Has all types of fuel Cedar Park (78613) Indian Springs Country Store - 3031 Woodall Dr - Out of all types of fuel
Chevron - 1410 W Whitestone Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Shell - 1405 W Whitestone Blvd - Only has premium
Valero - 901 W Whitestone Blvd - Only has diesel
Randalls - 1400 Cypress Creek Rd - Has all types of fuel
H-E-B - 170 E Whitestone Blvd - Out of all types of fuel
Texaco - 1050 Cluck Creek Trl - Has all types of fuel
Gulf - 500 S Bell Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Costco - 4601 183A Toll Rd - Only carries premium and unleaded, has both Northwest Austin (78726) Shell - 10515 N UR-620 - No diesel
7-Eleven - 14016 UR-620 - Has mid-grade and premium, does not have regular East Austin (78702) Chevron - 2723 S IH-35 - Has all types of fuel
Citgo - 1621 Cesar Chavez St - Has all types of fuel
East 1st Grocery - 1811 E Cesar Chavez St - Only has 87
Valero - 3112 E Cesar Chavez St - Has all types of fuel
Citgo - 3842 Airport Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Phillips 66 - 1149 1/2 Airport Blvd - Has all types of fuel
Double R Grocery - 1149 Airport Blvd - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 863 Airport Blvd - Has all types of fuel, but unleaded running low Wells Branch/Round Rock (78728) Metro Mart - 2113 Wells Branch Pkwy - Has all types of fuel
Valero - 1779 Wells Branch Pkwy - Has all types of fuel
Valero - 1310 Howard Ln - Has all types of fuel
7-Eleven - 14730 N IH-35 - Has all types of fuel (ran out Wednesday but refueled)
Shell -14812 N IH -35 - Has all types of fuel, but running low
Exxon - 15900 N IH -35 - Has all types of fuel
Speedy Stop - 14735 Bratton Ln - Has all types of fuel Lake Travis/Steiner Ranch (78732) Wag-A-Bag - 2900 N Quinlan Park Rd - Has unleaded, but out of premium
Randalls - 5145 N FM 620 - Out of fuel Lakeway (78734) Texaco - 2200 Lakeway Blvd - Has all types of fuel
H-E-B - 2000 UR-620 - Has all types of fuel (but has long lines)
Exxon - 903 S UR-620 - Has all types of fuel (but has long lines)
Exxon - 3636 UR-620 - Out of fuel
*Note: This information is from Thursday afternoon*
The City of Austin released the following statement:
"The City of Austin is aware of social media reports of fuel shortages in the Austin region. The City’s fuel division is currently operating normally and their ability to provide emergency and routine services has not been impacted. However we are monitoring the situation and are prepared to enact conservation methods should they be required."
None of Texas' refineries suffered major damage. Valero has already begun ramping up at its refineries and another major refinery in Texas is expected to be back on line Sunday.
However, gas prices are climbing, which is typical when hurricanes knock off refineries. Statewide, the average gas price is $2.26 per gallon, which is four cents higher than Wednesday and 12 cents more than Thursday last week. Drivers in Dallas are paying the most for gas at $2.23 per gallon.
Paul Hardin with the Texas Fuel & Food Association said if consumers see price gouging, they should report it to the Attorney General’s office immediately.
“The fines can range up to about $250,000,” said Hardin.Cape Town - For many, the fuel price is merely a number on a pump that they need to pay when filling their tank. But the cost of this essential commodity is much more than that; it is made up of many different costs that, together, constitute what is commonly referred to as the petrol price.
In April the cost of a litre of fuel will be impacted by a 30 cents a litre increase in the Fuel Levy, announced by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan during his budget speech in February.
This will move the Fuel Levy – a tax collected on every litre of fuel sold - from R2.55 to R2.85 a litre. The money collected through the Fuel Levy is administered by the National Treasury, and is treated as a general tax, not, as many people assume, road-related expenses, the Automobile Association (AA) explained on Tuesday.We have a prescription pill problem
Four |
either possibilities but I'd rather work on Armory full time if I had a choice. https://btcarmory.com
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Roy Badami
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Hero MemberActivity: 564Merit: 500 Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 08:36:31 PM #2 First off, many thanks to both @etotheipi and @goatpig for all you've done, and continue to do, for the Bitcoin community.
Two quick questions for goatpig:
1. Any chance of setting up a download location for the open source project, with 0.93.3 builds? This will at least make Armory useable again to a wider community.
2. Will your open source project continue to use the Armory name, or is that a trademark of ATI?
achow101
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bc1qshxkrpe4arppq89fpzm6c0tpdvx5cfkve2c8kl
StaffLegendaryActivity: 1680Merit: 2105bc1qshxkrpe4arppq89fpzm6c0tpdvx5cfkve2c8kl Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 08:40:47 PM #3 I hope to be able to help with armory development in the future, I just need to brush up on my python and c++.
Just a couple of questions
IIRC the announcements tab got its announcements from Armory's servers. Now that the company is no longer a thing, where will the announcements come from or will that be removed due to the cost of maintaining a server?
How come previous code for 0.94 cannot be used? Didn't you say that you also had a copy of that branch before it was removed? If it is because of licensing, can't you just ask Alan for permission to use it, or is there some legal issue with the company that prevents this? GitHub | GPG Key Fingerprint 0x17565732E08E5E41 Bitcoin Core contributor | Tip Me!: bc1qshxkrpe4arppq89fpzm6c0tpdvx5cfkve2c8kl
goatpig
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ModeratorLegendaryActivity: 2128Merit: 1111Armory Developer Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 08:41:51 PM #4 Quote from: Roy Badami on February 03, 2016, 08:36:31 PM First off, many thanks to both @etotheipi and @goatpig for all you've done, and continue to do, for the Bitcoin community.
Two quick questions for goatpig:
1. Any chance of setting up a download location for the open source project, with 0.93.3 builds? This will at least make Armory useable again to a wider community.
2. Will your open source project continue to use the Armory name, or is that a trademark of ATI?
1) I will have to figure things out on this front. I have no access to the current website and I expect it to be off limit (maybe I'm wrong?). If the community wishes to participate on that front, I'll be happy to provide signed builds, but no 0.93 builds. I expect to get into a testing phase for the redone 0.94 soon enough.
2) No idea. My current expectation is that ATI will graciously let me use that name. Otherwise, I'll consult with the community on what the new name should be. 1) I will have to figure things out on this front. I have no access to the current website and I expect it to be off limit (maybe I'm wrong?). If the community wishes to participate on that front, I'll be happy to provide signed builds, but no 0.93 builds. I expect to get into a testing phase for the redone 0.94 soon enough.2) No idea. My current expectation is that ATI will graciously let me use that name. Otherwise, I'll consult with the community on what the new name should be. https://btcarmory.com
goatpig
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ModeratorLegendaryActivity: 2128Merit: 1111Armory Developer Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 08:48:10 PM #5 Quote from: knightdk on February 03, 2016, 08:40:47 PM I hope to be able to help with armory development in the future, I just need to brush up on my python and c++.
Pull requests are welcomed. It's preferable if you consult with me on what you intent to develop. It all needs to be MIT licensed.
Quote IIRC the announcements tab got its announcements from Armory's servers. Now that the company is no longer a thing, where will the announcements come from or will that be removed due to the cost of maintaining a server?
Afaik the announcement system is down to begin with as it was not updated in a while and the URL changed anyways. This is again something to be discussed with the community. I can't push updates to old clients as the the URL for announcements is hard coded to ATI servers, so I wonder if it's worth modifying that URL in the fork at all, as opposed to just disabling the feature for now.
Quote How come previous code for 0.94 cannot be used? Didn't you say that you also had a copy of that branch before it was removed? If it is because of licensing, can't you just ask Alan for permission to use it, or is there some legal issue with the company that prevents this?
Alan doesn't legally own the code. He is a share holder in a company that owns the code. Simply put it isn't his decision to make.
I have access to much more than just 0.94, but releasing that would and basing an open source fork of Armory off of that would create a legal burden. I don't want to jeopardize the project to jump some hoops. 99% of what's in 0.94 is my work, I know how to redo it (the new stuff will actually be faster and more robust). Pull requests are welcomed. It's preferable if you consult with me on what you intent to develop. It all needs to be MIT licensed.Afaik the announcement system is down to begin with as it was not updated in a while and the URL changed anyways. This is again something to be discussed with the community. I can't push updates to old clients as the the URL for announcements is hard coded to ATI servers, so I wonder if it's worth modifying that URL in the fork at all, as opposed to just disabling the feature for now.Alan doesn't legally own the code. He is a share holder in a company that owns the code. Simply put it isn't his decision to make.I have access to much more than just 0.94, but releasing that would and basing an open source fork of Armory off of that would create a legal burden. I don't want to jeopardize the project to jump some hoops. 99% of what's in 0.94 is my work, I know how to redo it (the new stuff will actually be faster and more robust). https://btcarmory.com
Carlton Banks
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LegendaryActivity: 2282Merit: 1535 Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 08:50:29 PM #6 Concur with Roy, massive thanks to etotheipi, goatpig, Doug, and at least 2 other guys I forgot the name of.
Might also be an idea might to try to get Armory onto the debian/arch/gentoo/red hat etc repo, to take some traffic pressure off your new server. Torrent published either here or on the new website would be a further idea (but you could argue pretty much anyone here on this forum can do that themselves). Bitcoin.org publicly seeds all the new bitcoin releases with bittorrent over http, that's a way to go also. Vires in numeris
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ModeratorLegendaryActivity: 2128Merit: 1111Armory Developer Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 09:35:10 PM #8 Quote from: knightdk on February 03, 2016, 09:11:54 PM I was thinking about working on RBF.
To detect or create RBF transactions? For both you would need the C++ side to feed you some sort of RBF flag for each UTXOs. I created a branch on my fork called RBF_PR. It is based off of master. Feel free to fork that repo and work in that branch. Assume you are getting an RBF flag from ZC UTXOs, I'll add that extra bit of information once I'm done with the new DB. Please keep it all on the Python to simplify the merge.
Quote Also, what about work on gitian/deterministic builds?
I can't use any of that, will have to go at it from scratch too. Not sure about the priority on this, although I value that feature a lot. To detect or create RBF transactions? For both you would need the C++ side to feed you some sort of RBF flag for each UTXOs. I created a branch on my fork called RBF_PR. It is based off of master. Feel free to fork that repo and work in that branch. Assume you are getting an RBF flag from ZC UTXOs, I'll add that extra bit of information once I'm done with the new DB. Please keep it all on the Python to simplify the merge.I can't use any of that, will have to go at it from scratch too. Not sure about the priority on this, although I value that feature a lot. https://btcarmory.com
Roy Badami
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Hero MemberActivity: 564Merit: 500 Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 10:12:17 PM #12 Quote from: goatpig on February 03, 2016, 09:35:10 PM For both you would need the C++ side to feed you some sort of RBF flag for each UTXOs.
Core 0.12 has an RPC call to tell you whether a tx opts in to RBF (which AIUI also checks whether an unconfirmed parent tx opts in).
EDIT: Although perhaps it's only useable if the tx pays to an address in the Core wallet - I haven't looked at what it does so I don't know.
EDIT: See Core 0.12 has an RPC call to tell you whether a tx opts in to RBF (which AIUI also checks whether an unconfirmed parent tx opts in).EDIT: Although perhaps it's only useable if the tx pays to an address in the Core wallet - I haven't looked at what it does so I don't know.EDIT: See https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/7222
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Hero MemberActivity: 532Merit: 500 Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 10:14:25 PM #13 Many thanks to both @etotheipi and @goatpig for all you've done,
please any chance to keep Armory alive and include Trezor support? BTC Address --->
1487ThaKjezGA6SiE8fvGcxbgJJu6XWtZp Make my day! Say thanks if you found me helpfulBTC Address --->1487ThaKjezGA6SiE8fvGcxbgJJu6XWtZp
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ModeratorLegendaryActivity: 2128Merit: 1111Armory Developer Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 10:19:17 PM #14 Quote from: Roy Badami on February 03, 2016, 10:12:17 PM Core 0.12 has an RPC call to tell you whether a tx opts in to RBF (which AIUI also checks whether an unconfirmed parent tx opts in).
Armory only sets up an RPC connection to Core when running the auto bitcoind management. I'd prefer a solution that covers ever case.
Quote EDIT: Although perhaps it's only useable if the tx pays to an address in the Core wallet - I haven't looked at what it does so I don't know.
Core keeps track of all ZC tx (otherwise Armory would not be able to see them). I expect the RPC would let you get the RBF flag by tx hash, regardless of the relevance to Core's own wallet. Armory only sets up an RPC connection to Core when running the auto bitcoind management. I'd prefer a solution that covers ever case.Core keeps track of all ZC tx (otherwise Armory would not be able to see them). I expect the RPC would let you get the RBF flag by tx hash, regardless of the relevance to Core's own wallet. https://btcarmory.com
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LegendaryActivity: 2394Merit: 1066 Re: Moving forward with Armory February 03, 2016, 10:20:55 PM #16
As time winds on, please update this thread when you can. I understand that living comes first, then the things you love, then perhaps coding (they could overlap, possibly).
I'll be watching this space to see what evolves. I understand legalities can complicate things, just very glad you're willing to take it under your wing and continue. Thanks etothepi and goatpig, Armory is a high-octane wallet that has many features power users love.As time winds on, please update this thread when you can. I understand that living comes first, then the things you love, then perhaps coding(they could overlap, possibly).I'll be watching this space to see what evolves. I understand legalities can complicate things, just very glad you're willing to take it under your wing and continue. fortitudinem multis - catenum regit omniaStory highlights Missouri boy, 9, runs lemonade stand to help pay the legal fees for his adoption
Over the course of three days, the family raised more than $16,000 from in-person sales and donations
(CNN) Most kids who set up lemonade stands hope to earn enough for an ice cream or maybe a new bike. But young Tristan has a loftier goal: He wants to get adopted.
From his front yard in Springfield, Missouri, the 9-year-old spent last weekend selling cups of lemonade and cookies by the hundreds. Every cent will go to legal fees so his guardian, Donnie Davis, can adopt him.
Davis and her husband, Jimmy Davis, had expected to raise a few hundred bucks with the lemonade stand and a yard sale -- far short of the $5,000 to $10,000 in fees it will take to adopt the boy. But then the local media got wind of her story, word got around, and people began flocking to her yard.
"It just spread," she told CNN. "We had people driving two-and-a-half hours just to meet Tristan."
On Saturday alone, more than 600 people came to donate and share their own adoption stories, Davis said. "We were constantly running for more ice, water, cookies," she said. "There was one point in time, we put water in the cooler and sold out before it was even cold."
Read MoreThis game allows multiplayer play and is not subject to Xbox Live Family Settings. Microsoft shares User IDs and gamertags. Finally, a true real-time, full-3D MMORPG on your Windows Phone: Explore a vast heroic fantasy world and join thousands of players in this massively multiplayer online experience that pushes the boundaries of epic! WHO WILL YOU BE? Use the advanced character-creation system to customize your hero: • 5 races available: Elves and Humans fight for Order, Orcs and Undead for Chaos, while Mendels are neutral. • Choose your gender, appearance, class and talent. With over 1,000 skills and 3,000 pieces of equipment to discover, your adventure will not be over soon. • Create up to 4 different characters to play. INTERACT WITH THE COMMUNITY • Make friends or enemies, trade, challenge, communicate and more: A wide range of interactions makes each player a living part of this universe. • Join a party or guild to become stronger and coordinate with your teammates, or you can choose to adventure solo, interacting with other players peacefully or otherwise… THE WORLD IS YOURS • Travel through the most majestic settings - from dark forests to deserts, jungles, mountains and more - on foot or by magical means. • Talk and interact with hundreds of characters to find over 1,200 quests to perform. ENTER THE PvP ARENAS! Join Player vs. Player arenas and spill the blood of your enemies to dominate the online leaderboards. MOUNT UP Ride into battle faster than ever on the awesome mounts, including Lions, Stags, Bears, and more! BRING IT ON AND UNLOCK ACHIEVEMENTS IN YOUR XBOX LIVE PROFILE Order & Chaos comes to Windows Phone to let you enjoy a full-fledged Xbox Live experience. - Unlock 20 new achievements and win 200 Gamerscore points. - Are you more powerful than your Xbox Live friends? Compare your scores on the leaderboard. - Try it and enjoy the first quests. It’s 100% free until you reach level 8! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! There are tons of quests, items and dungeons waiting within. Happy adventuring! Enter the legend now! An additional download of 700MB is required to play this game. __________ This app allows you to purchase virtual items within the app and may contain third-party advertisements that may redirect you to a third-party site. Terms of use: http://www.gameloft.com/conditions/ __________ If you install this game, you understand and agree that Microsoft may share your User ID and gamertag with the game publisher to enable game features. This game includes multiplayer features with online interactions that are not subject to Xbox Live Family Settings. These features may include the following interactions with other players online: • Send and receive game invites; • Play cooperatively or head-to-head; • Send and receive in-game text messages; • Communicate via in-game voice chat. Please see the publisher’s site http://www.gameloft.com/privacy-notice/windows/ for information on settings it may enable.How Abbott royally stuffed up knighthoods
Posted
Tony Abbott runs Australia with a backdrop of kitsch 1950s nostalgia, and with the appointment of Prince Philip as Australia's newest knight it is obvious the PM has missed the mark, writes Darrin Barnett.
When a small moment becomes indicative that the entire situation is now beyond repair, we say things have "jumped the shark."
The phrase comes from the hit series Happy Days when, in a tired and desperate fifth season, the cult character Fonzie was enlisted to jump over a shark on water skis.
From that point on, it was clear that there would be no redemption for the once mighty sitcom.
Much like Happy Days, Tony Abbott runs Australia with a backdrop of kitsch 1950s nostalgia. And with the appointment of Prince Philip as Australia's newest knight it is obvious beyond doubt that the PM has now jumped the shark.
Abbott's surprise decision in March last year to reinstate knights and dames - which sings to a part of his electoral base that would never contemplate voting anything other than conservative - left much of middle Australia confused at best, and hostile at worst.
Today's announcement doubles down on that sentiment. Like many Australians, when I found out Prince Philip had been selected for Australia's highest honour I had to check it wasn't from a satirical website.
The list of arguments against this giant, symbolic misstep is virtually endless.
Firstly, at a time when the Government is desperately trying to sell its "end to the age of entitlement" theme, handing our highest honour to the literal embodiment of entitlement seems monumentally misguided.
Secondly, if you are desperate to give a knighthood to a royal, as Mr Abbott must be, Prince Philip is nowhere near the most popular nor worthy on his list of candidates.
In my experience, most Australians like William and Kate, don't mind Queen Elizabeth, tolerate Charles, but have little time for the bumbling Philip.
The 93-year-old Duke of Edinburgh is probably best remembered in this country for his 2002 remark when he asked an Aboriginal man: "Do you still throw spears at each other?"
This offensive remark, of course, was hardly out of character. The Prince has form over a long period of time, across many countries and continents.
Some standout utterances are (with thanks to Britain's Mirror, which has been keeping a groaning archive of such things):
To the President of Nigeria, who was in national dress, in 2003: "You look like you're ready for bed!"
To deaf children by steel band, in 2000: "Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf."
To a female solicitor, 1987: "I thought it was against the law for a woman to solicit."
On the 1981 recession: "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now everybody's got more leisure time they're complaining they're unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want."
Thirdly, why sully the announcement of the honour bestowed upon former Defence Force chief Angus Houston?
Sir Angus is a great choice. Enormously respected by all in addition to a long period of civic service.
Why lump him in with Prince Philip?
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten must surely not believe his luck. With obvious self-restraint, Mr Shorten nevertheless noted today the Prime Minister appears to be in a time warp.
"It's outside the mainstream, I think, of Australian thinking to have done this," he said.
Mr Shorten added that a Labor government would probably end the announcement of knights and dames.
Yet far more worrying for Mr Abbott must surely be the views of senior Liberal political advisor Grahame Morris, one of former PM John Howard's closest personal friends.
Mr Morris tweeted today:
Mr Howard, of course, never dreamt of using his robust reserves of political capital to reintroduce knights and dames, and noted that Mr Abbott's move last year was "anachronistic". Mr Morris's tweet today is probably fairly indicative of the former PM's general feeling.
In fact, you have to search pretty hard to find anyone who is in favour of today's announcement. Then again, there's always the reliable Professor David Flint, national convener of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy.
"I think it's a worthy reward, he's had a very long connection with this country," Professor Flint said.
"We have a tradition of handing awards to people from other countries and I see nothing wrong with awarding it to a Greek who became an Englishman who worked very hard to keep us free in the Second World War and has made a major contribution to us without being paid anything."
Abbott probably sees our constitutional monarchy as sacrosanct, and that's a fair enough personal view.
Yet how important must he see Prince Philip's knighthood to stick his neck out this far?
As another conservative commentator, Chris Kenny, noted succinctly on Twitter:
As Kenny notes, how can there be no one in the PM's office capable of offering such easily digestible advice?
Darrin Barnett is a former Canberra Press Gallery journalist and press secretary to prime minister Julia Gillard. He is now a fellow of the McKell Institute.
Topics: government-and-politics, community-and-society, australia-dayFrom Alphonse Mingana To Christoph Luxenberg: Arabic Script & The Alleged Syriac Origins Of The Qur'an
Islamic Awareness
© Islamic Awareness, All Rights Reserved.
First Composed: 20th December 2004
Last Modified: 3rd May 2007
Assalamu ʿalaykum wa rahamatullahi wa barakatuhu:
1. Introduction
The history of orientalism is quite peculiar. According to a few of them the history of Islam and Muslims is quite possibly a lie. They also claimed that Arabic sources on Islam are inherently unreliable whereas non-Islamic sources and speculative opinions are given an aura of truthfulness. As far as the Qur'an is concerned, it was not the revelation given to the Prophet, but simply a compilation of stolen liturgical material from the mass of Judeo-Christian and Zoroastrian traditions. One such example of an orientalist belonging to this class was that of Reverend Alphonse Mingana. Mingana attempted to teach Muslims about the transmission of their sacred Book down to even the Arabic alphabet! His hypothesis was that the Qur'an had strong imprints of Syriac. The "author" integrated a host of Syriac loan words into the language and thus brought about the linguistic revolution of what is now called the Qur'an.[1] Mingana catalogued the alleged "Syriac" vocabulary in the Qur'an and argued for the widespread presence of Syriac Christianity and its important role in the origins of Islam. His work, along with the more comprehensive work of Arthur Jeffery's The Foreign Vocabulary Of The Qur'an,[2] gave impetus for further research into the connection between the "foreign" vocabulary of the Qur'an and the historical circumstances of its appearance. Recently, Mingana's work was given a resurrection with a new twist by Christoph Luxenberg's Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran: Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache.[3]
As far as the origins of the Arabic language is concerned, Mingana claims complete ignorance about it. He goes on to claim that in Makkah and Madinah, the written language "must have been" either Syriac or Hebrew:
If all the signs do not mislead us, very few oracular sentences, if any, were written in the time of the Prophet. The kind of life he led, and the rudimentary character of reading and writing in that part of the world in which he appeared, are sufficient witnesses in favour of this view. Our ignorance of the Arabic language in its early period of its evolution is such that we can not even know with certainty whether it had any writing of its own in Maccah and Madinah. If a kind of writing existed in these two localities it must have been something very similar to Estrangelo [i.e., Syriac] or the Hebrew character.[4]
As for the Arabic vowels, he dismisses the value of Arab authors and instead relies on Aramaic writers and his own speculative opinions. He says:
The first discoverer of the Arabic vowels is unknown to history. The opinions of Arab authors, on this point, are too worthless to be quoted... If we may advance an opinion of our own, we think that a complete and systematic treatise on these vowels was not elaborated till the latter half of the VIIIth century, and we believe that such an attempt could have been successfully made only the under the influence of the school of Baghdâd, at its very beginning. On the one hand, besides the insufficiency of the grounds for assuming an earlier date, we have not a manuscript which can be shewn to be before that time, adorned with vowels; on the other hand, the dependence of these vowels on those of Armaeans obliges us to find a centre where the culture of the Aramaic language was flourishing, and this centre is the school of Baghdâd, which was, as we have already stated, under the direction of Nestorian scholars, and where a treatise on Syriac grammar was written by the celebrated Hunain.[5]
He also asserted that:
The foundation of the Arabic vowels is based on the vowels of Aramaeans. The names given to these vowels is an irrefragable proof of the veracity of this assertion. So the Phath corresponds in appellation and in sound to the Aramaic Phtâha....[6]
Following closely in the footsteps of Mingana, Luxenberg claims that before the emergence of Arabic literature, the principal language of writing was syro-aramäische or Syriac. This lead him to assume that the origins of the literary Arabic and the Qur'an must be sought in Aramaic and Christian communities. This assumption is taken further to claim that Makkah was not an Arab settlement but an Aramaic colony and that the residents of Makkah spoke aramäische-arabische Mischsprache.[7] This language, apparently not known or understood outside of Makkah(?), soon went into a state of oblivion and no reliable tradition existed to prove its existence.[8] Hence, according to Luxenberg, the early Muslim scholars, writing about a century and a half after the Prophet, were under the false impression that the Qur'an was written in classical Arabic; therefore, it was no surprise that they did not understand what they were reading.[9] In this regard, Luxenberg represents a radical break from everyone else, including Jeffery and Mingana.
Under the cloak of these assumptions, Luxenberg begins his quest to find the "real" Qur'anic text using his own graphic and linguistic methods. It is his assumptions for the graphic side of his analysis that interests us in this paper. By claiming that the early Arabic documents lack diacritical points and vowel markers, Luxenberg takes liberty to alter diacritics and change the vowels at will.
Luxenberg's work has been given wide publicity by the New York Times (Alexander Stille and Nicholas Kristoff), The Guardian and Newsweek. Is his book a path-breaking discourse or is it yet another headline grabbing exercise? This has prompted us to evaluate the claims of Luxenberg and inspect the foundations which these claims rest upon. In this paper, we would like to examine the assumptions of Mingana and Luxenberg concerning the origins of various aspects of the Arabic script. We will also compare the Arabic script with the Syriac script and its development. It will be shown that both Mingana and Luxenberg were wrong in their assumptions concerning the Arabic script.
2. Origins Of The Arabic Script
As mentioned earlier, Mingana claimed ignorance about the evolution of the Arabic script and the presence of an Arabic alphabet during the advent of Islam. He then went on to say that in Makkah and Madinah, the written language "must have been" either Syriac or Hebrew. As for Luxenberg, he claims that:
When the Koran was composed, Arabic did not exist as a written language; thus it seemed evident to me that it was necessary to take into consideration, above all, Aramaic, which at the time, between the 4th and 7th centuries, was not only the language of written communication, but also the lingua franca of that area of Western Asia.
As far as the history of Arabic as a written language is concerned, it is best depicted by the following pre-Islamic as well as early post-Islamic Arabic inscriptions that show the progressive development of the Arabic script. The inscriptions below show that the Arabic script before the advent of Islam clearly had a well-developed alphabet.
These inscriptions detailed above provide ample evidence of a well articulated Arabic alphabet and are sufficient to refute the speculative assumptions of Mingana and Luxenberg. Furthermore, Bellamy commenting on the inscriptions from Jabal Ramm, Umm al-Jimal and Harran says:
Anyone who takes a close look at these inscriptions and compares them with the sample of Koran... will discern a great many letterforms that have not been changed at all, or very little, in the sixteen hundred years that have elapsed since the earliest one was written.[16]
The condition of Arabic writing in Muhammad's time is indicated by PERF No. 558 (our plates iv-v), an Arabic papyrus of the reign of ‘Umar dated AH 22 and written in a fairly well developed manuscript hand in the distant province of Egypt, where Greek and Coptic were the written languages in general use. If written Arabic was so primitive and rare in its own homeland at the time of Muhammad's death, how do we account for its practical use in Egypt only a short dozen years after that event? Again to grant the incomplete development of orthography would give us reason to suspect only the orthographic accuracy of early Qur'anic editions but not the possibility of their existence. In this connection it is interesting to note that nowhere in the traditions of the earliest transmission of the Qur'an is there any hint of serious orthographic or vowel difficulties; rather it is the differences in the Arabic tribal dialects and differences arising out of foreigner's use of Arabic that seem to demand attention. The foregoing considerations lead one to believe that, if we allow for such common mistakes as writers and copyists are liable to make, the Arabic writers of Muhammad's time and of the time of early Caliphs were able scribes capable of producing an acceptable edition of a written Qur'an despite the lack of all the improvements of modern written Arabic.[17]
Luxenberg mentions the pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in Grohmann's classic Arabische Paläographie.[18] Deducing from the early form of Arabic alphabets, he says that it is safe to assume the cursive syro-aramäische script [i.e., Syriac] served as a model for the Arabic script.[19] What now becomes almost unbelievable is that Luxenberg uses Grohmann's Arabische Paläographie as a source to support his argument that the syro-aramäische script served as a model for the Arabic script. Grohmann in this book, in fact, was one of the earliest scholars to refute the origins of Arabic script from Syriac script.[20] T. Nöldeke was the first to establish the link between the Nabataean and Arabic scripts in 1865, which later confirmed against J. Starcky's Syriac thesis by Grohmann. The affiliation between Nabataean and Arabic scripts has now been fully documented by J. Healey. He says:
The development of the Nabataean script in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. is usually seen as a progression from form derived from earlier Aramaic towards forms out of which the early (western cursive) Arabic script developed, though we should note the view of J. Starcky, based partly on the observation that Nabataean script, unlike the Syriac and Arabic scripts, is essentially suspended from an upper line, that the origin of the Arabic script is to be sought in a Lahmid form of the Syriac script. This view has met with little support. The Nabataean origin of the Arabic script is now almost universally accepted.[21]
Similar conclusions were also reached by Nabia Abbott,[22] Kees Versteegh[23] and Beatrice Gruendler.[24] One should also note that the origins of an early cursive Arabic script has nothing to do with the syro-aramäische script of Luxenberg; rather it is from the Nabataean script from where it originated. Now that Luxenberg's hypothesis of the syro-aramäische script being the "model" for the Arabic script is conclusively refuted, let us now move on to the origin of diacritical and vowel marks in Arabic script.
3. Diacritical & Vowel Marks In Arabic From Syriac?
The diacritical (or skeletal) and vowel marks in early days of Islam were termed as nuqa t (or dots). Skeletal dots differentiate the graphemes or the letters sharing in the same skeleton such as ح from ج. These are known as nuqa t al-i‘jām and was familiar to the Arabs prior to the advent of Islam. The vowel marks or nuqa t al-i‘rāb (or tashkīl), which can take the form of dots or conventional markings, were invented by Abu al-Aswad al-Duali (d. 69 AH / 688 CE) as we shall see below.[25] Let us now look into the issue of borrowing.
3.1 DIACRITICAL MARKS
It has been claimed by scholars, with some reservations, that the origins of diacritical and vowel marks originate from Syriac.[26] We have already seen the opinions of Mingana earlier.[27] Luxenberg opines that the diacritical dots for ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish) in Syriac may have served as the basis for the Arabic alphabet.[28]
In the Syriac alphabet, only two characters possess diacritical dots: ܕ (dolath) and ܪ (rish). By comparison the Arabic alphabet contains a total of fifteen dotted characters: ب، ت، ث، ج، خ، ذ، ز، ش، ض، ظ، غ، ف، ق، ن، ة. Imagining that the Arabs borrowed their multitudinous dots from the Syriac becomes a difficult proposition.[29] Moreover, we have clear pre-Islamic evidence of the usage of diacritical dots, e.g., the Raqush Inscription [267 CE] has diacritical points on the letters د، ش and ر; the Jabal Ramm Inscription [4th century CE] has diacritical points for the letters ج، ي and ن; and a curious inscription from Sakakah contains dots associated with Arabic letters ب، ت and ن.
Coming to the time of the advent of Islam, the earliest dated papyrus PERF No. 558 [22 AH / 642 CE] shows numerous diacritical dots on the letters ج، خ، ذ، ز، ش and ن. Dotting is also seen for the letters ز، ق and ن in P. Mich. 6714 - a bilingual papyrus from 22 - 54 AH / 642 - 674 CE. There are also examples of diacritical dots in the Islamic inscriptions, e.g., an inscription at Wadi Sabil [46 |
lemy along with them—believed that here in exotic Taprobane was the original home of Dionysus described by Homer a thousand years earlier in the ninth century BC. This identification would have further reinforced the prevailing opinion of the time: that Lanka or Taprobane was the Antipodes (Greek: literally, 'where feet are opposite'), a fabulous, topsy-turvy island realm where anything was possible—the natural abode of gods like Dionysus. Remarkably, this simple attestation by one of classical antiquity's great scientists has attracted scant notice among scholars of the modern era. Apparently, what was once obvious to the ancients is no longer evident to modern observers. In the remainder of this study, I will argue that this is less due to changes in Kataragama than to changes in the fundamental assumptions of modern observers.
How did Alexandrian mariners come to identify the Kataragama god with their own Dionysus? In classical times, such identifications were accepted as natural. Caesar, for instance, assigned Roman names to non-Roman deities when he wrote of the Gaulish Celts: 'Of all the gods they worship Mercury (i.e. Hermes) most of all—After him they honour Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva."14 By the same token, Tamils identify the Kataragama god with their Murukan and people of North Indian heritage, including the Sinhalese, identify him with Skanda-Kumāra of Sanskritic mythology. And yet, as we shall see, such identifications are not based on outward similarities alone, but on deep-seated resemblances or resonances which traditional people ascribe not to a human origin by cunning'myth-makers' but to divine intelligence operating in the super-human sphere and manifesting itself variously at different times and places.
Regarded from the diachronic perspective that prevails today, god Kataragama 'became' Murukan or Skanda-Kumāra or he 'became identified' with them, but did not 'become' Dionysus because the identification did not endure among the local population. However, from the synchronic perspective common to traditional cultures, the Kataragama god already is Murukan and Skanda-Kumāra and Dionysus from the very beginning, i.e. in principio. It is worth noting that this amalgamation—or rather, identification—of three 'distinct' gods is perfectly concordant with their characteristic association with the dissolution of boundaries.
Modern scholars—who are devotees by profession of Apollo—regard with disdain the secrecy and paradoxical, double-edged logic common to Dionysus and Kataragama and abhor what they regard as cult excesses. Charles Segal observes, "As Apollo imposes limits and reinforces boundaries, Dionysus, his opposite and complement, dissolves them."15 Undoubtedly, Kataragama and Dionysus "cannot be understood, only appreciated".16 Accordingly, an attempt may be made not to dissect the cults but to evaluate their bonds of commonality with a view to understand better their inner dynamics, if not the common source of their sacred power as well.
From its beginning, European indological scholarship has tended to focus on languages, texts and traditions of Indo-European origin while overlooking indigenous and Dravidian sources or downplaying their role in the evolution of Indian thought. As part of a general reappraisal of the history of Indian thought, the present study also aims to reapproximate the archaic worldview, alone from which archaic cults draw their soul-inspiring vision and vitality and outside of which they appear to the modern mind as mere 'belief systems' with no ontological basis in what we moderns fondly cherish as'reality'. As Walter Otto observes in his landmark study Dionysus: Myth and Cult, "It is the custom to speak only of religious concepts or religious belief. The more recent scholarship in religion is surprisingly indifferent to the ontological content of this belief. As a matter of fact, all of its methodology tacitly assumes that there could not be an essence which would justify the cults and the myths."17
As befits a multi-faceted god like Skanda-Murukan, this study considers his cult from multiple perspectives which often appear to be mutually incompatible and irreconcilable, especially where the modern, pragmatic-diachronic perspectives come up against—and clash with—the traditional, idealistic-synchronic point of view, laden as it may be with menacing paradoxes. Specifically, I maintain that no study of traditional initiatic (Skt: pāramparīya) knowledge (Skt: vidyā) can dispense with that tradition's own approach to the acquisition of such knowledge, according to which the means and the end are inseparable. And I contend that it is precisely because of the modern reluctance or inability to recognize and comprehend the premises of archaic religions like Kataragama that modern observers including the vast majority of casual cult adherents have scarcely glimpsed more than the most superficial aspects of this archaic cult. As such, their understanding remains narrowly confined to the outlook of the modern era, which typically fails even to recognize, let alone appreciate, the implicit assumptions of archaic cults. This, in turn, partly explains why the very word 'cult' has overwhelmingly negative connotations to modern ears. So vast is the gulf that separates modern observers from the cult life of Dionysus or Kataragama that only a very tentative and imperfect attempt to bridge that gulf may be contemplated within the context of this study.
Dionysus and Shiva
For decades, indological scholarship has underrated this nexus implied between Dionysus and Skanda-Murukan while favoring a comparison of Dionysus with Skanda's mythological 'father' Shiva instead. In this context, I propose to examine the body of evidence that suggests a parallelism or historical link between the cults of Dionysus and Kataragama with a view to discover to what extent, if any, information concerning one cult may shed light upon the other. My frame of reference is the Philosophia Perennis (Augustine's "Wisdom uncreate, the same now as it ever was, and the same to be evermore," Confessions ix.10), by which I mean "the philosophy that assumes a transcendent unity behind all religions and sees them all as attempts, each valid for its time and place, to point the way to the true goal of human existence."18 From the outset, it should be noted that a remarkable pattern of correspondence does exist between Dionysus and Shiva. After all, both are identified with ecstatic possession, wine, mountains, wild animals, frenzied women, frenzied dancing, fertility and, especially, the coincidence of opposites. Structural evidence from literature and popular mythology has also been cited in support of this conclusion; the case in its favor as put forward by scholars is convincing and merits further study.19 Significantly, ancient Greek visitors to North India also made the same identification: as early as 300 BC, Megasthenes, ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta Maurya, refers to the god in the mountains (Shiva) as Dionysus.20
However, there are problems in identifying Dionysus with Shiva. Undoubtedly, their similarity is in part due to a family resemblance shared by Shiva the Father and his'son' Skanda-Murukan, the Sanat Kumāra or Perpetual Youth. This mythological relationship gained wide acceptance only in the late classical era; in earlier times, Skanda's parentage had been a matter of pure speculation. However, for the purpose of synchronic analysis, we accept this father-son relationship in myth at face value and take it as a starting point to re-examine the triangular relationship that obtains between Dionysus, the Indian god Shiva and his son Skanda-Murukan, the god of Kataragama.
Dionysus is recognized as the son of the high god Zeus and is sometimes depicted as sitting at Zeus' right side atop Mount Olympus. Already this should be enough of a clue that the Indian counterpart of Dionysus should be not the great god Shiva, aloof from humanity on Mount Kailasa, but Shiva's playful and precocious son Skanda who, in his familiar representation as Somaskanda, sits beside Shiva on Mount Kailasa. These common traits of Dionysus and Skanda, viz. their youthfulness, playfulness, and sonship, clearly distinguish them from the severe and dreadful father figures of Zeus and Shiva. Like Skanda-Murukan, Dionysus "is neither child nor man but, eternal adolescent, occupies a place somewhere between the two."21 As such, both represent "the spirit of ludic energy and the power of transformative play,"22 full of cunning, deception and strategies that are at once diabolical and divine. In this they reveal their common affinity to Hermes, the Greek god of cunning, theft and eloquence whose caduceus or herald's magical wand finds its counterpart in Skanda-Murukan's vel (Tamil:'spear'), called his Jñāna Shakti or 'power of gnosis'.
'Hermes and the Infant Dionysus' by Praxiteles, from the temple of Hera, Olympia, c. 330 B.C.
In Greek mythology, Dionysus is born from his father's thigh and delivered to twelve nymphs or water-spirits, the Hyades, who become the child-god's wet-nurses. Later, out of gratitude for their service, they are exalted to the heavens where seven of them shine as the constellation Pleiades. Likewise Skanda, born directly from Shiva, descends to earth where he is found in a reedy marsh by six water spirits, the Krittika maidens, who serve as the god's wet-nurses and later are exalted to heaven as the Krittika constellation, which is none other than the Pleiades; hence Skanda is also Kārttikeya, 'born of the Pleiades'. Just as Dionysus is Purigenes, 'the one born of fire', so likewise is Skanda called Agnibhu. Skanda is Sharadhajanma, 'born in a reedy marsh'; Dionysus is Limnaios, 'of the marsh'. Dionysus is Dithyrambos, 'twice-born', i.e. born first from fire and then from water. Likewise, Skanda is born first from the fiery element of his father's third eye and then born a second time in the watery element of Saravana, a reedy marsh. Danielou draws attention to this astonishing convergence of thematic elements and concludes that "Murugan, born in a reedy marsh and nourished by nymphs, is elsewhere called Dionysus."23 So remarkably parallel are the thematic elements surrounding the complex birth-motif that it strains credibility to ascribe these similarities to sheer coincidence.
Yet, when we turn to Skanda's father Shiva, there is no birth-motif whatsoever, for while both Skanda and Dionysus are called 'twice-born', the god Shiva is not born at all: he is unborn, eternal and unchanging. It is not the father-gods Zeus or Shiva who are born on earth to sport among humanity, but their playful sons Dionysus and Skanda. Both are young gods of energy or power (associated with young stars—the Pleiades) having both creative and destructive aspects, whose creative energy manifests as an intellectual rather than procreative conception—and yet, they are associated with fertility nevertheless. In the pan-Indian conception, this energy or power (Skt: shakti) is feminine and this feminine energy is part and parcel of Skanda-Murukan's svabhava or inherent character.
Ālatti Pūja, Ruhunu Mahā Kataragama Dēvāle The Ṣatkona yantra, cut into black stone with the diagram of the Kataragama deity. Representation of flames along the periphery, the Tamil OM in the centre. In the Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel. From Wirz (1954)
Again, both Dionysus, who was contemptuously called 'the womanly one' and Skanda-Kumāra, whose Tamil name Murukan means 'the tender one', are not purely masculine gods but possess equally strong feminine associations as well. Like Dionysus, Skanda is raised by female attendants or foster mothers, called'mothers' or 'nurses.' To this day, women votaries at Kataragama (the twelve Alatti Ammas or Ladies of the Lamp) play an important role in his rituals; Alatti Ammas, for instance, must accompany the god in all his ritual processions, whether by day or by night. In contrast, Shiva is a masculine ithyphallic deity, surrounded by troops of ghouls. Significantly, both Dionysus and Skanda-Murukan are very seldom if ever depicted as ithyphallic. While Shiva may be depicted as androgynous, the feminine aspect is far more prominent in Dionysus and Murukan.
Gods of Feminine Power
Skanda-Murukan's principal symbols—the vel and the ṣatkona yantra (hexagram)—both serve as reminders of the god's close association with magical power and the feminine principle—śakti. For instance, the ostensibly masculine vel symbol—Murukan's 'own self' as the tradition informs us—comes to the young god not from his father (as one might expect in patriarchal cultures) but from his'mother' Umā, the personification of śakti (as noted, a feminine word in Sanskrit that also means'spear'). This, moreover, is a tacit reminder that the entire Kaumāra (concerning the god Kumāra) paramparā or "pupillary succession" is implicitly derived from India's indigenous Śākta heritage of mystical devotion to Śakti, the Indian conception of the Godhead as Magna Mater.
Of particular interest, however, is the god's longstanding association with the number six and the ṣatkona yantra or'six-cornered magical diagram,' for the ṣatkona yantra (etched upon a metal plate) is precisely what is believed to be contained in the small casket that is taken out in procession at Kataragama. A full discussion of the subject of the 'calculus' of symbolic forms goes beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that the god, whose Sanskrit name Ṣanmukha (Tamil: Ārumukam) means 'having six faces,' is homologised to the hexagram, a figure composed of two intersecting equilateral triangles representing the Mother principle and the Father principle in balanced union and thus—voila! the bambino or Holy Child known to mythologies the world over.
In the traditions of Europe and West Asia, the hexagram is well known as the 'Seal of Solomon', which alludes to its widespread association with the conjunction of sacerdotal authority and temporal power. Moreover, the yantra in conjunction with the vel or spear corresponds to the archetypal warrior's shield and spear or, in another context, to the axis mundi and the cakra or loka or plane of existence through which the axis mundi or'solar ray' passes as an axle around which a wheel turns.
The yantra is another product of India's indigenous, non-discursive schools of ritual magic and as such it is intended not for merely decorative purposes but for its magical efficacy. Its etymology offers a clue to the yantra's function and raison d'être. Like the similar terms mantra and tantra, it consists of a verbal root yam ('to hold') plus the suffix -tra denoting instrumentality. Hence, ya(m)-tra or yantra, 'a device that holds,' i.e. a magical snare, trap, or container, especially one designed to hold a spirit, daimon, or god. In this function, the yantra parallels the pervasive South Indian pattern of place-goddesses (e.g. Madurai Meenakshi Amman or Valli Amman of Kataragama) who first attract and then 'hold' wandering gods to those places as their husbands. In the context of Kataragama, the yantra in the holy of holies may be understood to 'hold' or 'contain' the god of six faces or directions, much as the Ark of the Covenant was understood to 'contain' the Shekhinah or 'presence' of the Holy Spirit of God.
Despite their feminine associations, both appear as archetypal heroes whose coming is characterised by strife and conquest. As the wargod Karttikeya, Skanda is Mahasena, the Supreme Commander 'who has a great army' of demons and angels alike;
Dionysus Returns from India -Mosaic Archeological Museum- Sousse Tunisia. A riotous procession of gods and demigods surrounds Dionysus shown riding a chariot with thyrus or fennel wand in hand.
Both gods are identified with the fringe of civilized society: with wilderness, 'crazy' or roguish behavior, sudden possession or intoxication and underground or otherwise vaguely subversive activities—in Sri Lanka, exclusive protagonists of religion look askance at Kataragama and its amoral reputation. Victor Turner and others would speak of Dionysus and Kataragama in terms of 'liminality', of being on the margin, in an in-between geographical or psychological space "where fluidity challenges stability, where fusion replaces boundary—here too normal relations and normal inhibitions are suspended in a quasi-magical interlude characterized by joyful play, imaginative exuberance and free energy."24 This liminal quality of Kataragama also marks it as a place of transition or passage between psychological states or lokas ('worlds'), as we shall see. This liminality or meeting of worlds expresses itself as ecstatic possession (Skt: arudha literally,'mounted' i.e., by a spirit), a common feature of the cults of both Dionysus and Murukan, readily visible in South India and Sri Lanka to this day. Dionysus is called Gynaimanes, 'he who maddens women': his madness affects women and they are his principal followers, called Maenads or 'raving' Bacchantes. In ancient Tamil poetry, too, Ceyon or Murukan is credited with creating love-frenzy in young women, as in the following lines from one of the oldest poems in the Tamil language, which could also well depict the cult of Dionysus:
"Here festivals are always held
Harmonious with the dances wild
Of frenzied maids by the Red-god stirred,
The flutes do pipe, the lyres do twang,
The drums roll loud and the tobors sound." -Pattinapalai 178-182
It is worth noting in this regard that adherents of cults of both Dionysus and Kataragama commonly engage in trance-practices that are nothing less than miraculous in the eyes of many. Euripides' Bacchae draws a picture of the marvelous circumstances under which fire does not burn the god-intoxicated celebrants and weapons do not wound them.25 Even today in Kataragama, hundreds of celebrants may be seen walking over beds of live coals hot enough to melt aluminum, while others pierce themselves with pins, knives and skewers without a trace of injury—provided that they are in trance.
Finally, both Dionysus and Murukan are intimately associated with drama, mystery and ritual theater. Both Dionysus and Murukan are patron deities of bardic poetry, prophecy and dramatic performance and Murukan is closely identified with the genesis of Tamil, one of the world's great classical languages. In his play Bacchae (289 ff), the ancient Greek playwright Euripides says that Dionysus "is a prophet and the bacchic revel is filled with the spirit of prophecy."
Danielou proposes an explanation for the identification of Dionysus with both Shiva and Skanda. "In the Mediterranean world," he speculates, "Skanda appears as a new Dionysus and his legend is mingled with that of the old Dionysus."26 Citing Diodorus, he distinguishes "Bacchos, son of Semele, who is Skanda, from an older Dionysus (Shiva), born of Zeus and Persephone" who is credited with the invention of wine.27 However, he offers no plausible chronology to support this hypothesis.
Clothey's version of this general hypothesis reconciles the best accepted conclusions concerning both cults and, as such, is more satisfactory. As he observes:
By the time of the Cankam literature... the Murukan cultus manifests certain aspects that have striking parallels in the Dionysian cult of the Middle East. The early Murukan is particularly similar to the agricultural Dionysos of a pre-Greek era... Murukan and Dionysos at a later period are 'Aryanized'; both become associated with warrior and celestial motifs and become the son of the presiding deity of the mountain at the center of the world.28
However, he does not resolve the vexing issue of how Middle Eastern motifs may have entered the South Indian cultural milieu.
It would go beyond the scope of this paper to explore the intriguing associations that both Dionysus and Skanda share with Alexander the Great and folk or literary traditions of an Alexander Romance, but careful analysis could reveal much about the migration of mythic patterns and cult ideologies across the ancient world. Interestingly, the historical world-conqueror Alexander was widely identified with Dionysus and, to a lesser extent, with Skanda-Murukan as well. For example, one of the oldest major pilgrimage centers of the hill-god Murukan, Tirupparankunram near Madurai, has at the top of the hill a Muslim dargah dedicated to Sikandar, whom local Muslims identify with Skanda-Murukan.29 By a linguistic coincidence, both 'Alexander' and 'Skanda' transliterate into Arabic as al-Sikandar. N. Gopala Pillai has argued that the cult of Skanda is derived from the influence of Alexander on North India, but few scholars take his arguments seriously.30 Clothey, however, concedes that "it may not be impossible that the name of Skanda was associated with Alexander, in a way still not precisely understood and that elements of Skanda's Northern iconography were derived or influenced by the impact of post-Alexandrian Hellenization."31
Dionysus and Kataragama Skanda
The issues are assuredly more complex than they initially appear, but these points taken together should be enough to turn our attention from Shiva and toward Skanda-Murukan in the search for affinities with Dionysus. So let us turn to the known structural and thematic parallels between the Dionysian mystery cult of the ancient Mediterranean world and the cult of Skanda-Murukan as it survives especially in Kataragama. Necessarily, I must confine my remarks here to a brief overview of relevant features, leaving unsaid many fascinating details.
Center of the universe in pan-indian lore, Mount Kailāsa in western Tibet (above) is the cosmographical analog to the sahasrara cakra ('thousand-petaled lotus crown') in Kundalini Yoga and to heaven or moksha ('liberation') in soteriological terms.
The myths of Dionysus and Skanda-Murukan display other thematic parallels in their marvelous birth accounts. Skanda is born in the trans-Himalaya and migrates to South India and Sri Lanka where he is explicitly identified with the South—in Indian cosmography, the direction or realm of chaos and death, presided over by Yama, Judge of the Dead. The ancient Greeks used to look to the Far East and the South as the birthplace of Dionysus and some accounts placed Nysa, his birthplace, in India.32 Skanda is born from his father Shiva seated upon the cosmic mountain Kailasa or Meru; by a linguistic pun, Dionysus is born from his father's thigh (Greek: meros). As Danielou observes, "It has been suggested that the fact that Shiva's sperm stayed on the snowy mountain Himavat, identified with Mount Meru, the axis of the world, is not extraneous to the legend of Dionysus' sojourn in the thigh (meros) of Jupiter."33 On this point, one may say, there is agreement—both traditions point to, or suggest, a common mythological origin, even in a geographical sense.
Moreover, this heritage of punning, word play and double-entendre, too, persists both in Dionysian ritual drama and in the cult of Skanda-Murukan even today. For instance, one of Skanda's ancient epithets, Śaktidhara (Skt. literally, 'he who holds śakti') plays upon the multiple meanings of the grammatically feminine word śakti, such that the epithet may mean 'he who holds the spear', 'he who holds his goddess-consort', or 'he who wields mystic power'. All three interpretations are perfectly applicable to the god; they also, incidentally, illustrate the god's common affinity to women, magical power and the spear-symbol. When allegorical tales abound with such ambiguous references, the informed listener or connoisseur apprehends a rich universe full of multiple levels of meaning or exegesis, which serve as a virtual stairway of ascent to higher and higher levels of understanding. This finds its material counterpart in the multiple curtains that hang between the worshipper and the sanctum sanctorum of the god at Kataragama.
Lord of the Underground Dream World
The Kataragama god's Mahādēvāle residence (right)
"I behold Teiresias the Seer in dappled fawn-skins arrayed, and likewise, moving me to laughter, my mother's father flourishing the wand of Baccheus!" (from Euripides' The Bacchae)
Like Skanda-Murukan, Dionysus is reckoned to be both king and prophet, patron of hunters, bards and antis or itinerant magical performers. Dionysus appears incognito on earth as one of his own bacchantes in Euripides' Bacchae; again in The Frogs of Aristophanes he journeys into the underworld, also in disguise. In like fashion, Sinhala oral tradition likens the Kataragama god to a king who routinely inspects his kingdom disguised as a beggar, a pilgrim, or a Swāmi to ascertain the conditions of the realm and the attitudes of his subjects—a recurrent theme in Indian literature and folklore. As gods who journey in disguise through a lower world, they also share chthonic associations; nocturnal processions by torch light are conducted in their honor and their presence is felt with great immediacy—even nowadays at Kataragama. Both are suprasensual guides to deliverance, psychopomps who guide, paradoxically, by leading astray. As such, Dionysus is also Lusios ('The Liberator') while Skanda is Guha, 'The Mysterious'.
Kataragama's reputation for mystery and sanctity is well deserved; living traditions current among the majority Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims all testify to the shrine's mysterious power. An example from Islamic lore of Tamil Nadu will suffice, but many others could be added. A Tamil text, the Kanzul Karamat, tells how the sixteenth-century Muslim saint Kuthub Shaul Hameed of Nagur was mysteriously transported to the bank of the Menik Ganga in Kataragama and thence conducted underground to a subterranean palace where the mystic robe of Kuthub-ul-Akhtab was conferred upon him by al-Khiḍr35, 'The Green Man' of Islamic lore who appears in the Holy Quran (Surah 18 verses 57-83) as the teacher of Moses and who is none other than Kataragama-Skanda according to local Sufi interpretation.
Not surprisingly, this underground Kataragama has been variously attested by contemporary resident experts as well, not only as a standard theme of Kataragama's storytelling tradition, but also as a recurrent subject of visions and dreams. For instance, it is well-known in Kataragama that no ritual innovation or architectural renovation may be undertaken unless and until the god himself so commands his servants in a dream; untimely death or misfortune is the certain consequence of disregarding this tradition. Moreover, even today some advanced practitioners are known to engage in yogic or lucid dreaming, a practice whereby the dreamer may consciously explore Kataragama in the dream state.
Reports from yogic dreamers who have explored the subtle dream world of Kataragama tend to support and even elaborate upon longstanding tradition. One experienced adept described to this researcher the Kataragama god's Mahādevale as he beheld saw it in a lucid dream: as a pagoda of seven stories—a ground floor, three upper stories and three subterranean stories, in contrast to the simple, single-storied Kataragama shrine of diurnal consciousness.
Mt. Kailasa in western Tibet and Kataragama in the far south of Sri Lanka form a near-perfect analog to the axis mundi or susumna nadi of yogic lore. See also "Kailasa to Kataragama: Sacred Geography in the cult of Skanda-Murukan".
Neither Dionysus nor Skanda-Murukan dwells in a celestial heaven, but rather in shadowy underworlds (which include, from the divine perspective, life here on earth) the realm of the dead and the source of life. Both are gods who have known the lofty heights—the Himalaya of their own divine origin and nature—but who nevertheless prefer the life-sustaining valley (homologized to Mother Earth, the Theotokos or Magna Mater) teeming with earthly sensations and emotions like love and hate, the stuff that life, theater and literature are made of. They revel in intrigue and wear a thousand beguiling disguises or masks—most, but not all, of which are human or humanlike. Kataragama Deviyo, for instance, may appear as a Vedda, as an itinerant beggar, as a youth, as a holy man, or even as a tree—and he still appears as such even today, leaving those who have encountered him changed for life, as they readily testify. This conviction that the god is present and real has long characterised the mystery rites of Kataragama and is still a feature of the Kataragama festival even in the late 20th century; Dionysus, too, was "thought and felt to be present with overwhelming certainty."36
As spirits of antithesis and paradox, both Murukan and Dionysus are characterized by the juxtaposition of pandemonium and silence, another coincidence of opposites. Not only in myth, but also in cultic practice, their epiphanies are celebrated with colorful noisy processions and frenzied dancing by torchlight—and yet, during the procession at Kataragama, ritual participants do not utter a single word. In the cult of Dionysus, too, melancholy silence was the sign of women possessed by the god. Indeed, Kataragama's ritual performances are all conducted in strict silence and no initiate will verbally disclose anything about his or her oral-performative tradition (Skt: paramparā) except to reiterate its prehistoric origins. This, of course, is perfectly concordant with the cult's central injunction cummā iru! (Tamil: 'Be still!') enjoining both contemplative silence and secrecy upon cult initiates. Incidentally, the utility of discursive research methodologies is also severely restricted when so much of what the researcher intends to study is shrouded in silence and secrecy. As such, the traditional approach to acquiring specialized knowledge becomes truly indispensable.
Both deities are gods of epiphany who repeatedly 'come' or manifest themselves. Otto calls Dionysus "the god who comes, the god of epiphany, whose appearance is far more urgent, far more compelling than that of any other god. He had disappeared and now he will suddenly be here again."37 That is, both gods appear mysteriously from the watery or chthonic depths in disguise to shatter the conventional social order and to fill with terror and wonder the hearts of those who behold them before incomprehensibly disappearing again. Until the 20th Century, the Kataragama god was regarded with such dread by Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims alike that only those who received a direct summons would dare to visit the remote shrine. Robert Knox, who spent eighteen years as a captive in the Kandyan kingdom of the seventeenth century, testifies that "The Name and Power of this God striketh such terror into the Chingulayes, that those who otherwise are Enemies of this King and have served both Portuguese and Dutch against him, yet would never assist either to make Invasions this way."38 Public perceptions have changed since Knox's time, but the fact remains that millions consider the Kataragama god to be the most down-to-earth and powerful of the island's guardian spirits. To this day, the god's devotees invoke him, repeatedly urging him to 'come'.
"At that moment, Murugan invoked the help of his brother Vināyaka who appeared behind Valli in the shape of a frightening elephant. The terror-stricken girl rushed into the arms of the Saiva ascetic for protection." Painting from Tiruttani Devasthanam, Tamil Nadu.
This 'coming' of Dionysus or Skanda-Murukan is, properly speaking, a return or re-awakening of an age-old experience. For instance, when Murukan first appears to Valli in a Neolithic setting, his cult is already well established; Valli is already the god's ardent devotee even before he comes in person to woo her and she becomes his beloved only later when at last she sees through his disguise. Like the god himself, the cult of Kataragama has passed through many cycles; the locality itself has risen from jungle into urban center and returned back into jungle repeatedly in recorded history. And so it is with Dionysus: according to Otto, "The Greeks themselves considered their principal cults of Dionysus to be age-old... in Delphi the worship of Dionysus could be considered older than that of Apollo... Homeric epic is intimately acquainted with his cult and his myths and it speaks of him in the same manner in which it speaks of the deities who have been worshipped since time immemorial."39
Lords of Water, Life and Fertility
Yet another common motif which classicists and indologists have long recognized about these two gods is that both are associated with the watery element and its connection with fertility and with life itself. That is, both Dionysus and Skanda-Murukan are closely associated with fruit, blood, semen (the Sanskrit verbal root skand refers primarily to the spurting of semen; hence Skanda means 'Spurt of Semen' or, by extension, 'The Leaper or Attacker' 40), the sap of fresh vegetation and with an elixir of immortality, whether wine or soma. As infants, both are nursed by females of the watery element. In Kataragama's Islamic lore and in the Alexander Romance as well, for instance, the mysterious figure al-Khiḍr is Alexander's accomplice or cook who discovers unsought what Alexander sought in vain—the ma'ul hayat or 'Water of Life' that bestows heavenly knowledge and life everlasting to those who taste it. His epithet al-Khiḍr, 'The Green Man', also points to his chthonic association with plant growth, sap and the underground fountain of life which, local Islamic tradition maintains, he discovered in Khadir-gama (i.e. Kataragama), the 'home of al-Khiḍr.' Like god Murukan of South India, the Kataragama god is looked upon as a fertility god who brings or withholds rain—as god-king of a hydraulic civilization, he "divides the waters" and ensures that each community gets its share of life in the form of water. Both functions—fertility and the regulation of life-giving water—are ritually enacted in the colorful diya kaepeema or 'water-cutting ceremony' that is the climax of the Esala festival.
Dionysus, of course, is well known in Greek mythology for his association with water, plant sap, sperm and another elixir of knowledge—wine. Plutarch tells us that, according to Greek belief, Dionysus was the lord of all moist nature.41 Varro (August. De civ. D.7.21) declares that "the sovereignty of Dionysus was not only to be recognized in the juice of fruits whose crowning glory was wine but also in the sperms of living creatures."42 Since prehistoric times, the worship of Murukan, too, has included fruit, honey, the fermented juice of paddy and coconut and the blood of sacrificial rams.43 In the widely-circulating legend of Palani in Tamil Nadu, the popular shrine's name is interpreted in the expression palam nee—'you are the fruit', i.e. you (Murukan) are the ñānappalam or 'fruit of gnosis'—that father Shiva says to placate his precocious and impulsive son Murukan.
The association of blood and fertility finds expression in the importance of the color red in both cults. Blood or vermilion powder and Murukan as Ceyon 'the Red', mutually symbolize each other and evoke his close connection to śakti, the feminine principle. Blood-red color simultaneously symbolizes both life and death, as well as both classical genres of ancient Tamil poetry: akam ('love-matter') and puram (mainly war), over which Murukan presides as the patron of Tamil language, poetry and drama. Likewise, images of Dionysus were commonly colored with vermilion and his Maenads in their frenzy were known to rip apart and devour the raw flesh of male goats and even men unwary enough to intrude upon their torchlit revels upon the mountains—the god himself was omestes, 'eater of raw flesh.' 44
Again, both Dionysus and Skanda-Murukan have strong associations with certain species of plants. Dionysus is |
it until we couldn’t do it any more,” Bottum says simply.
The ex-members didn’t reconnect en masse until Bottum’s wedding in 2008. Slowly they rekindled their relationships, made amends for old transgressions and, minus Martin, announced comeback shows. As often happens with misunderstood pioneers, Faith No More’s reputation ballooned during their absence and their return was welcomed with open arms. There was no pressure to make a new album but, driven by Gould, they secretly started swapping song ideas. Improbably, these evolved into their best record since Angel Dust, full of counterintuitive musical collisions.
“To hear anything one of us does at this point is fascinating,” Bottum says. “I think I know these guys and then they’ll do something that’s like: ‘Wow, that is really fucking weird.’ I think we accomplished what we need to accomplish. If we all died today I think we would have done a good job.”
Even though they have no plans for any more shows or records, Faith No More do come dangerously close to endorsing the uplifting narrative they find so boring.
“Doing what we’re doing now makes all of that work we did then a lot more validating,” Gould agrees. “We came back and we made it better. If that’s the only lesson we learned, that’s a good lesson.”
The night before our interview, I watch Faith No More play at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. They perform in white, surrounded by bouquets of flowers, like an avant garde wedding band, accompanied by a man in a black rubber gimp costume. They only play one song from The Real Thing and subvert the climax of their most beloved song, Midlife Crisis. Their more bizarre songs remain as inscrutable as riddles in a made-up language. The difference between now and 1992 is that the audience enjoys being confounded.
“I don’t know who our fans are,” Patton admits the next day. “I’m still fucking mystified. I was looking at them last night thinking: ‘Who are you?’”
In the best possible way, the feeling is mutual.
Sol Invictus is out now on Reclamation/IpecacIn this edition of The Talking Game, editor Aditya Balaram interviews the head of acta7 and agent of the likes of Philipp Lahm and Owen Hargreaves.
Player agents play a massive role in the world of football by helping players choose their next professional destinations, ensuring that the players are valued right and facilitating for the meeting of all parties involved. Having started his football career with Bayern Munich and then moving on to coaching, Roman Grill decided to start acta7, an agency that helps top professional athletes. With the star players such as Bayern Munich and Germany captain Philipp Lahm, former Manchester United midfielder Owen Hargreaves and Piotr Trochowski among Grill’s clients, he has established acta7 as one of the top player consultancy agencies in the world.
1. Could you run us through how a transfer works, right from the point of a club admitting interest in a player to the player actually moving to the club?
Grill: Well, the process depends on different factors, so not every transfer works totally similarly. But normally the club contacts the agency of a player to indicate its interest. Our next step is to meet all acting persons of the club to recheck the interest and motivation. The following proceeding depends on the player`s present contract situation. If the club wants to engage the player after the end of contract the agent and the responsible contact person of the club only have to negotiate the conditions of a contract for the player in a second meeting. If the player has to be bought out of a contract the new club has to achieve agreement about a transfer fee with the current club in addition.
2. What is the role of an agent in a transfer?
Grill: To assess the player`s value for the club.
3. How much of a role do you, as an agent, have in helping a player decide which club to move to?
Grill: An agent is a consultant. It is his job to point out the risks and opportunities to help the player to make a good and safe decision.
4. What are the major differences in having professional agents like yourself and having a family member as an agent?
Grill: This question cannot be answered generally. It depends totally on the background and qualification of the managing family member and on the relationship between the player and his relative. The close contact could be blessing or curse.
5. How important a role did your stint with Bayern Munich play in helping you form a good relationship with the likes of Philipp Lahm and Owen Hargreaves?
Grill: Well, my time at Bayern Munich gave Philipp and Owen the opportunity to convince them of my professional competence. I obtained their confidence. In my opinion that`s the most important thing to build up a successful and long-term collaboration.
6. What are the factors that you take into consideration when deciding your cut in a transfer? Do agents ever end up incurring losses during transfers?
Grill: The factors that we take into consideration depend on the club and the player. First of all we conform to the usual practice of the club. Of course another important point is the player`s development and the question of whether we have made a substantial contribution to his career. In other words: Did we scout the player? Did we bring the player to the club`s attention and so on? And last but not least – even football observes to the law of supply and demand, meaning: What player are we talking about? Are we glad that the transfer takes place anyway or are we in the happy position to choose between different options? Taking in to account all these factors we decide about our commission. You always suffer a loss during a transfer if one contracting party fails to fulfill the agreements.
7. What attracted Owen Hargreaves to trade the Bundesliga for the Premier League? How much of a say did you have in his move to England?
Grill: There have been especially two main causes for Owen`s decision: First, of course, was the attractiveness of Manchester United at that time and second a very personal motive as England is the country of birth of his parents. My task was – as described some minutes ago – to give him an overview about the pros and cons and to go through the formalities after Owen`s decision to change the club. It was not my intention to influence the decision process in one direction.
8. Are there any regrets from your side regarding the shift that Hargreaves made from the Bundesliga to the Premier League?
Grill: No. The Premier League is as attractive as the Bundesliga and Mancester United as a club is as interesting and attractive for a top athlete as Bayern Munich. Against his family background it was easily comprehensible for me that he decided to move to England. I think there are no reasons to regret this step.
9. Is it very different being the agent of Philipp Lahm? Could we ever see him leave Bayern Munich?
Grill: Not really. Of course different players have different characters and origins. But our job remains the same: to give advice and support to a player with excellent skills and to ensure that he makes a career corresponding to his talent. Philipp`s contract with Bayern Munich expires in 2016. He feels more than comfortable playing for ai???hisai??? club. So I cannot answer this question at the moment.
10. What are the craziest offers that you have ever received for any of your clients?
Grill: As it is well established that we are not crazy, we neither do receive crazy offers.
11. Talking about crazy, the amounts being spent on players today is growing incredibly fast. Do you think that there must be strict action taken in order to curb such spending? Would it hurt agents if this happened?
Grill: Well, I think, you cannot tell a company how it should pay its employees. Investment and risk will always be part of the game. For that reason I am sure that restrictions never will be too strict. A brilliant athlete will always earn enough money to ensure the basis of transaction of agencies.
12. How do you decide on which players become your clients?
Grill: Acta7 means ai???agency and consulting for top athletesai???. So the name is already the answer to your question. We are looking for outstanding talents. Due to the long work with young and talented players we are able to develop trustworthy procedures for dealing with remarkable potential. The starting point is always the personality of the player and his football ability. Our target is to develop the young talent and lead him into the professional football.
TheHardTackle would like to thank Roman Grill for answering our questions and Katharina Schrott for helping conduct the interview. Do check out the acta7 website
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When it comes to his comedy, |
}
Conclusions
Spritz is a work-in-progress library, meaning the API can change while we improve it, but fear not: as you have noticed, the configuration needed to integrate an animation with a ViewPager is so minimal that any change would require only a few minutes.
You are encouraged to participate in the development of Spritz by giving out your ideas, opening bugs and — even better — submitting Pull Requests at our novoda/spritz Github repository!
The real spritz
Wait, were you here for an actual Spritz recipe? Alright, that’s easy:
Add some ice into your glass Add 3 parts of prosecco Add 2 parts of Aperol, Campari, Rabarbaro or any other suitable Italian liquor Add a splash of soda Drop a slice of orange in it Stir Enjoy!
Remember that spritz is an aperitif, just like onboarding is for your app!New research reports the moral imperative to help those in need is much weaker if the needy person in question is a stranger.
(Photo: Fano Miasta/Unsplash)
The health-care legislation currently being considered by Congress would leave millions of people without coverage, and likely lead to many premature deaths. Yet the debate has largely shied away from the morality of such a law, and its proponents seem indifferent to the harm it would do.
Why is that? New psychological research suggests a likely answer.
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According to a team of Israeli researchers, we instinctively distinguish between two types of harm: active, in which you actively injure someone in some way; and passive, in which you fail to provide needed help.
While we feel morally obligated to avoid actively hurting another human being, the ethical imperative to help someone is more qualified if we didn't directly cause their suffering. In such cases, our impulse to help—or, conversely, to look the other way—largely depends on how close we feel to the person in need.
"Judgments concerning the omission of care are dependent on social distance," write the researchers, led by psychologist Michael Gilead of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. They argue that, while this truism applies to both liberals and conservatives, it is "at the foundation of right-wing political thought."
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In the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, the researchers describe five experiments that back up their assertion. In one of them, 80 Americans recruited online were presented with one of two vignettes and asked to make an ethical decision.
Some of them read a story about a man who accidentally hit his neighbor's new car, destroying its side mirror. Realizing no one saw him, he drives away without leaving a note. Others read that same scenario, except that the car belonged to a stranger.
Another group of participants were told a man, while driving to work one day, noticed his neighbor was "stranded by the side of the road," in need of a charge for his car battery. Feeling too tired to help, he just kept on driving. In the alternate version, the man in need of help was a stranger.
Participants overwhelmingly viewed the actions of the first man as morally wrong, no matter who the car belonged to. But they judged the man in the second scenario far more harshly if he passed up his neighbor, rather than a stranger.
In other experiments, the ethical imperative to provide care was judged to be stronger when the person in need was one's brother (compared to a friend), or one's good friend (compared to a fellow university student). Intuitively, closeness implies an obligation to help, while distance weakens it.
This pattern was found consistently, both in the experiments conducted using Americans, and one that featured Israelis. That suggests this way of moral thinking is common to both members of more individualistic and more communal cultures. It also did not vary significantly with political orientation.
That said, the researchers point out that this impulse seems to provide the seeds of Ayn Rand's "objectivist" moral ideology. That way of thinking, embraced by such top Republicans as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, argues that, while directly harming others is bad, "whether or not an individual chooses to care for others has no bearing on his or her moral character."
As Gilead and his colleagues note, few people go to that extreme. Most of us believe providing care for those in our immediate social circle is a moral imperative.
The rest of humanity, not so much.Male cuckoos appear to have a unique call that makes them distinguishable to and from other males. A new study appearing in Animal Behaviour shows that an individual cuckoo call may determine how a male responds to an interloper in his territory -- behaving more tolerantly towards neighbors and more aggressively towards strangers.
Common cuckoos, Cuculus canorus, are brood parasites: they lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, and let these hosts incubate their eggs and feed and rear the nestlings. Although cuckoos do not show parental care, they demonstrate complex social behavior, including territoriality and male-male aggression. Cuckoos have a well-known and simple two-phrase call ("cu" and "coo"), uttered by males during the breeding season. Previous studies have suggested that the "cu-coo" call of males is individually unique, allowing discrimination between different classes of males.
Researchers in central Hungary used playback experiments in a dense population of radio-tagged cuckoos to test whether neighboring males are tolerated more than unfamiliar intruders: the classic "dear enemy" phenomenon. The birds responded more aggressively to the calls of unfamiliar simulated intruders (strangers) than to the calls of conspecifics with whom they shared territorial boundaries (familiar neighbors). Cuckoos reacted within less than half a minute on average; they often approached the loudspeaker to within 5 to 10 meters from up to 80 meters away, and used their "cu-coo" calls in response. The birds used their simple call for the discrimination of familiar and unfamiliar individuals, and did so specifically to defend their own territories. In turn, they showed tolerance to nearby conspecifics, such as neighbors with overlapping territories. Since more than one cuckoo was interested in the playbacks, this study also confirmed the opportunity for brood-parasitic birds to socialize during the breeding season.
One of the study authors, Dr. Mark Hauber, Professor of Psychology, Hunter College, and Interim University Vice Provost for Research, City University of New York (CUNY), said, "This study is exciting for two reasons -- it shows that brood parasitism is not an alternative for complex social dynamics in territorial birds. Also, song learning is not required for recognizing friends from enemies."
Future studies may examine the importance of individual call recognition, determine which parameter of the cuckoo call makes it unique, and clarify whether multiple overlapping territories, quasi "cuckoo hotspots," are related to the presence of female cuckoos or driven by available host nests.After graduating from university in Glasgow, Floraidh Clement knew that she wanted to work in social media.
Ideally, she would have stayed in the “underrated” Scottish city, where she felt settled among the welcoming locals. But she sent off hundreds of job applications and never got to the stage of an interview. In a smallish city with four universities, competition was tough.
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And while everyone who graduated in Scotland “seemed to see it as the natural next step” to move to London, she wasn’t interested in the British capital. The friends she had there were spending most of their earnings on rents and didn’t seem happy.
So instead Clement and her boyfriend decided to look for work in Berlin. Born in Lower Saxony and raised in North Rhine-Westphalia, she was no stranger to Germany, although her family moved back to the UK when she was a teenager.
Within a few weeks of job hunting the couple had both been given interviews at companies in the thriving Spree-side startup scene. After long application processes, they were offered jobs and set off in the early autumn.
“Before I arrived I wanted to stay here, get married and have children,” Clement says, explaining that she saw Berlin as the perfect place to raise kids. “Seeing people from all walks of life makes you a more tolerant person.”
But after a rocky start, she isn’t so sure anymore.
The over-heated rental market was the first bucket of ice Berlin threw at her.
“Before you arrive here you look at rental costs and think ‘great, I can afford to get my own place’", she says. "But good luck getting a flat as an English-speaker against the 30-odd other people who want it.”
The young couple have been staying in a property rented through AirBnB, an arrangement which is of questionable legality and also expensive. While they started looking in the Prenzlauer Berg district, which would have given great access to both their jobs, now they are open to moving anywhere in the capital. But, after weeks of trying, they still can’t get their name on a tenancy.
“I understand that a landlord would have hesitations about signing a contract with people who don’t speak German - it’s a big undertaking - but it’s frustrating nonetheless,” she says.
“A lot of Brits who come here have this idea of living the bohemian dream in Berlin, but I don’t think that exists anymore,” she states.
Getting used to the rather gruff way Berliners have of dealing with strangers was the next challenge. The people of the capital are notorious even among their famously direct compatriots for their abruptness, what is known as the “Berliner Schnauze.”
Clements says that she finds German directness to be a relief from “overly polite Britishness” - but even for her it goes too far in the capital city.
“I was in the supermarket the other day and when I asked a shop attendant where I could find a chocolate soya drink she started shouting at me,” she says.
At her work too, the Berliners tend to stick to themselves.
“They’re the ones who dress in black and listen to techno. They think they’re really cool - they’re not really up for banter.”
Still, in many ways the city has met her expectations.
“There is something really inspiring about being in a place where people come from the whole world in search of the same thing,” she says.
“I’m not a party person but there is so much to do here even if you aren’t spending Friday night queuing outside Berghain. I don’t think there is a chance for me to be bored here.”
Her new start has also been hindered by sickness. While this has made it harder to settle in, she has been pleasantly surprised by the German attitude to illness.
Whereas in Britain “you are expected to fight through”, in Berlin “they want you to go home. Everyone is so sympathetic and there is no resentment among colleagues.” Her doctor wrote her off work for two weeks and at the end of the month she was surprised to see that she had been paid more or less in full.
A bar in Berlin's hip Neukölln district. Photo: DPA
Time to experiment
At some point near the start of the century the Berlin buzz began to spread among young British people. Some say Brits first discovered the city during the World Cup held in Germany in 2006. Others attribute it to a slow process fuelled by the growth of cheap flights.
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Either way, at the end of last year 14,931 British citizens were registered as living in the capital, demonstrating a 79 percent increase in the British population since the year 2000.
“The reasons why people come to Berlin are of course varied,” Melanie Neumann, a doctorate student at the Centre for British Studies of Humboldt University, told The Local. “But especially young Brits come here mostly for lifestyle reasons. They want a new start, a new challenge.”
Life in Berlin gives them “more time to experiment and find out what they can do and what they want,” said Neumann, who is doing her PhD on British and Irish migration to the German capital.
The Brits that Neumann has surveyed for her research are by-and-large satisfied with their decision.
“Over half of the people who took part in my study said that their lives had improved after migrating, and a third said it had clearly improved,” she states.
But many complain about the difficulty of dealing with German bureaucracy - a quarter of respondents said they felt discriminated against by authorities over the past two years.
Neumann says that there is no single secret to adapting to Berlin but that “it is incredibly important to learn at least a little bit of German if you want to really experience the city and not just live in an English expat bubble.”
‘Like an old jumper’
Rachael Marriott is someone who has been through the Berlin grinder and lived to tell the tale. In fact she has adapted so well in the five years she has been here that she now says "Icke" instead of "Ich" when speaking German, the classic trait of a Berlin dialect.
She warns Brits to be under no illusions about how easy it will be to begin with.
“It can be a very lonely experience at first, you need to give it 18 months,” she said. “Don’t give up after six months, it can be hard to find expat friends at first.”
Marriott was “sick of the Cameron government” when she packed her bags for Germany. Meanwhile a teaching stint in South Korea had given her "a taste for another way of life" even if the cultural differences had shown her that she needed to find a country that was “almost home.”
She had spent childhood holidays in Germany, so moving here was “like putting on an old jumper.” She wasn’t solely focused on moving to Berlin, but it also isn’t a choice she regrets. “The food choices and the theatre are incredible, it is the place the US should be but isn’t,” she says.
The struggles she faced seem typical of those which confront many Brits in Berlin.
“German bureaucracy is so much more than you ever imagine it could be. You fear going into the offices and being confronted by some angry German who tells you you don’t have the right papers," she says.
The Berlin winter can be tough. Photo: DPA
Marriott had luck. A former colleague of her father’s took her under her wing and became her “German mother.” When she got a shock demand for a €500 payment from her internet provider after just a few months in the country, her new mother was there to help sort it out.
Her advice to Brits considering moving over is to start learning German even before they get here and to find a German at work or through friends to "adopt" them and help them through the administrative struggles.
She also says it is important to make expat friends. “They don’t necessarily have to be British, but other expats know what you are going through. Germans can’t look at their culture in the same way that we can.”
She assures though that trying to befriend Berliners will pay off in the end. “Once you get to know them they can be incredibly warm - they just save it for those they care about.”
The notoriously long and cold Berlin winter on the other hand is well deserving of its reputation, she says.
“My first winter was rough. It is okay up until Christmas because you have Glühwein to keep you warm. But there was still snow on the ground in April."
Arrived in Germany? Need to learn German? Learn online, face-to-face with expert teachers
For Scottish emigre Clement, the winter is one thing that she has found to be kinder than its reputation.
“Everyone talks about how bad it is. Maybe I’m just used to anything coming from Scotland,” she jokes. “But it hasn't been that bad. Yet.”Feds election campaign went into full swing as the writ dropped Tuesday, allowing all candidates the opportunity to campaign. The first major event the candidates had to manoeuvre was a debate organized by Imprint, and it didn’t happen without controversy.
With 49 presidential candidates, giving them enough time to speak, approximately 10 minutes each, would take over eight hours, leaving no time for the other three executive positions and councillors and UW senate candidates to debate. Since the many of these candidates were running to highlight the deficiencies of student politics, we decided to ask them to fill out a brief questionnaire to gain an invitation to the event.
Out of the 49 presidential candidates, only 12 submitted responses, of which 5 were deemed inappropriate by myself and thereby considered to be unserious candidates. The decision was made to exclude these candidates from the debate, and it has proved to be a controversial one.
How could I be so subjective in my decision? There is a wealth of precedent in which media organizations excluded candidates from debates, and I believe I used principles similar to those used by other organizations in making this decision. Candidates whose responses to the survey would have surely resulted in zeros, were they to be marked as essay questions, were excluded.
But I recognize that my marking scheme may be different than yours, so I’ll allow you the opportunity to judge for yourself.
Asked what qualified him to be president, candidate Qifan Xi said he was of sound mind and body, and therefore fit to take the office of the Feds presidency. Xi also listed his leadership experiences, which he claimed define him as a strong leader of students, saying, “One time I was involved in and led a land war in Asia. And succeeded.”
Syed Albiz, asked how he was qualified to lead and provide direction for our student union, replied simply, “I am not.” He added that what set him apart from other candidates was that he has “a unique and distinctive odor [sic]” and also claimed to have once conquered Asia minor.
Meanwhile, Jesse Onland mimicked Discordianism, replying to each question with “FIVE TONNES OF FLAX.” Felix Fung said his leadership experience was leading PubCrawls and the best improvement he could make in the office of President would be to “eliminate it.”
Finally, Matthew McPherrin felt that he would be qualified to be FedS president because of his “extensive collection of cat videos,” and stated that he would like “to minimize FEDS waste by getting rid of as much of it as possible.”
Did we silence their voices or fail to facilitate good discourse by not allowing them to speak at our event? We did lose the participation of Onland and the reincarnation of the “5 tons of flax” campaign seen last election, but, in my judgement, Onland and those of his ilk don’t add to the debate — they merely muddy the waters and disrupt any real discourse.
Imprint’s desire was to have a discussion of the key issues at each position, and allow an opportunity for serious candidates to have a forum. As the organizers of an invitation-only event, we are not obligated to give everyone spot at the table, and I chose to not allow those candidates whose responses showed contempt for the very office they were seeking to hold.
I believe we held a fair debate, allowing each candidate the same amount of speaking time. We even invited some members of last year’s Rhino party — who had vowed to resign if elected — to participate in the debate as they had clearly put effort into their responses and whose opinions we felt they would add to the debate.
As economists know, every decision has an opportunity cost. The net benefit, however, was a meaningful discussion on student issues and student values. I invite you to listen to the debate on the FedS website, and share with me your opinion on the issue.
Brent Golem is the Editor-In-Chief of Imprint.While speaking with a group of college journalists on Thursday, President Obama complained about being "picked on" by the media.
Along with right-hand flak Josh Earnest, Obama talked about the "pokes and prods" he suffered from the press.
“Sometimes both Josh and I probably have our disagreements with the press corps and feel picked on and misunderstood,” Obama said, according to Politico.
“But the truth of the matter is, and I’ve said this before, what separates us out in part from a lot of other countries in the world is, we’ve got this incredible free press that pokes and prods and calls into account our leaders.”
The president also complained about how hard it is to get "good" stories placed.
“It is very hard to get good stories placed,” he told the journalists.
“People will assign you stories about what’s not working. It’s very hard for you to write a story about, ‘Wow, this thing really works good.'”
He also suggest the media needs to help make people less cynical.
“One of the things we have to think about is how do we tell a story about the things we do together that actually work so that people don’t feel so cynical overall,” Obama said.
Perhaps it would help if Obama and his administration ever gave Americans reason not to feel cynical.Government chooses western Sydney for first random drug testing of welfare recipients
Updated
Welfare recipients in western Sydney will be subjected to random drug testing from January, if Parliament passes the Coalition's controversial plan for a two-year trial.
The Federal Government will today announce it has chosen Canterbury-Bankstown as the first location for the trial due to the high number of jobseekers applying for welfare payments, as well as a rise in methamphetamine-related hospital admissions.
At the same time, the Government will unveil plans for a "dedicated treatment fund" of up to $10 million to support jobseekers in the trial and those who test positive to drugs.
The trial of 5,000 new welfare recipients across three separate locations is due to begin in January next year but Labor and the Greens are firmly opposed to the plan meaning the Coalition is relying on the support of the Senate crossbench.
Social Services Minister Christian Porter has defended the new approach, saying it was "entirely focused on helping job seekers overcome drug problems" and not about "penalising or stigmatising" them.
"We want to help people in this situation," Mr Porter said.
"Failure to do so simply leaves people at risk of a cycle of welfare dependency."
One positive result and payment is through basics card
About 12,000 jobseekers in the Canterbury-Bankstown region are currently receiving the Newstart or Youth Allowance payments.
Figures from the Human Services Department show that over an 18-month period, the number of recipients given an exemption from their "mutual obligations" because of drug dependency rose from eight to 21.
If the trial goes ahead, the Government expects about 1,750 people in the region to be randomly tested with the first tests due to begin in late January or February.
Those who initially test positive to cannabis, ice or ecstasy will have 80 per cent of their welfare payment quarantined onto "basics cards", which can only be used for certain purchases such as rent, childcare and food.
A second positive test would see the welfare recipient charged for the cost of the test, and referred for treatment.
Human Services Minister Alan Tudge said income management was already in place in Bankstown and was "a proven and effective tool to help welfare recipients manage their money".
What do people in western Sydney think?
While some believe it is only fair that those receiving welfare are drug tested, many western Sydney residents feel it is unfair the trial would only target their region.
"People on the dole need to be responsible and I think drug testing will help them in their search for work and to live a better life," John Russell said.
"[But] I do believe it should apply to areas outside Bankstown, but this area does have a lot of drug use and crime. Hopefully drug testing will benefit everyone living here."
Fuad Alnatour agreed the Government needs to ensure welfare is used to improve people's lives, but testing needs to be across Sydney.
"I have friends on dole payments and they spend their money on drugs and then have none for food," he said.
"I think it's good to try out the drug testing in Bankstown first but it should extend to other parts of Sydney."
But Valerie Giammarco said alternative measures to help those dependant on drugs need to be considered.
"I've worked in this area for many years and I've never seen people on drugs. I think the Government is unfairly stigmatising people on welfare payments through random drug testing," she said.
"We should be thinking about other ways to help them, investing in counselling or rehab services, not restricting their Centrelink payments."
Only 22 out of 8,000 tested positive in NZ
Dr Nadine Ezard, clinical director for alcohol and drug services at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital, argued there was no evidence the drug testing would increase jobs or help people with substance abuse issues to return to the workforce.
"We're looking at a situation that's been developed without any evidence that it will work for what it's supposed to do," she said.
"It's very expensive. The Government hasn't released how much it will cost but when we look to other experiences, for example in New Zealand back in 2015, they spent around a million dollars on testing just over 8,000 people and only 22 people tested positive.
"We need to argue whether this is a good use of public funds."
Dr Ezard said the program was likely to increase the stigma around drug abuse and prevent people from seeking treatment.
The two-year trial has been slammed by anti-poverty activists who have said it was a discriminatory move that would profile vulnerable people.
Topics: government-and-politics, welfare, drugs-and-substance-abuse, australia, bankstown-2200, canterbury-2193
First postedSundance Resources, Snowy Mountain Engineering Co embroiled in bribery scandals in Sri Lanka and Congo
Updated
Two Australian companies are being investigated over alleged bribery scandals linked to the presidents of Sri Lanka and the Congo, after the firms sought to secure multi-million-dollar contracts in those countries.
Key points: Sundance Resources agents allegedly involved in plot to bribe son, nephew of Republic of Congo's President
SMEC staff involved in alleged kickback request from office of Sri Lanka President when he was a minister
A Fairfax Media and 7.30 investigation can reveal Perth's Sundance Resources is implicated in an alleged bribery plot involving some family members of Republic of Congo President Denis Sassou Nguesso.
Engineering giant Snowy Mountain Engineering Company is being separately investigated over claims its staff sought approval to pay kickbacks to foreign officials, including a donation to the party of Sri Lanka's president Maithripala Sirisena when he was a cabinet minister.
While these matters are still being investigated, the revelations place pressure on the Turnbull Government to reform Australia's maligned anti-corruption framework, and come after foreign bribery allegations implicating Tabcorp, Leighton Holdings and BHP Billiton.
Do you know more about this story? Email 7.30@abc.net.au
Iconic Australian firm facing bribery investigations
The iconic Snowy Mountains Engineering Company (SMEC) is the subject of a major AFP probe examining the firm's overseas operations.
7.30 can reveal SMEC's overseas staff allegedly bribed officials to secure a $2.3 million aid-funded sewerage project in Sri Lanka in 2011, and a smaller power plant project in Bangladesh in 2007.
Leaked internal company emails also reveal claims from SMEC's Sri Lankan manager in 2009 that then senior minister Maithripala Sirisena and one of his advisers allegedly requested a political "donation" before signing cabinet papers for a $1.82 million dam contract sought by SMEC. Mr Sirisena is now Sri Lanka's President.
"The minister... wants to know whether SMEC could make a donation for the elections," an email from the SMEC manager states about his meeting with Mr Sirisena.
The same email states: "[Mr Sirisena's] Coordinating Secretary said this is the way it goes prior to signing the cabinet papers. He wants us to produce an amount/percentage on the contract value."
In a statement overnight, Mr Sirisena said he had "no knowledge of the incident" and requested further details to "ascertain the involvement of any of his office staff".
The President also said he would co-operate "in any investigation" in Australia and "will also instruct the relevant local authorities to investigate".
The SMEC Sri Lankan manager also wrote he wanted to "inform the minister/co-ordinating secretary" of the size of a suspected kickback to be paid. In another email, the manager said he needed to "prioritise" certain payments to unnamed parties "since the signing of the contract would depend" on it.
In a statement, SMEC confirmed there was a "request for a political donation".
But it said its internal investigation had found that no payment was ever made by the company in response, and the firm "continues to fully cooperate with the AFP".
The secret Congo deal
Sundance Resources' Mbalam‐Nabeba Iron Ore Project, on the border of Cameroon and the Republic of Congo, is touted as one of Africa's biggest iron ore ventures.
But internal Sundance files reveal an alleged plot to bribe some family members of Congo's most powerful man when the company first sought exclusive mining permits in 2006 and 2007.
A July 2006 report by Sundance's African agents states the project needed the backing of "Head of State", President Denis Sassou Nguesso.
Internal company files indicate the agents then brokered a deal potentially worth millions of dollars with the president's son and nephew for a large parcel of shares in Sundance's proposed Congo subsidiary.
"Denis Sassou Nguesso [the President's son] was delighted by the project, but clearly had a problem with the shareholders standing that was proposed to the Congolese side in this deal."
"Unless we give them [the Nguesso government] a good reason to do this project with us, they would want to … do the project with the Chinese," the confidential July 2006 report states.
The President's son was allegedly given shares worth millions of dollars. In mid-2007 his father, President Sassou Nguesso, personally signed off on Sundance's mining permits in a move Sundance's agents attributed to "our relations and network in Congo".
A Sundance spokesman told Fairfax Media the firm "has commissioned an independent party" to conduct a "thorough assessment".
The AFP said it was evaluating the case and took "these allegations very seriously".
AFP warns Australian firms
The AFP says it is ramping up inquiries and pushing companies to dob themselves in before they get caught.
"For any company to think that, you know, this is just the cost of doing business, then they are going to, in due course, face the full effect of the law," AFP Commander Peter Crozier told 7.30.
The Government gave the AFP an extra $15 million in April to fight corporate bribery after the global Unaoil bribery scandal, which involved construction giant Leighton Holdings, and allegations that Tabcorp bribed the sister of Cambodia's Prime Minister.
But experts including former NSW Supreme Court Judge and chair of NGO Transparency International Anthony Whealy say the latest revelations show far greater reforms are urgently needed.
Topics: corporate-governance, mining-industry, iron-ore, bribery, sri-lanka, congo
First postedRussian hacking, White House warnings, angry denials by Vladimir Putin’s officials: we are edging towards a digital Cuban crisis. So it is as well to ask what is truly at stake in this e-conflict, and what underpins it.
To which end, meet the most important intellectual you have (probably) never heard of. Alexander Dugin, the Russian political scientist and polemicist, may resemble Santa’s evil younger brother and talk like a villain from an Austin Powers movie. But it is no accident that he has earned the nickname Putin’s Rasputin. His books and posts – often, it must be said impenetrable or plain madcap – are required reading for those who seek to understand the new landscape of Brexit, Donald Trump’s victory and the global surge of the far right.
Gates: US ‘somewhat laid back’ over Russian election interference Read more
Born in Moscow in 1962, Dugin is a ferocious champion of Russian imperialism, or what he calls Eurasianism. He supports tradition against liberalism, autocracy against democratic institutions, stern uniformity against Enlightenment pluralism. In The Fourth Political Theory (2009), he claims all this adds up to a new and coherent ideology, supplanting liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism – though he still seems pretty fond of fascism.
The extent of Dugin’s personal access to the Kremlin remains opaque: it has certainly waxed and waned over the decades. What is beyond dispute, however, is the influence his geopolitical vision has enjoyed in the general staff academy and the Russian ministry of defence. Putin’s intervention in Georgia in 2008, his invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and his tightening grip on Syria are all entirely consistent with Dugin’s strategy for Mother Russia.
All of which is alarming enough. But what makes Dugin so suddenly significant is his growing influence in the west. It has long been alleged that he acts as a covert intermediary between Moscow and far-right groups in Europe, many of which are believed to receive funding from the Kremlin.
The purpose of operations like the hacking of the US election has been to destabilise the Atlantic order generally, and America specifically. And on this great struggle, Dugin is positively millenarian: “We must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things, of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy, and political correctness – everything that is the face of the Beast, the anti-Christ.”
Stand by for world war three, then? Not just yet, it seems. Dugin was one of the first public figures in Russia to spot that Trump was a potential ally, and that his prospective presidency might unite the previously hostile nations in a joint crusade to eradicate “perversion” and to carve up the planet between them.
In March 2016, he declared that the tweeting tycoon was the voice of “the real rightwing in America … which has found itself caught in the liberal globalist sect’s trap, obsessed with the new world order and focused on the interests of the world financial elite.” He ended his encomium thus: “In Trump we trust!”
So bonkers does all this sound that one is sorely tempted to tune out. But that would be a mistake. I seriously doubt that Trump has ploughed his way through Dugin’s 600-page Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), supposedly a standard textbook for Russian army officers. But the man who will be his chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is certainly aware of its author, and has spoken with apparent approval of “what I call Eurasianism. We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what [Putin] is talking about as far as traditionalism goes, particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”
Look further, and it is clear that the virus of Duginism is now fizzing away in the bloodstream of the American “alt-right” and the digital nexus so important to Trump’s victory. Richard B Spencer, the white nationalist president of the National Policy Institute, is notorious for his post-election outburst at a Washington conference last month: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Less well-known are his close links with Dugin, who he invited to a conference on “European identity” in Budapest in 2014 (the Russian was denied a visa), having already published Dugin’s writings online.
Tensions between the US and Russia may be distracting us from a potential convergence – and not the good kind, either
Let me be clear: I do not mean to suggest that this bearded neofascist is heading for a photocall at Trump Tower or the Oval Office. The evidence to date suggests, shall we say, that the president-elect is not much interested in ideas or intellectuals. Asked in July if he had time to read, he replied: “I never have.” Which is candid, if depressing.
My point is that the battle of ideas matters even when those in power pour scorn upon it, or claim themselves to be no more than practitioners of “common sense”. Discourse analysis teaches us that ideas are the magmatic force of public life, rumbling beneath the feet of the mighty, shaping their actions and the popular response. As Isaiah Berlin put it, ideas “are indeed the central complex of relations of a man towards himself and to the external world”.
In Dugin’s case, the “central complex” is a mess of imperialism, bigotry, reactionary religiosity and a loathing of social diversity. To confuse matters further, he has borrowed from postmodernism the idea that “truth is a matter of belief … there is no such thing as facts”. In the year of “post-truth politics”, this contention resonates all too deeply. Worse, Dugin’s ideas help to explain why the present tensions between the US and Russia may be distracting us from a potential convergence between the two mighty powers – and not the good kind, either.
Imagine a world in which the old left-right divide and the east-west conflict of the cold war era were practically irrelevant. The conflict of consequence would be between traditionalists and pluralists, between internationalists and nativists, between autocracy and liberalism. This is Dugin’s world. In it, Trump and Putin, for all their differences, would be on the same side.
The core lesson of 2016 is that there is nothing inevitable in the march of progress. But it is equally true that the ultra right has no providential monopoly on success. Vile as they are, Dugin’s ideas constitute a half-mad manual to what is happening today, and may happen tomorrow. It should be read with care by all those who are planning the counterattack.Edit: If you are expecting an email about your supporter pack and can't find it, check your spam folder! We've had a few reports of it automatically being marked as spam. If in doubt, please feel free to contact our customer support department at support@grindinggear.com. By the way, if you're a Spanish Path of Exile player, there's a great fansite that I wanted to mention in the news - www.poesp.com If you are expecting an email about your supporter pack and can't find it, check your spam folder! We've had a few reports of it automatically being marked as spam. If in doubt, please feel free to contact our customer support department at support@grindinggear.com. YouTube |
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Posted by Chris
on Grinding Gear Games onYes, we get it, the Dynamic Perspective (not 3D) technology used in Amazon’s Fire smartphone is cool. But while it is pretty, it is just in essence, a gimmick, |
definition of what ‘investment grade’ really is – because I guarantee there would be no shortage of differing opinions from industry ‘experts.’
This endless promotion of residential property, with rows of investment magazines lining newsagency shelves, promoting subjective ‘hotspots,’ or as I pointed out a few weeks ago, agencies cold calling households, and sending ‘advisors’ round to ‘educate’ and encourage inexperienced investors to negatively gear against their principle place of residence, is toxic.
Meanwhile, the RBA continue to sit on their hands, not wanting to pull a regulatory lever, instead warning investors to employ caution, hoping they will fall into line like a bunch of good school kids. However, whilst macro prudential tools may assist in ensuring banking lending standards remain robust – can they have any long-term sustainable or lasting impact on property prices?
In a recent research paper by BIS (Bank for International Settlements) entitled “can non-interest rate policies stabilise housing markets?” – evidence was gathered from 57 countries spanning more than three decades, investigating the effectiveness of nine non-interest rate policy and macro prudential tools on restraining credit growth and house prices.
The analysis used a new dataset going as far back as 1980, making it the most comprehensive study to date in terms of both scope and time span.
The paper concluded that whilst reductions in the maximum LTV (loan to value) ratio can restrain demand, its effects can be partially or wholly offset by a rising market enabling the investor to borrow more, therefore, changes in the maximum DSTI (debt service to income) ratio were assessed to be more substantial.
But importantly:
“Only tax changes affecting the cost of buying a house, which bear directly on the user cost, have any measurable effect on prices” and, “None of the policies designed to affect either the supply of or the demand for credit has a discernible impact on house prices.”
The study puts this down to the ‘can buys’ still outnumbering the growing pool of credit constrained ‘can’t buys’ – stressing that the importance of housing supply was not explicitly considered. Therefore if we want to lower house prices or put in place policies to aid affordability, we need to look outside the limited powers of the RBA alone.
As has been proven time and time again, intermittently stoking at the bottom end of the market with FHB grants and incentives does little more than provide a short term ‘happy pill’ for vendors, as the price multiplier effect ripples across the rest of the housing terrain, stimulating both an inflationary and volatile environment.
Instead, we need to focus on the real problem in Australia – and it’s not property prices, it’s land prices – as economist Leith Van Onselen effectively points out when he analyses the difference between commercial and rural land compared to residential land values, and building costs.
“Whilst commercial and rural prices have remained relatively stable over the last 24 years relative to GDP, residential prices have skyrocketed…”
In other words, the cost of residential fringe land, which without constraint, should be close to its ‘raw’ value, is not cheap at all – and it’s all down to ineffective urban planning policy.
As I (and others) have pointed out previously, even within a wide expansive boundary as mooted in Melbourne’s new urban growth strategy, the government limits land use until they have gone through a lengthy process of mapping out areas for infrastructure known as a ‘Precinct Structure Plan’ – it is a slow laborious process and as soon as you restrict the supply of anything, scarcity inevitably inflates values.
Larger developers are not slow to purchase swathes of acreage prior to rezoning, and then once ‘Psp’s’ have been finalised, drip feed it onto the market. Not only do Government bodies have little understanding of how released plots respond to consumer demand, they have no policy in place to deter the practice. It’s therefore a failure.
Furthermore, facilitation of infrastructure is currently financed via hefty development overlays, which are passed onto the buyer rather than initiatives such as bond financing, where residents pay back proportionally over a lengthy period of time, as was the case historically.
We must remove these barriers with effective policy and let land prices revert back to normal levels to reflect a ‘real price’ closer to commercial values.
Without doing so, we can’t gain a true indicator of the trade-off buyers are prepared to make between price and distance. Currently, the average price of a newly built house and land package is around $400,000, this is not serviceable on the single median wage, and therefore can hardly be deemed affordable.
Get the land supply – price – and infrastructure equation right, and I suspect there would be no lack of demand from genuine aspiring homebuyers. Only when this is done, can we have a truly transparent debate on first homebuyers willingness to ‘spread over the land.’The dogs were caught in Moscow’s alleyways, and soldiers and doctors selected strays that were no heavier than about 13 pounds and no taller than about 14 inches, the dimension of the rocket’s nosecone. Chernushka, shown here during a routine weight check, went up into orbit in September 1963 accompanied by a mannequin human. She made it back safely.
The dogs had to be trained to relieve themselves once inside their space suits. The suits had special receptacles, but convincing the animals to use them was difficult and only the dogs who took to it were selected. For orbital flights, all the dogs were female. There was no room in the cabin for a male dog to cock its leg, so females were better suited to space.
Before sending dogs into space, the Soviets sent them up for suborbital test flights. From the July 2 1957 issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda: “They made their way back to their Motherland, back down to Earth, by parachute, from out of the heavens beyond the clouds.... Throughout this time, the dogs experienced all the effects of outer space.”
Laika, the most famous space dog, went up in November 1957. During training she showed a great capacity for endurance and tolerance. She died soon after launch, though, a fact not revealed until 2002. At the time, the Soviets kept her “alive” for seven days in orbit, and newspapers would report on her health. She became a national hero and her face was emblazoned on everything from cigarettes…
… to spinning tops. This Japanese toy shows her boldly astride a Sputnik. But reality was more harrowing. First, she spent three days in the capsule on the launchpad. During launch, her heart rate tripled and her breathing quadrupled. In zero gravity, everything went back to normal. But the capsule’s cooling fans were useless, and Laika basically baked to death.
Countries were still putting her on stamps as late as the 1980s. Top row: Polish stamp (1964), Beninian stamp (1977). Bottom row: Mongolian stamp (1982), DPR Korean stamp (1987).
Belka and Strelka, shown here with American pianist Van Cliburn who met them when he was in Moscow on tour, had a happier fate. They spent a day in orbit in 1960, after which they were recovered safely, the first cosmonauts to return to Earth. They became massive celebrities, and one of Strelka’s puppies (Strelka is the one with the eye patches) was sent to John F Kennedy as a diplomatic gift.
These two dogs appeared on a huge range of products and memorabilia as well, including postcards, buttons, and this ceramic flask. They received fan mail from around the world, which was answered by the scientists who took care of them. When they died, their bodies were stuffed. Today they are on display at the Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow.Monsanto Awarded ONE BILLION Dollars Due To Patent Infringement For A Product That Was Never On The Market
from the roundup-ready dept
The damages theory was interesting. Since the accused product was not yet on the market, Monsanto did not seek any lost profit. Rather, Monsanto demanded a reasonable royalty for the research-use made by the defendants. Monsanto argued that the use of Monsanto's invention in DuPont's labs and Pioneer's test fields gave those companies an "improper head start" in making the GM seeds. The judge and jury agreed – if those companies wanted to build upon the invention then they should have first obtained a license. In the pharmaceutical world, 35 U.S.C. § 271(e) offers a research exemption for this type of activity. However, that exception does not apply here because of the low level of regulation over genetically modified food-products. The patent is set to expire in 2014. The patentee's right-to-exclusive-research supported by this case means that the 2014 date offers a starting-date for follow-on competitive research. Any actual products building directly upon the patented invention will arrive on the market sometime later.
We've had plenty of stories over the years of Monsanto's incredibly aggressive stance when it comes to its "Roundup Ready" patents. The company has now been awarded $1 billion from Dupont for infringing on one of these patents. Now, here's a case where we're talking about competing companies, so perhaps no big deal, right? Except there's one tidbit here that makes this interesting: Dupont. So the "damages" to Monsanto would seem to be minimal... except in a court of law apparently. According to Patently-O:Got that? Normally, companies can build on top of others' products as patents are set to expire, so they're ready to launch once the patent has expired. But, in this case, even trying to build new offerings in a lab for use later is apparently an insane billion dollar issue. Even worse, it means that any real competition, which will create more market-reasonable prices, gets significantly delayed as no one can prepare for when the patent expires.
Filed Under: patents, research, roundup ready
Companies: dupont, monsantoSen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, greets a supporter after announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination March 23 in Lynchburg, Va. (Photo11: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Two months after staging a marathon Senate speech to protest the growth of government spending, Sen. Ted Cruz took a New York fundraising swing highlighted by a visit with Donald Trump — and put it on the taxpayers' tab.
The trip, which cost more than $1,200, was one of several taxpayer-funded excursions the Texas Republican has taken to political events.
Senate rules mandate that official funds — allocated to each senator to operate their Capitol Hill office — "may only be used for official purposes," and "No official resources may be used to conduct campaign activities," according to the Senate Ethics Committee.
CLOSE Texas Sen. Ted Cruz grants his first one-on-one interview since announcing he's running for president in 2016. VPC
In the wake of his announcement last month that he is running for president, Cruz's use of his Senate office funds demonstrates how murky the line can be between official and political travel. USA TODAY recently tracked similar trips taken by Hillary Clinton, who may also be a presidential contender in 2016. During her Senate tenure, Clinton traveled on the taxpayer dime to several "official" events sponsored by political backers as she geared up for her 2008 presidential bid.
"For mixed-purpose trips, the Senate encourages offices to divide expenses based on a reasonable standard. Sen. Cruz has gone above and beyond any reasonable standard for determining official vs. unofficial costs. He places the utmost priority on ensuring prudent use of taxpayer dollars," campaign spokesman Rick Tyler said.
Cruz did not announce the Trump visit on his office website. A report in Politico the day before the visit quoted an unnamed Cruz spokeswoman as noting that Trump and Cruz were friends and met during "some down time in NYC" for Cruz during a fundraising tour.
His campaign defended Cruz's use of taxpayer money for the travel, noting that he did official business on the trip. Cruz appeared in-studio that Friday afternoon on the Fox News program Happening Now — though he had been on other Fox programs several days earlier from Washington. Tyler said Cruz paid for non-official expenses of the New York trip out of his own pocket.
During an appearance in July 2013 at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Cruz invited guests to join his grass-roots movement to "take this country back" and to "take out your cellphone and text the word 'growth' to 33733," which sent the texts back to Cruz's campaign website.
Cruz and the regional director of his Dallas Senate office spent at least $800 in taxpayer money to travel to the conference, a Western version of the bigger Conservative Political Action Conference held near Washington each year.
The senator asked attendees to sign a petition to defund President Obama's signature health care law, giving a Web address run by the Senate Conservatives Fund, a super PAC that spent heavily in 2014 elections to elect conservative candidates.
Cruz repeated this refrain at other events that year. The same month as the New York trip, Cruz spoke at a "Restoration Weekend" event in Palm Beach, Fla., hosted by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a conservative organization that says it "combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror."
He urged the audience to join a grass-roots movement and log on to a website — makedclisten.org — to upload their stories about the problems caused by Obamacare. That site was operated by Cruz's PAC, the Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund, which maintains a "makeDClisten" Twitter account.
Cruz and senior adviser Charles Roy were both reimbursed from his Senate office for travel expenses to Palm Beach and nearby Fort Lauderdale during this time period, but there is no way to determine what portion of that $2,300 expense is related to the Restoration Weekend appearance. Cruz's PAC reported spending $1,554 at the Breakers, the hotel where the conference was held, indicating Cruz divided political and official expenses that weekend.
In February 2014, Cruz was back in Florida, again on the taxpayers' expense, to receive the Statesman of the Year award by the Sarasota Republican Party. Breitbart News described it this way: "An event originally scheduled as a small rally for potential 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) mushroomed into a major political event after nearly 2,000 people RSVP'd online." According to Breitbart, after the award ceremony, "Cruz will attend a $500 per person VIP fundraiser and, to wrap up the evening, a $5,000 per couple private donor dinner," benefiting the local party.
Cruz was reimbursed from his office account for $1,615 in travel costs from Houston to Tampa and Palm Beach, Fla., during that period, Senate records show.
Under Senate rules, "it is very easy to classify something that is a political event in front of political supporters as not being a campaign event and being part of your official duties," said Bill Allison, senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit group that advocates government transparency. "As long as they never use the magic words, 'Will you vote for me?' "
Any trip paid for with public money should have "some kind of official public component," said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the watchdog Center for Responsive Politics. This would be particularly relevant for Cruz, Krumholz said, because he has "inveighed against wasteful government spending."
"I think we have a deep spending problem in this country, and Congress had abdicated its responsibility and built a record debt," Cruz said in a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor in September 2013 to protest raising the federal debt ceiling and not repealing the Affordable Care Act.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1IU66qORoger Stone, an informal adviser and confidant to Donald Trump, appeared this morning on “Breitbart News Daily,” where he accused Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin of potentially being a spy for Saudi Arabia and radical Islamist groups.
“Now that Islamic terrorism is going to be front and center, there’s going to be a new focus on whether this administration, the administration of Hillary Clinton at State, was permeated at the highest levels by Saudi intelligence and others who are not loyal Americans,” he said. “I speak specifically of Huma Abedin.”
Stone said that Abedin, who has been the target of several far-right conspiracy theories, comes from a family of “hardcore Islamic ideologues” and “has a very troubling past, she comes out of nowhere.”
“We have to ask: Do we have a Saudi spy in our midst? Do we have a terrorist agent?” he added.
In the past, Stone has suggested that Abedin is Clinton’s secret lesbian lover.Chapter 47. Uniform Code of Military Justice
Sub Chapter 1. General Provisions [TOC]
Sec. Art. 801. 1. Definitions. 802. 2. Persons Subject to this chapter. 803. 3. Jurisdiction to try certain personnel. 804. 4. Dismissed officer's right to trial by court-martial. 805. 5. Territorial applicability of this chapter. 806. 6. Judge advocates and legal officers. *806a 6a. Investigation and disposition of maters pertaining to the fitness of military judges.
801. ART. 1. DEFINITIONS.
In this chapter
(1) "Judge Advocate General" means, severally, the Judge Advocates General of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and, except when the Coast guard is operating as a service in the Navy, the General Counsel of the Department of Transportation.
(2) The Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard designated as such by appropriate authority.
(4) "Officer in Charge" means a member of the Navy, the Marine Corps, or the Coast Guard designated as such by appropriate authority.
(5) "Superior commissioned officer" means a commissioned officer superior in rank of command.
(6) "Cadet" means a cadet of the United States Military Academy, the United States Air Force Academy, or the United States Coast Guard Academy.
(7) "Midshipman" means a midshipman of the United States Naval Academy and any other midshipman on active duty in the naval service.
(8) "Military" refers to any or all of the armed forces.
(9) "Accuser" means a person who signs and swears to charges, any person who directs that charges nominally be signed and sworn to by another person who has an interest other than an official interest in the prosecution of the accused.
(10) "Military Judge" means an official of a general or special court-martial detailed in accordance with section 826 of this title (article 26).
(11) "Law specialist" means a commissioned officer of the Coast Guard designated for special duty (law).
(12) "Legal officer" means any commissioned officer of the Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard designated to perform legal duties for a command.
(13) "Judge Advocate" means--
(A) an officer of the Judge Advocate General's Corp of the Army or the Navy; (B) an officer of the Air Force or the Marine Corps who is designated as a judge advocate; or (C) an officer of the Coast Guard who is designated as a law specialist.
(14) "Record", when used in connection with the proceedings of a court-martial means--
(A) an official written transcript, written summary, or other writing relating to the proceedings: or (B) an official audiotape, videotape, or similar material from which sound and visual images, depicting the proceedings may be reproduced.
802. ART. 2. PERSONS SUBJECT TO THIS CHAPTER
(a) The following persons are subject to this chapter:
(1) Members of a regular component of the armed forces, including those awaiting discharge after expiration of their terms of enlistment; volunteers from the time of their muster or acceptance into the armed forces; inductees from the time of their actual induction into the armed forces; and other persons lawfully called or ordered into, or to duty in or for training in the armed forces, from the dates when they are required by the terms of the call or order to obey it. (2) Cadets, aviation cadets, and midshipman. (3) Members of a reserve component while on inactive-duty training, but in the case of members of the Army National Guard of the United States or the Air National Guard of the United States only when in Federal Service. (4) Retired members of a regular component of the armed forces who are entitled to pay. (5) Retired members of a reserve component who are receiving hospitalization from an armed force. (6) Members of the Fleet Reserve and Fleet Marine Corps Reserve. (7) Persons in custody of the armed forces serving a sentence imposed by a court-martial. (8) Members of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Public Health Service, and other organizations, when assigned to and serving with the armed forces. (9) Prisoners of war in custody of the armed forces. (10) In time of war, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field. (11) Subject to any treaty or agreement which the United States is or may be a party to any accepted rule of international law, persons serving with, employed by, or accompanying the armed forces outside the United States and outside the Canal Zone, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. (12) Subject to any treaty or agreement which the United States is or may be a party to any accepted rule of international law, persons within an area leased by or otherwise reserved or acquired for use of the United States which is under the control of the Secretary concerned and which is outside the United States and outside the Canal Zone, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.
(b) The voluntary enlistment of any person who has the capacity to understand the significance of enlisting in the armed forces shall be valid for purposes of jurisdiction under subsection (a) and change of status from civilian to member of the armed forces shall be effective upon the taking of the oath of enlistment.
(c) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a person serving with an armed force who--
(1) Submitted voluntarily to military authority; (2) met the mental competence and minimum age qualifications of sections 504 and 505 of this title at the time of voluntary submissions to military authority: (3) received military pay or allowances; and (4) performed military duties: is subject to this chapter until such person's active service has been terminated in accordance with law or regulations promulgated by the Secretary concerned.
(d)
(1) A member of a reserve component who is not on active duty and who is made the subject of proceedings under section 815 (article 15) or section 830 (article 30) with respect to an offense against this chapter may be ordered to active duty involuntary for the purpose of-- (A) investigation under section 832 of this title (article 32); (B) trial by court-martial; or (C) non judicial punishment under section 815 of this title (article 15). (2) A member of a reserve component may not be ordered to active duty under paragraph (1) except with respect to an offense committed while the member was (A) on active duty; or (B) on inactive-duty training, but in the case of members of the Army National Guard of the United States or the Air National Guard of the United States only when in Federal service. (3) Authority to order a member to active duty under paragraph (1) shall be exercised under regulations prescribed by the President. (4) A member may be ordered to active duty under paragraph (1) only by a person empowered to convene general courts-martial in a regular component of the armed forces. (5) A member ordered to active duty under paragraph (1), unless the order to active duty was approved by the Secretary concerned, may not-- (A) be sentenced to confinement; or (B) be required to serve a punishment of any restriction on liberty during a period other than a period of inactive-duty training or active duty (other than active duty ordered under paragraph (1)).
803. ART. 3. JURISDICTION TO TRY CERTAIN PERSONNEL
(a) Subject to section 843 of this title (article 43), no person charged with having committed, while in a status in which he was subject to this chapter, an offense against this chapter, punishable by confinement for five years or more and for which the person cannot be tried in the courts of the United States or of a State, a Territory, or District of Columbia, may be relieved from amenability to trial by court-martial by reason of the termination of that status.
(b) Each person discharged from the armed forces who is later charged with having fraudulently obtained his discharge is, subject to section 843 of this title (article 43), subject to trial by court-martial on that charge and is after apprehension subject to trial by court-martial for all offense under this chapter committed before the fraudulent discharge
(c) No person who has deserted from the armed forces may be relieved form amenability to the jurisdiction of this chapter by virtue of separation from any later period of service.
(d) A member of a reserve component who is subject to this chapter is not, by virtue of the termination of a period of active duty or inactive- duty training, relieved from amenability to the jurisdiction of this chapter for an offense against this chapter committed during such period of active duty or inactive-duty training.
804 ART. 4. DISMISSED OFFICER'S RIGHT TO TRIAL BY COURT-MARTIAL
(a) If any commissioned officer, dismissed by order of the president, makes a written application for trial by court-martial setting forth under oath, that he has been wrongfully dismissed, the President, as soon as practicable, shall convene a general court-martial to try that officer on the charges on which he was dismissed. A court-martial so convened has jurisdiction to try the dismissed officer on those charges, and he shall be considered to have waived the right to plead any statute of limitations applicable to any offense with which he is charged. The court-martial may, as part of its sentence, adjudge the affirmance of the dismissal, but if the court-martial acquits the accused or if the sentence adjudged, as finally approved or affirmed, does not include dismissal or death, the Secretary concerned shall substitute for the dismissal ordered by the President a form of discharge authorized for administrative issue.
(b) If the President fails to convene a general court-martial within six months from the preparation of an application for trial under this article, the Secretary concerned shall substitute for the dismissal order by the President a form of discharge authorized for administrative issue.
(c) If a discharge is substituted for a dismissal under this article, the President alone may reappoint the officer to such commissioned grade and with such rank as, in the opinion of the President, that former officer would have attained had he not been dismissed. The reappointment of such a former officer shall be without regard to the existence of a vacancy and shall affect the promotion status of other officers only insofar as the President may direct. All time between the dismissal and the reappointment shall be considered as actual service for all purposes, including the right to pay and allowances.
(d) If an officer is discharged from any armed force by administrative action or is dropped from the rolls by order of the President, he has no right to trial under this article.
805. ART. 5. TERRITORIAL APPLICABILITY OF THIS CHAPTER
This chapter applies in all places.
806. ART. 6. JUDGE ADVOCATES AND LEGAL OFFICERS
(a) The assignment for duty of judge advocates of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard shall be made upon the recommendation of the Judge Advocate General of the armed force of which they are members. The assignment for duty of judge advocate of the Marine Corps shall be made by direction of the Commandant of the Marine Corps. The Judge Advocate General or senior members of his staff shall make frequent inspection in the field in supervision of the administration of military justice.
(b) Convening authorities shall at all times communicate directly with their staff judge advocates or legal officers in matters relating to the administration of military justice; and the staff judge advocate or legal officer of a superior or subordinate command, or with the Judge Advocate General.
(c) No person who has acted as member, military judge, trial counsel, assistant trial counsel, defense counsel, assistant defense counsel, or investigating officer in any case may later act as staff judge-advocate or legal officer to any reviewing authority upon the same case.
(d)
(1) A judge advocate who is assigned or detailed to perform the functions of a civil office in the Government of the United States under section 973(*b)(2)(B) of this title may perform such duties as may be requested by the agency concerned, including representation of the United States in civil and criminal cases. (2) The Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Transportation with respect to the Coast Guard when it in not operating as a service in the Navy, shall prescribe regulations providing that reimbursement may be a condition of assistance by judge advocates assigned or detailed under section 973(b)(2)(B) of this title.
* 806a. ART. 6a. INVESTIGATION AND DISPOSITION OF MATTERS PERTAINING TO THE FITNESS OF MILITARY JUDGES.
(a) The President shall prescribe procedures for the investigation and disposition of charges, allegations, or information pertaining to the fitness of a military judge or military appellate judge to perform the duties of the judge's position, to the extent practicable, the procedures shall be uniform for all armed forces.
(b) The President shall transmit a copy of the procedures prescribed pursuant to this section to the Committees on Armed Services of the Senate and the House of Representatives
Sub Chapter II. Apprehension and Restraint [TOC]
Sec. Art. 807. 7. Apprehension. 808. 8. Apprehension of deserters. 809. 9. Imposition of Restraint. 810. 10. Restraint of persons charged with offenses. 811. 11. Reports and receiving of prisoners. 812. 12. Confinement with enemy prisoners prohibited. 813. 13. Punishment prohibited before trial. 814. 14. Delivery of offenders to civil authorities.
807. ART. 7. APPREHENSION
(a) Apprehension is the taking of a person into custody.
(b) Any person authorized under regulations governing the armed forces to apprehend persons subject to this chapter or to trial thereunder may do so upon reasonable belief that an offense has been committed and that the person apprehended committed it.
(c) Commissioned officers, warrant officers, petty officers, and noncommissioned officers have authority to quell quarrels, frays and disorders among persons subject to this chapter who take part therein.
808. ART. 8. APPREHENSION OF DESERTERS
Any civil officer having authority to apprehend offenders under the laws of the United States or of a State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession, or the District of Columbia may summarily apprehend a deserter from the armed forces and deliver him into the custody of those forces.
809. ART. 9. IMPOSITION OF RESTRAINT
(a) Arrest is the restraint of a person by an order, not imposed as a punishment for an offense, directing him to remain within certain specified limits. Confinement is the physical restraint of a person.
(b) An enlisted member may be ordered into arrest or confinement by any commissioned officer by an order, oral or written, delivered in person or through other persons subject to this chapter. A commanding officer may authorize warrant officers, petty officers, or noncommissioned officers to order enlisted members of his command or subject to his authority into arrest or confinement.
(c) A commissioned officer, a warrant officer, or a civilian subject to this chapter or to trial thereunder may be ordered into arrest or confinement only by a commanding officer to whose authority he is subject, by an order, oral or written, delivered in person or by another commissioned officer. The authority to order such persons into arrest or confinement may not be delegated.
(d) No person may be ordered into arrest or confinement except for probable cause.
(e) Nothing in this article limits the authority of persons authorized to apprehend offenders to secure the custody of an alleged offender until proper authority may be notified.
810. ART. 10. RESTRAINT OF PERSONS CHARGED WITH OFFENSES
Any person subject to this chapter charged with an offense under this chapter shall be ordered into arrest or confinement, as circumstances may require; but when charged only with an offense normally tried by a summary court-martial, he shall not ordinarily be placed in confinement. When any person subject to this chapter is placed in arrest or confinement prior to trial, immediate steps shall be taken to inform him of the specific wrong of which he is accused and to try him or to dismiss the charges and release him.
811. ART. 11. REPORTS AND RECEIVING OF PRISONERS
(a) No provost marshal, commander or a guard, or master at arms may refuse to receive or keep any prisoner committed to his charge by a commissioned officer of the armed forces, when the committing officer furnishes a statement, signed by him, of the offense charged against the prisoner.
(b) Every commander of a guard or master at arms to whose charge a prisoner is committed shall, within twenty-four hours after that commitment or as soon as he is relieved from guard, report to the commanding officer the name of the prisoner, the offense charged against him, and the name of the person who ordered or authorized the commitment.
812. ART. 12. CONFINEMENT WITH ENEMY PRISONERS PROHIBITED
No member of the armed forces may be placed in confinement in immediate association with enemy prisoners or other foreign nationals not members of the armed forces.
813. ART. 13 PUNISHMENT PROHIBITED BEFORE TRIAL
No person, while being held for trial, may be subjected to punishment or penalty other than arrest or confinement upon the charges pending against him, nor shall the arrest or confinement imposed upon him be any more rigorous than the circumstances required to insure his presence, but he may be subjected to minor punishment during that period for infractions of discipline.
814. ART. 14. DELIVERY OF OFFENDERS TO CIVIL AUTHORITIES
(a) Under such regulations as the Secretary concerned may prescribe, a member of the armed forces accused of an offense against civil authority may be delivered, upon request, to the civil authority for trial.
(b) When delivery under this article is made to any civil authority of a person undergoing sentence of a court-martial, the delivery, if followed by conviction in a civil tribunal, interrupts the execution of the sentence of the court-martial, and the offender after having answered to the civil authorities for his offense shall, upon the request of competent military authority, be returned to military custody for the completion of his sentence.
Sub Chapter III. Non-Judicial Punishment [TOC]
815. ART. 15. COMMANDING OFFICER'S NON-JUDICIAL PUNISHMENT
(a) Under such regulations as the President may prescribe, and under such additional regulations as may be prescribed by the Secretary concerned, limitations may be placed on the powers granted by this article with respect to the kind and amount of punishment authorized, the categories of commanding officers and warrant officers exercising command authorized to exercise those powers, the applicability of this article to an accused who demands trial by court-martial, and the kinds of courts-martial to which the case may be referred upon such a demand. However, except in the case of a member attached to or embarked in a vessel, punishment may not be imposed upon any member of the armed forces under this article if the member has, before the imposition of such punishment, demanded trial by court-martial in lieu of such punishment. Under similar regulations, rules may be prescribed with respect to the suspension of punishments authorized by regulations of the Secretary concerned, a commanding officer exercising general court-martial jurisdiction or an officer of general or flag rank in command may delegate his powers under this article to a principal assistant.
(b) Subject to subsection (a) any commanding officer may, in addition to or in lieu of admonition or reprimand, impose one or more of the following disciplinary punishments for minor offenses without the intervention of a court-martial--
(1) upon officers of his command-- (A) restriction to certain specified limits, with or without suspension from duty, for not more that 30 consecutive days; (B) if imposed by an officer exercising general court-martial jurisdictions or an officer of general flag rank in command-- (i) arrest in quarters for not more than 30 consecutive days; (ii) forfeiture of not more than one-half of one month's pay per month for two months; (iii) restriction to certain specified limits, with or without suspension from duty, for not more than 60 consecutive days; (iv) detention of not more than one-half of one month's pay per month for three months; (2) upon other personnel of his command-- (A) if imposed upon a person attached to or embarked in a vessel, confinement on bread and water or diminished rations for not more than three consecutive days; (B) correctional custody for not more than seven consecutive days; (C) forfeiture of not more than seven days' pay; (D) reduction to the next inferior pay grade, if the grade from which demoted is within the promotion authority of the officer imposing the reduction or any officer subordinate to the one who imposes the reduction; (E) extra duties, including fatigue or other duties, for not more than 14 consecutive days; (F) restriction to certain specified limits, with or without suspension from duty, for not more than 14 consecutive days; (G) detention of not more than 14 days' pay; (H) if imposed by an officer of the grade of major or lieutenant commander, or above-- (i) the punishment authorized under clause (A); (ii) correctional custody for not more than 30 consecutive days; (iii) forfeiture of not more than one-half of one month's pay per month for two months; (iv) reduction to the lowest or any intermediate pay grade, if the grade from which demoted is within the promotion authority of the officer imposing the reduction or any officer subordinate to the one who imposes the reduction, by an enlisted member in a pay grade above E-4 may not be reduced more than two pay grades; (v) extra duties, including fatigue or other duties, for not more than 45 consecutive days; (vi) restriction to certain specified limits, with or without suspension from duty, for not more than 60 consecutive days; (vii) detention of not more than one-half of one month's pay per month for three months.
Detention of pay shall be for a stated period of not more than one year but if the offender's term of service expires earlier, the detention shall terminate upon that expiration. |
the title of one of his books, "Race Matters." The liberal and the conservative believe race doesn't matter. Character matters, but not race.
Prager drew from both the Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries to define "racism," describing contemporary misapplications of the term as left-wing linguistic corruption: "Misuse of the term racist, the distortion of its meaning, has been a moral scandal."
"You have to be an idiot to be a racist," said Prager, describing "racism" as both "stupid and evil."
Political observers should note that racism is an ideology predicated on the view that a person's racial heredity greatly impacts his or her character via biological determinism.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.IPSWICH police are warning cyclists not to "drink and ride" after an Ipswich man was caught riding while more than three times over the legal blood alcohol limit.
At Ipswich Magistrates Court yesterday, Cale Levinson Jones pleaded guilty to pedalling home drunk on his bicycle.
Police prosecutor Sergeant Fiona Pederson said the 23-year-old was stopped by officers after he was seen swerving from side to side on the road.
Sgt Pedersen said Jones was not wearing a helmet, had slurred speech and smelled strongly of liquor.
When he was later breath-tested, he recorded a blood-alcohol limit of 0.173.
The incident took place at 1.30am on September 14, in Booval.
Jones said he regretted his decision to ride drunk and that his actions were irresponsible and dangerous. He was fined $300.
Ipswich Police Inspector Keith McDonald said many cyclists were of the misconception that just because they weren't driving a car, they were immune from drink driving laws.
"This is not the case, the law applies to bicycle riders - and even horse riders too - almost exactly the same as it does to cars," he said.
"Drunk cyclists are not only endangering their lives but those of other road and footpath users."
Insp Keith McDonald said police did not have the power to breathalyse cyclists but could arrest riders they suspected of being drunk.
"Once they have been arrested we can ask them to consent to having a breath test done," he said.
Anyone arrested for riding drunk cannot lose their driver's licence in Queensland.Différance is a French term coined by Jacques Derrida. It is a central concept in Derrida's deconstruction, a critical outlook concerned with the relationship between text and meaning. The term différance means "difference and deferral of meaning."
Overview [ edit ]
Derrida first uses the term différance in his 1963 paper "Cogito et histoire de la folie".[1] The term différance then played a key role in Derrida's engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. The term was then elaborated in various other works, notably in his essay "Différance" and in various interviews collected in Positions.[2]
The ⟨a⟩ of différance is a deliberate misspelling of différence, though the two are pronounced identically, IPA: [difeʁɑ̃s] (différance plays on the fact that the French word différer means both "to defer" and "to differ"). This misspelling highlights the fact that its written form is not heard, and serves to further subvert the traditional privileging of speech over writing (see archi-writing and logocentrism), as well as the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. The difference articulated by the ⟨a⟩ in différance is not apparent to the senses via sound, "but neither cannot it belong to intelligibility, to the ideality which is not fortuitously associated with the objectivity of theorein or understanding."[3] This is because the language of understanding is already caught up in sensible metaphors—for example, θεωρεῖν (theōrein) means "to see" in Ancient Greek.
In the essay "Différance" Derrida indicates that différance gestures at a number of heterogeneous features that govern the production of textual meaning. The first (relating to deferral) is the notion that words and signs can never fully summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined through appeal to additional words, from which they differ. Thus, meaning is forever "deferred" or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers. The second (relating to difference, sometimes referred to as espacement or "spacing") concerns the force that differentiates elements from one another, and in so doing engenders binary oppositions and hierarchies that underpin meaning itself.
Derrida developed the concept of différance deeper in the course of an argument against the phenomenology of Husserl, who sought a rigorous analysis of the role of memory and perception in our understanding of sequential items such as music or language. Derrida's approach argues that because the perceiver's mental state is constantly in flux and differs from one re-reading to the next, a general theory describing this phenomenon is unachievable.
A term related to the idea of différance in Derrida's thought is the supplement, "itself bound up in a supplementary play of meaning which defies semantic reduction."[4]
Between structure and genesis [ edit ]
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text, in a broad sense,[5][6] emerges from semiology advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it.... A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.[7]
Saussure explicitly suggested linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, of a science of signs in general, being human codes only one among others. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, he made of linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone":[8] Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling in what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and speak of'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working every where there is a relation to something else.
Derrida sees these differences as elemental oppositions working in all languages, systems of distinct signs, and codes, where terms don't have absolute meanings but instead draw meaning from reciprocal determination with other terms. This structural difference is the first component that Derrida will take into account when articulating the meaning of différance, a mark he felt the need to create and will become a fundamental tool in his lifelong work: deconstruction:[9]
1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.
But structural difference will not be considered without him already destabilizing from the start its static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs, remembering that all structure already refers to the generative movement in the play of differences:[10]
The other main component of différance is deferring, which takes into account the fact that meaning is not only synchrony with all the other terms inside a structure, but also diachrony, with everything that was and will be said, in History, difference as structure and deferring as genesis:[11][12]
2) "the a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation—in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being—are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of différance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance.
This confirms the subject as not present to itself and constituted on becoming space, in temporizing and also, as Saussure said, that "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject":[11]
It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of différance, that the subject is not present, nor above all present to itself before différance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral; and it confirms that, as Saussure said, "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject."
Questioned this myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective") Derrida will start a long deconstruction of all texts where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the actual construction of meaning and values based on the subordination of the movement of "différance":[11]
At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)—to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified."
But, as Derrida also points out, these relations with other terms express not only meaning but also values. The way elemental oppositions are put to work in all texts it is not only a theoretical operation but also a practical option. The first task of deconstruction, starting with philosophy and afterwards revealing it operating in literary texts, juridical texts, etc., would be to overturn these oppositions:[13]
On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.
It is not that the final task of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, because they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot be suspended once and for all. But this does not obviate their need to be analyzed and criticized in all its manifestations, showing the way these oppositions, logical and axiological, are at work in all discourse for it to be able to produce meaning and values.[14]
Illustration [ edit ]
For example, the word "house" derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from "shed", "mansion", "hotel", "building", etc. (Form of Content, which Louis Hjelmslev distinguished from Form of Expression) than how the word "house" may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e. the relationship between signifier and signified) with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or definition.
When can we talk about a "house" or a "mansion" or a "shed"? The same can be said about verbs, in all the world languages: when should we stop saying "walk" and start saying "run"? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying "yellow" and start saying "orange", or stop defining as "black" and start saying "white", or "rich" and "poor", "entrepreneur" and "worker", "civilized" and "primitive", "man" and "animal", "beast" and "sovereign", "christian" and "pagan", or "beautiful" and start saying "ugly", or "bad" and start saying "good", or "truth" and start saying "false", "determined" and "free"? Or "in" and "out", "here" and "there", "now" and "then", "past" and "present" and "future" and "eternal"? Not only are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance. Deferral also comes into play, as the words that occur following "house" or "white" in any expression will revise the meaning of that word, sometimes dramatically so. This is true not only with syntagmatic succession in relation with paradigmatic simultaneity, but also, in a broader sense, between diachronic succession in History related with synchronic simultaneity inside a "system of distinct signs".
Thus, complete meaning is always "differential" and postponed in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries from different periods in time, and such a process would never end.
This is also true with all ontological oppositions and its many declensions, not only in philosophy as in human sciences in general, cultural studies, theory of Law, et cetera. For example: the intelligible and the sensible, the spontaneous and the receptive, autonomy and heteronomy, the empirical and the transcendental, immanent and transcendent, as the interior and exterior, or the founded and the founder, normal and abnormal, phonetic and writing, analysis and synthesis, the literal sense and figurative meaning in language, reason and madness in psychoanalysis, the masculine and feminine in gender theory, man and animal in ecology, the beast and the sovereign in the political field, theory and practice as distinct dominions of thought itself. In all speeches in fact (and by right) we can make clear how they were dramatized, how the cleavages were made during the centuries, each author giving it different centers and establishing different hierarchies between the terms in the opposition.
Paradox [ edit ]
It may seem contradictory to suggest that différance is neither a word nor a concept. The difference itself between words cannot only be another word. If that is the case then différance appeals to ontology, creating an even bigger problem. So différance is either an appeal to an infinite mystery (similar to God in theology) or becomes empty of any and all meaning and is thus rendered superfluous.
The web of language [ edit ]
We reside, according to this philosophy, in a web of language, or at least one of interpretation, that has been laid down by tradition and which shifts each time we hear or read an utterance—even if it is the same utterance. Différance and deconstruction are attempts to understand this web of language, to search, in Derrida's words, for the "other of language".[15] This "other of language" is close to what Anglophone Philosophy calls the Reference of a word. There is a deferment of meaning with each act of re-reading. There is a difference of readings with each re-reading. In Derrida's words, "there is nothing outside the [con]text" of a word's use and its place in the lexicon. Text, in Derrida's parlance, refers to context and includes all about the "real-life" situation of the speech/text (cf. speech act theory).
Temporal delay [ edit ]
For Derrida, the relationship between the Signifier and the Signified is not understood to be exactly like Saussure's. For Derrida, there was a deferral, a continual and indefinite postponement as the Signified can never be achieved. The formation of the linguistic sign is marked by movement, and is not static. The easiest way to understand this is to imagine Saussure's model as a two dimensional plane, where each signified is separated due to the difference in its sound image. (If two sound-images are exactly alike, one could not distinguish between the two.) Each signifier then would be a particular point. Derrida adds a third dimension, time. Now, the act of formation is accounted for. This is not to say that there is no relationship between the two. However, Derrida felt that the old model focused too heavily on the signifier, rather than on utterance and occurrence. The Signifier and the Signified are severed completely and irrevocably.
Example of word introduction [ edit ]
An example of this effect occurred in England during the Renaissance, when oranges began to be imported from the Mediterranean. Yellow and red came to be differentiated from a new colour term, "orange". What was the meaning of these words before 1600? – What is their meaning afterwards? Such effects go on often in the use of language and frequently this effect forms the basis of language/meaning. Such changes of meaning are also often centres of political violence, as is apparent in the differences invested in male/female, master/slave, citizen/foreigner etc. Derrida seeks to modulate and question these "violent hierarchies" through deconstruction.
Perhaps it is a misconception that différance seeks contradictory meanings. It does not necessarily do so. It can, but what it usually describes is the re-experience, the re-arrival of the moment of reading. Roland Barthes remarked that "those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere".[16] This wry comment summarizes the phenomenon of different experience for each iteration.
We are discussing just one text—every text. No distinction is necessarily made between texts in this "basic" level. The difference/deferral can be between one text and itself, or between two texts; this is the crucial distinction between traditional perspectives and deconstruction.
Deconstruction and the history of philosophy [ edit ]
Derrida's neographism (rather than neologism because "neologism" would propose a logos, a metaphysical category; and (more simply) because, when uttered in French, "différance" is indistinguishable from "difference"—it is thus only a graphical modification, having nothing to do with a spoken logos) is, of course, not just an attempt at linguistics or to discuss written texts and how they are read. It is, most importantly, an attempt to escape the history of metaphysics; a history that has always prioritised certain concepts, e.g., those of substance, essence, soul, spirit (idealism), matter (realism), becoming, freedom, sense-experience, language, science etc. All such ideas imply self-presence and totality. Différance, instead, focuses on the play of presence and absence, and, in effecting a concentration of certain thinking, Derrida takes on board the thought of Freud's unconscious (the trace), Heidegger's destruction of ontotheology, Nietzsche's play of forces, and Bataille's notion of sacrifice in contrast to Hegel's Aufheben.
Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.[17]
Yet he does not approach this absence and loss with the nostalgia that marks Heidegger's attempt to uncover some original truths beneath the accretions of a false metaphysics that have accumulated since Socrates. Rather it is with the moods of play and affirmation that Derrida approaches the issue.
However, Derrida himself never claimed to have escaped from the metaphysics with what he has done. To the contrary, he criticises others for claiming to have demolished metaphysics thoroughly.
Negative theology [ edit ]
Derrida's non-concept of différance, resembles, but is not, negative theology, an attempt to present a tacit metaphysics without pointing to any existent essence as the first cause or transcendental signified. Following his presentation of his paper "Différance" in 1968, Derrida was faced with an annoyed participant who said, "It [différance] is the source of everything and one cannot know it: it is the God of negative theology." Derrida's answer was, "It is and it is not."[18]
In contrast to negative theology, which posits something supereminent and yet concealed and ineffable, différance is not quite transcendental, never quite "real", as it is always and already deferred from being made present. As John Caputo writes, "Différance is but a quasi-transcendental anteriority, not a supereminent, transcendental ulteriority."[19] The differences and deferrings of différance, Derrida points out, are not merely ideal, they are not inscribed in the contours of the brain nor do they fall from the sky, the closest approximation would be to consider them as historical, that is, if the word history itself did not mean what it does, the airbrushing speech of the victor/vanquished.
Derrida has shown an interest in negative or apophatic theology, one of his most important works on the topic being his essay "Sauf le nom".[20]
Life and technics [ edit ]
In Of Grammatology, Derrida states that grammatology is not a "science of man" because it is concerned with the question of "the name of man." This leads Derrida into a consideration of the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, and in particular his concepts of "program," "exteriorisation," and "liberation of memory." Derrida writes: "Leroi-Gourhan no longer describes the unity of man and the human adventure thus by the simple possibility of the graphie in general; rather as a stage or an articulation in the history of life—of what I have called différance—as the history of the grammè."[21] Derrida thus explicitly refers the term différance to life, and in particular to life as the history of inscription and retention, whether this is genetic or technological (from writing to "electronic card indexes"). And thus grammatology is not a science of man because it deconstructs any anthropocentrism, in the sense that the inscription in question falls on both sides of the divide human/non-human.
Yet, in the article "Différance", Derrida refers différance not to physis, that is, life, but to "all the others of physis—tekhnè, nomos, thesis, society, freedom, history, mind, etc.—as physis differed and deferred, or as physis differing and deferring."[22] Bernard Stiegler argues in his book, Technics and Time, 1, that this represents a hesitation in Derrida: "Now phusis as life was already différance. There is an indecision, a passage remaining to be thought. At issue is the specificity of the temporality of life in which life is inscription in the nonliving, spacing, temporalisation, differentiation, and deferral by, of and in the nonliving, in the dead."[23] What this suggests to Stiegler is that grammatology—a logic of the grammè—must be supplemented with a history of grammatisation, a history of all the forms and techniques of inscription, from genetics to technics, each stage of which will be found to possess its own logic. Only in this way can différance be thought as the differing and deferral of life (life as the emergence of a difference from non-life, specifically as the deferral of entropy), and as the difference from physis through which the human must inevitably be defined (the human as the inauguration of another memory, neither the memory of genetics nor that of the individual, but rather a memory consisting in "inscription in the nonliving," that is, technical memory).
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
"Speech and Phenomena" and other essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, corrected edition).A talking cat. A giant flan. Truth sprinkles. Sabrina the Teenage Witch was irreverent and absurd, yes, but its feminist ethos and screwball-esque dialogue made it stand out from the average teen show of its day.
Which is why, 20 years on, it still resonates. When I asked friends if the show had an impact on their lives, I received a number of immediate responses – “If heaven is just a black cat offering retorts and advice, I’d be happy,” said one. “Everything in their magical world was grounded in logic,” said another. “Of course the cat can talk – he’s a man serving a prison sentence for trying to take over the world. Of course you have an evil twin – our whole family does. The justifications for magic were as exciting as the magic itself.”
Sabrina’s creator, Nell Scovell, wanted to make the perfect programme for her strange teenage self, “so Sabrina never hung out at the mall or went shopping. She cared about being a good friend, making good choices, and doing well in school. The magic was a metaphor for a young girl learning to control her desires and emotions, as well as an excuse to showcase a 6ft flan.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sabrina and Salem in her bedroom. Photograph: c.Warner Br/Everett / Rex Featur
When the original, male, head writer left for contractual reasons, Scovell soon got signed up. But while the network was “amazing about letting me be weird” (hence the giant flan taking over the school cafeteria), she found herself regularly going into battle.
One of the biggest standoffs was over Sabrina’s mother, who ABC assumed would be dead. “I decided that her mom was off travelling for work and made her an archeologist, which would explain her being out of reach. The network fought me. They said, ‘We don’t think a mother would go off and leave her kid like that.’ ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘She trusts the aunts. Sabrina’s in good hands. Plus, Sabrina’s dad is off working in ‘the other realm’ and you don’t have a problem with it.’ I lost a lot of battles, but I did win that one. I bucked the Disney matricide tradition and made Sabrina’s mother lean in.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The stories were never cookie-cutter’ … Sabrina with her aunt. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock
Her use of the phrase “lean in” makes sense today. Scovell co-wrote Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 bestselling ode to the power of female negotiation. And it was but one job in a broad (to put it mildly) career. The first staff writer at Spy magazine, she got into television via a script she sent on spec to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. This led to writing gigs at Late Night With David Letterman (her Vanity Fair piece about what a hostile environment it was for a woman is a must-read) and the Simpsons before creating Sabrina.
The show premiered to almost 18m viewers and became a venerable staple in ABC’s 90s-era Friday night TGIF lineup. Today, Scovell views her career trajectory as utterly unsurprising. “It makes total sense to me,” she says. “Sabrina was my attempt to create a show that I would’ve loved as that weird young girl who grew up to write for Letterman and Spy and The Simpsons.”
The show lives on through syndication, exposing a new generation of teens to its unique, undeniable charm. When asked to explain the show’s continued appeal to smart, weird, girls and boys, Scovell says: “It was unusual to have a girl as the star, so that was empowering. And the stories weren’t cookie-cutter, either. In one of my favorite episodes, Sabrina wanted to know if [her best friend] Harvey liked her as more than a friend so she put ‘truth sprinkles’ on his bundt cake in home ec class. But the teacher ended up putting them on all the cakes and, for a day, everyone at school told each other what they really think. Sabrina came home and told her aunts that the lesson was that the world would be an awful place if everyone told the truth all the time.”
Scovell laughs. “I bet no TGIF show ever landed on that moral before.” And chances are, it never will again.27 lives saved by cross-border cardiology service BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A cross-border cardiology service has been credited with saving the lives of 27 patients from Co Donegal in its first nine months. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/27-lives-saved-by-crossborder-cardiology-service-35389481.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/article35389480.ece/a1f06/AUTOCROP/h342/PANews%20BT_P-552c37fc-b97c-480b-b50f-371b1d2407f3_I1.jpg
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A cross-border cardiology service has been credited with saving the lives of 27 patients from Co Donegal in its first nine months.
The agreement that enables heart attack victims living in the north west to access a specialist procedure at Altnagelvin hospital in Londonderry started in May last year.
The first of its kind cardiology deal between health authorities on both sides of the border envisages around 50 to 60 patients from Co Donegal access life-saving care in Derry.
The accord covers people living within 90 minutes of Altnagelvin, ensuring they do need to be transported longer distances to other hospitals in the Irish Republic, such as in Galway.
Once patients undergo the heart procedure in Derry they are transferred to Letterkenny or Sligo hospitals.
The agreement was struck by the Western Health & Social Care Trust (WHSCT) in Northern Ireland and the Saolta University Health Care Group in the Republic.
A similar agreement enables patients in Donegal to undergo radiotherapy treatment in Derry.
Donie Cronin from Donegal was one of those patients who received cardiac care in Altnagelvin.
"I am very grateful for this life saving patient service and to all involved in my care," he said.
"Thankfully I am doing really well now".
Stormont Health Minister Michelle O'Neill said: "I would like to congratulate the team at the Western Trust and Saolta for their work in developing this fantastic service.
"This clearly demonstrates the life-saving benefit of all-Ireland approaches to healthcare in meeting patients' needs and improving access to vital services."
Dr Albert McNeill, clinical lead for WHSCT, said: "Receiving this treatment as soon as possible improves patient survival and reduces the long term heart damage caused by heart attacks.
"The clinical service is a good example of how health care organisations and professionals across jurisdictions can work together for the benefit of patients."
Dr Jim Crowley, clinical lead for Saolta, said "The cross-border cardiology service between Saolta and the Western Health and Social Care Trust is working extremely well.
"Patients from County Donegal who suffer a heart attack receive emergency potentially life-saving coronary intervention treatment at Altnagelvin Hospital."Christopher Robinson may have to pick that money off the floor and give it to his ex after cops used his Facebook photos of him posing with cash to bust him for allegedly failing to pay child support.
ABC News reports that the Milwaukee man is charged with three felony counts of failure to support his 3-year-old child, after he allegedly didn't make a single monthly child support payment for three years. He was supposed to pony up $150 a month.
“What we do in these types of cases is we try to find out from other family members whether there is other information we may not be able to know about,” Milwaukee County Chief Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern told ABCNews.com.
Lovern told WDJT his office often uses Facebook to build cases against suspected child support scofflaws.
"It's a great investigative tool for us because it gives us a glimpse into their real lives that our targets may be living," Lovern said.
The Stir's Nicole Fabian-Weber tries to understand what would posses someone to post photos of themselves with money when they are delinquent on child support payments. She comes to the conclusion that it has something to do with the constant need for attention that Facebook engenders and feeds:
It's awfully easy to get caught these days, thanks to Facebook. People want to be seen! They want to be heard! And clearly, that's predominantly what's on their minds. I mean, bailing out on three years of child support, then uploading a photo of cash. That's just dumb. And that, my Friends, is being drunk on Facebook.Tai Wesley said it best, during Melbourne United’s season launch.
“This is by far, the toughest NBL in the history of the NBL.”
It’s a statement that is music to the ears of NBL fans. Never has Australia’s premier basketball competition been so rich in both talent and competition. The Australian Basketball Challenge (ABC) in Brisbane was indicative of this, as every team presented a legitimate case to make the playoffs.
This makes power rankings so hard. With no tangible regular season evidence to go by, these rankings are determined by a number of factors – last season’s performance, offseason additions and subtractions and preseason form, just to name a few.
These power rankings are the opinion of one man. To discuss the rankings, hit Luke up on Twitter at @lukesicari
1. Perth Wildcats
The reigning champions deserve the top spot, before anyone shows they can mow them down.
Perth had an interesting offseason, losing three key pieces from last year’s squad in Jermaine Beal (Sydney), Nate Jawai (Cairns) and Tom Jervis (Brisbane). However, the additions of former D-League standout Jaron Johnson, Iowa State defensive stalwart Jameel McKay and Angus Brandt should help cover the losses.
Let’s not forgot the returning Casey Prather, who has cleaned up his offensive game and old reliable Damian Martin, who is undoubtedly the league’s best defender.
The pieces are there for Trevor Gleeson to mould another championship-winning roster. The Wildcats could be shoo-ins to make the playoffs for an unprecedented 30th straight season.
One question does loom and that’s the injured Matt Knight. A partial shoulder dislocation will keep him sidelined to begin the year, with Lucas Walker serving as an injury replacement. The likes of Jesse Wagstaff and Shawn Redhage will need to step up in Knight’s absence.
2. Melbourne United
Melbourne’s roster oozes talent and that stands as the main reason they enter the season as the second ranked side.
United ended their last season abruptly in the semi-finals, which speaks of the potential they have for this season, and that’s before we take the offseason talent acquisitions into account. Anything less than a grand final berth would be graded a disappointment.
The backcourt pairing of Cedric Jackson and Chris Goulding is unlike one we’ve ever seen before. A pair of Olympians will suit up in United colours, with David Andersen returning home and David Barlow finally getting healthy. Imports Devin Williams and Ramone Moore will provide energy, as well the newly signed Wesley.
This is before we even mention Todd Blanchfield and Majok Majok.
The only concern for Melbourne entering the season is whether or not they have a lockdown defender on the perimeter. Williams and Majok should provide some muscle inside, but Goulding and Jackson have never been known for their defensive expertise.
While the defensive shortcomings may serve as a weakness, it isn’t significant enough to drop United any lower.
3. Illawarra Hawks
The preseason champions, Illawarra has reloaded after the departures of Kevin Lisch (Sydney) and Kirk Penney (New Zealand), helping them maintain a top-three ranking.
Any team that has dominant big A.J. Ogilvy on their roster is going to be a force to be reckoned with but it’s what the Hawks did in the offseason that elevates them in these rankings. While many originally thought the losses of Lisch and Penny would set them back, Illawarra took a walk down memory lane and dipped into future waters to help them hold steady.
Former league MVP Rotnei Clarke returns after a long stint in Europe and will team up with Marvelle Harris, an electric scorer out of Fresno State. Both players should fit into coach Rob Beveridge’s uptempo offence nicely and they’ll help the Hawks withstand the losses of Lisch and |
Fortunately, she was still very little and was used to being moved around, and she slept like a rock as well, so the noise of the show didn’t disturb her at all. At the show, Doc was in his usual spot, interacting with the fans and having a good time.
My wife and I walked up with our daughter. Doc saw us, turned away for a second, then did a double-take with an even bigger grin on his face than I thought was possible. He asked me, “Well! What do we have here?” I told him that this was our new daughter, and he was just beaming. Now, before I go further, I should point out that, no matter how many times I was around Doc, I still gushed a little and got a little nervous. Not sure why; that’s just how I was. Perhaps it never truly sunk in that I was friends with a former world champion?
The reason I mention that is because I immediately asked him if it would be okay if we could take a picture of him holding our daughter. Before I could even finish, he extended both hands out as far as he could to hold her. He cradled her in his arms, absolutely beaming as he gave us a thumb’s up for the picture. It is my all-time favorite picture, and something I will forever cherish.
Less than six months after that picture was taken, Doc announced that he was retiring from wrestling. Not because he wanted to; because his throat cancer had come back more aggressive than ever. For those that don’t know, Doc was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2004, causing severe damage to his throat and forcing him to speak using a stoma (a hole in the throat that you have to plug with your finger in order to communicate). He had defeated the cancer and, in late 2009, was just a few months away from being cancer-free for five years when it came back. It was heartbreaking to see. Here was my idol being forced to retire, not through injury or simply because he was tired of wrestling and wanted to move on.
I was there live for Doc’s last match in the United States, wrestling Booker T trainee Franco D’Angelo in a match for the ACW (Asylum Championship Wrestling) Heavyweight Championship, ACW being one of the local promotions here in Colorado. All of the proceeds from the show went to helping Doc with his medical bills that he had incurred thanks to being back on chemotherapy, and former ECW/WWE diva Dawn Marie, who had been trying to raise money for Doc to get a hands-free communication device for the past several months, was flown in for no money to finally meet him in person, as a way to say thank you. Video messages from wrestling legends and friends like Demolition and Jerry Lawler were sent into the show, wishing Doc to get well soon and share some funny stories. Doc came out for his match, and I hugged him as he made his way around the ring to engage the fans. A few minutes later the match started, and thanks to a schoolboy, Doc defeated D’Angelo to win the title and celebrate with the rest of the locker room, winning the final championship of his career. He thanked the crowd and told us that he was bound and determined to beat cancer one more time. Knowing how strong he was, whether it was possible or not, everyone believed he could do it, including himself.
That night would be the last time I ever got to see him.
Just a couple months later, Doc posted on his MySpace page that the chemotherapy was tough, but he felt good and was getting stronger by the day. While this no doubt gave me and many others hope, the cancer was just too strong. A week or so later, I received a text message from a friend of mine letting me know that Doc had just passed away. I was in total shock. Nothing felt real to me that day. I had to go on the internet and try to find out what happened. I just hoped and hoped that somehow, the information was wrong or at the very least premature, and that he was still alive. Unfortunately, it was all true, and the kindest man I have ever met had been taken away from me and the rest of the world.
I had to miss the memorial service due to work, despite the fact that I was just a few blocks down the street. For months after his death and the memorial, I had dreams that it had in fact all been a dream and that Doc was still alive. In the dreams, he was the same jovial guy he ever was, thanking everyone for their support and being glad he beat cancer one more time. I don’t recall how long these dreams went on, but it felt like an eternity. One day, while trading tweets with Tommy Dreamer (no, I don’t know him, although I wish I did; he’s just better about replying to fans than some wrestlers on Twitter), he put my mind at ease, telling me stories of how Doc had to miss the birth of his son due to work, and that if there was an afterlife, Doc understood me missing the service and wasn’t upset or disappointed. To this day, I still regret not being able to go, but those few words from Tommy really helped put my mind at ease.
Earlier this year, to show how much he meant to me, I had Doc’s name and birth/death years tattooed on my shoulder, in the colors of his wrestling gear. It’s in a place where I can always see it and it helps me remember all of the good moments I got to share with Doc during the end of his life. I even received a message from his son Windham, thanking me for honoring his dad’s memory with my tattoo. That meant a lot to me. Windham, if you are reading this, I loved your father very much, and I am so proud that I got to know him and become his friend, even if only for a little while. He was a great, great man, and I miss him every day.
I will never claim to be the best friend Doc ever had or knew the most about him; I will, however, claim that he was a great man, someone I admired and respected greatly, and someone who I was proud to call my friend. I always wanted to get to know him better, and even planned on taking him out to dinner a few times (I never got to). But I am very proud of the little bit of time I did get to spend with him. I’m proud that I have a signed copy of his autobiography on my shelf, next to a signed picture of him with Terry Gordy. I’m proud he got to meet my only child in his lifetime, as well as hold her in his arms. I’m proud I got to be his friend and I will cherish every last memory I have of him for as long as I live.
As I wrap this up while trying to fight back tears, I will leave it at this: Doc, you were taken from us far too soon, and not a day goes by where I don’t think about and cherish our friendship. I love you.
“Dr. Death” Steve Williams
May 14th, 1960-December 29th, 2009
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Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week.
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Eric G. Eric is the owner and editor-in-chief of the Camel Clutch Blog. Eric has worked in the pro wrestling industry since 1995 as a ring announcer in ECW and a commentator/host on television, PPV, and home video. Eric also hosted Pro Wrestling Radio on terrestrial radio from 1998-2009. Check out some of Eric's work on his IMDB bio and Wikipedia. Eric has an MBA from Temple University's Fox School of Business. More Posts - Website Follow Me:As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton advocated early on for training and equipping moderate Syrian rebels to help fight Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. At that time, near the end of summer 2012, the president disagreed with her, only to authorize the program two years later after she had left office.
Clinton had harsh words Sunday for what it's done so far, after the top U.S. commander in the Middle East admitted last week that only four or five moderate Syrian fighters the U.S. trained still remain on the battlefield.
"Where we are today is not where we were. And where we are today is that we have a failed program. You heard the testimony. Five people trained for...$500 million, half a billion dollars," she told moderator John Dickerson on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday.
Pentagon: U.S. plan to train Syrian opposition forces not working
"A lot of what I worried about has happened. There are now big ungoverned territories within Syria that are dominated by terrorist groups, [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] being the best known, but not the only one. You have Iran and Russia increasingly moving into support Assad and his constant bombardment against his own people."
And, she added, "You have these millions of refugees," referring to the further deterioration of the situation in Syria since she left office.
Clinton wrote extensively about her advocacy for a train-and-equip program in her 2014 memoir, "Hard Choices." "There are real risks to such an approach," she said in the book, citing the Afghan rebels the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan armed during the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s who later formed al Qaeda.
"But if rebels could be vetted and trained effectively, it would be helpful in a number of ways. First, even a relatively small group might be able to give a big psychological boost to the opposition and convince Assad's backers to consider a political solution," she wrote.
Clinton argued that the U.S. was sacrificing the chance to bring order to the flow of weapons coming to Syria from various Arab states. Those weapons often went to competing armed groups or found their way into the hands of extremists.
The key, she said, was "vetting the rebel fighters to ensure we first weeded out the extremists."
Flash Points: What can the U.S. do in Syria?
Clinton and David Petraeus, then the head of the CIA, worked on a more detailed plan and Petraeus presented it to the president. Clinton wrote that Mr. Obama was worried that arming the rebels would not drive Assad from power, and that there could be too many unintended consequences - he worried about creating another Afghanistan.
"These were very reasonable concerns, but Petraeus and I argued that there was a big difference between Qatar and Saudi Arabia dumping weapons into the country and the United States responsibly training and equipping a nonextremist rebel force," Clinton wrote. "[G]etting control of that mess was a big part of our plan's rationale."
Clinton and Petraeus did not intend for such a force to be trained to overcome the regime. "Rather, the idea was to give us a partner on the ground we could work with that could do enough to convince Assad and his backers that a military victory was impossible," Clinton wrote.
It was not a perfect plan, she conceded, but it was, in her words, the "least bad option among many even worse alternatives."
Ultimately, the president ruled against her and Petraeus, because he feared getting stuck in another sectarian war. He also wanted more time to evaluate the Syrian opposition. Clinton respected his decision and backed down, writing, "No one likes to lose a debate, including me. But this was the President's call."
Syria's civil war worsened after she left the administration, though, which left Clinton with the feeling that she and Petraeus had been right.
"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad--there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle--the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled," Clinton told The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg in August 2014.
Obama explains why White House didn't arm moderate Syrian opposition
Ultimately, Mr. Obama signed off on U.S. arming and training of Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. But when White House spokesman Joshua Earnest was asked about the program's failures last week, his answers made it sound as if the president never had much faith in the program.
"The president has long been skeptical of relying solely on this strategy. That's why he isn't, and our country isn't relying solely on that specific train-and-equip operation to lead our efforts inside of Syria," Earnest said. "We knew at the beginning and the President knew when he uttered those words how difficult of a challenge standing up this proposal and implementing this proposal would be."
Earnest said he didn't think Mr. Obama believed all 15,000 Syrian opposition fighters could be trained and equipped within the space of a year.
Clinton, however, remains convinced that the program could still work.
"I wouldn't give up on train and equip, but I sure would push the Pentagon to take a hard look at why what has been done has been such a failure and what more we can do to support Kurdish fighters who are on the front line," she told Dickerson Sunday.About
PROPHETS OF GODS 2.0
In 2005, an ABC-TV affiliate in Las Vegas broadcast images of a UFO summoned by a self-styled “prophet” who predicts many more will be seen throughout the area next week.
Prophet Yahweh aka Ramon Watkins
Ramon Watkins, also known as “Prophet Yahweh” agreed to meet with a reporter and camera crew of KTNV at a location of their choice and time.
What they witnessed, and captured on camera, stunned the reporter and crew.
Watkins claims to have seen some 1,500 UFOs over the last 25 years and has learned to summon them by reading the Old Testament.
In 2006, we, Abdullah Hashem and Joseph McGowen, two Independent filmmakers from Mooresville, Indiana decided to meet up with Prophet Yahweh and follow him on his 50 State tour of UFO summoning, in order to see if his summoning abilities were real and if he is indeed in contact with beings from another planet.
Screen Shot of Prophet Yahweh's Summoning in Indianapolis from Film
Little did we know, we were about to walk into the middle of a war between two Prophets battling for the title of the Prophet of the UFOS.
We made a trial version of the film and never had the ability to complete the true Full version. We need your help now in helping us make this full feature film shedding light on the mystery behind the UFO summoner Prophet Yahweh, his followers and all those who are affected by his claims.
Many TV shows and programs were interested in this film and we were featured on FOX59, UPN's "A Current Affair" and we were contacted by Dr. Phil and other shows.
Director Abdullah Hashem on FOX59
If we complete this film, we are sure this will make headlines once again and at the very least it will be a very touching, entertaining, informative, documentary to witness.Image copyright john schade
Arctic ground squirrels could play a greater role in climate change than was previously thought.
Scientists have found that the animals are hastening the release of greenhouse gases from the permafrost - a vast, frozen store of carbon.
The researchers say it suggests the impact of wildlife on this area has been underplayed.
The findings are being presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
Dr Sue Natali, from Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, US, said: "We know wildlife impacts vegetation, and we know vegetation impacts thaw and soil carbon.
"It certainly has a bigger impact than we've considered and it's something we will be considering more and more going into the future."
The Arctic permafrost, where deep layers of soil remain frozen all year round, covers nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere and contains a great deal of carbon.
Dr Natali explained: "Carbon has been accumulating in permafrost for tens of thousands of years. The temperature is very cold, the soils are saturated, so that when plants and animals die, rather than decompose, the carbon has been slowly, slowly building up.
"Right now the carbon storage is about 1,500 petagrams (1,500 billion tonnes). To put that in perspective, that's about twice as much as is contained in the atmosphere."
The fear is that as the planet warms, the permafrost will thaw, releasing even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and causing temperatures to rise further still.
However, Dr Natali said that until now there had been little research into the effect that animals could have on this system.
Image copyright Thinkstock
To investigate, Dr Natali and Nigel Golden, from the University of Wisconsin, looked at ground squirrels: small, fluffy rodents that are found across the Arctic.
As part of The Polaris Project, they travelled to Siberia to study the squirrels' underground burrows.
Mr Golden said: "They are soil engineers. They break down the soil when they are digging their burrows, they mix the top layer with the bottom layer, they are bringing oxygen to the soil and they are fertilizing the soil with their urine and their faeces."
The team found that this activity meant that their burrows were warmer than the surrounding ground.
Mr Golden said: "We saw an increase in soil temperature in the soils where the arctic ground squirrels were occupying.
"This is a major component. As that permafrost begins to warm, now microbes can have access to these previously frozen carbons that were in the soil.
"And because they mix the soil layers, they are being exposed to warmer temperatures."
Image copyright John wood
The team also found that the nitrogen that squirrels were adding to the ground through their waste was having an impact.
While this fertilizer can counteract greenhouse gas loss by causing plants to grow (which then soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), it can also feed microbes in the soil, accelerating the amount of carbon dioxide and methane - both greenhouse gases - that are being released.
Dr Natali said: "If ground squirrels are adding nitrogen to an area - and that area doesn't have plants because they dug them up - this may result in increased loss of carbon from the system."
She concluded that squirrels were playing "a far more important role in this permafrost carbon cycle than we thought".
The team now wants to return to the area to quantify how much carbon is being unlocked by the squirrels - and to assess how other wildlife is affecting the area.
The researchers also want to assess how the thawing permafrost will impact on the squirrel populations themselves.
Follow Rebecca on TwitterTop technology executives apparently have decided it’s fair game — and smart business strategy — to ridicule DIRECTV Now in public
AT&T’s new live streaming service has been riddled with technical errors since its launch on November 30. Countless DIRECTV Now subscribers have begged the service for solutions to the snafus, and asked for refunds if none can be found. (Thus far, few solutions and no refunds.).
Amazon: Best-Selling HDTV Indoor Antenna: $29.99.
The technical problems triggered a slew of stories by the nation’s tech press and that ultimately led to the executives pulling a few poisoned arrows out of their quiver and taking aim.
First, it was Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch who has used his Twitter account to urge dissatisfied DIRECTV Now customers to switch to his live streaming service. Lynch mocked DIRECTV Now’s inability to deliver a reliable and smooth stream, although Sling TV has had its own technical problems since its launch two years.
Amazon: Top 100 TVs!
And today, T-Mobile CEO John Legere said his company was giving a free year of Hulu to customers who recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile to take advantage of a T-Mobile promotion that included a free year of DIRECTV Now.
Legere apologized for the DIRECTV Now promotion, saying the service doesn’t work.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere.
“It’s turns out DIRECTV Now is barely watchable, but we’ve got our customers’ backs,” Legere says in a T-Mobile press release. “So, every former AT&T customer who took us up on our offer now gets a free year of Hulu on us – and they get to enjoy it on a faster, more advanced network with unlimited data! Even I can’t believe AT&T spent $67 billion on DIRECTV and still couldn’t roll out a streaming service that worked!”
On Twitter today, Legere went a step further by taunting AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson who last week said DIRECTV Now has been “very strong” since its launch.
Amazon’s Fire TV with 4K: $89.
“Are you as excited as I am to see what they say about failing # DirectTVNow as I am?!,” Legere tweeted in reference to AT&T’s scheduled conference call today with analysts to discuss the company’s fourth quarter report.
AT&T has yet to respond to Legere’s remarks, but company executives will likely to address it later today in the conference call.
— Phillip Swann
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FacebookChad Johnson wants to take Antonio Brown in a game of one-on-one.
No, not in basketball, but in football, as Johnson -- formerly an All-Pro receiver for the Bengals -- wants to guard Brown, the NFL's best wide receiver. Johnson recently made his intentions known on Twitter, to which Brown accepted Johnson's challenge.
@AntonioBrown Waiting on you to hit the field so I can lock yo a** up too — Chad Johnson (@ochocinco) March 31, 2017
Let's do it Sunday https://t.co/8pAGqw0DK3 — Antonio Brown (@AntonioBrown) March 31, 2017
Love the Pittsburgh Steelers? Then what are you waiting for? Stay in the loop and sign up for our FREE Steelers newsletter!
Johnson, who has been out of football since Miami released him before the start of the 2012 season, has apparently been working on his coverage skills, as former Steelers safety Shamarko Thomas recently recorded Johnson in action (warning: the video contains possible offensive language).
A six time Pro Bowler, Johnson caught 751 passes for 10,783 yards and 66 touchdowns during his decade in Cincinnati. His final year with the Bengals was Brown's first season in Pittsburgh, as No.84 has replaced Johnson as the AFC North's dominant receiver, as he leads the NFL in receptions, yards and touchdowns since the start of the 2013 season.
Based on Brown's social media formats, it doesn't appear that the two receivers battled it out on Sunday, as Johnson's challenge to Pittsburgh's receiver has yet to come to fruition.Free Concurrency with GNU Parallel Parallelizing code without writing any
I am currently working on my thesis, which involves running simulations over and over again with varying parameters. GNU Parallel allows me to run these simulations concurrently with all possible combinations of parameters—without changing my codebase.
My simulation is implemented in Python. It takes some parameters as input, runs for some time, and finally prints the result as CSV to screen. Pretty simple.
Once I had set up the simulation and got it performing decently, I proceeded to the next step: running it with many different combinations of parameters in order to analyze and compare the results.
I was facing two problems:
How could I run the simulation for all possible combinations of parameters? A single simulation takes about 1 minute to run. With a handful of arguments, each having many possible values, the number of parameter combinations explode, known as the curse of dimensionality. How can I take full advantage of the four cores on my computer—let alone the twenty-four cores at university—in order to reduce the total execution time to a fraction?
Going Down the Rabbit Hole
Addressing the first problem, i.e. calculating the combinations of all parameters, is straightforward. For n parameters I simply need n nested for-loops:
import simulation for day in range ( 1, 31 ): for algo in [ 'greedy', 'perfect','smart' ]: for factor in [ 1, 5, 10 ]: print ( simulation. run ( day, algo, factor ))
That was easy. Granted, if I need to change the parameters I’d need to edit this file. I can’t do it on a case-by-case basis.
Not so fast, fella! What’s up with that print? How will I be able to distinguish the different runs? Turns out I can no longer simply print the result of each simulation to standard output as this would mingle all results. And with no output I can no longer redirect the result to a file as I was doing for a single simulation:
$ python simulation.py > result.csv
I now need to take care of saving each simulation’s result to a file in the Python script. Easy enough:
import simulation for day in range ( 1, 31 ): for algo in [ 'greedy', 'perfect','smart' ]: for factor in [ 1, 5, 10 ]: filename = 'output/{}-{}-{}.csv'. format ( day, algo, factor ) with open ( filename, 'w' ) as f : f. write ( simulation. run ( day, algo, factor ))
Noisy, but so what… Next up: reduce execution time by running simulations in parallel.
I’ve never worked with threads in Python. All I know is that Python—more precisely the CPython implementation—features a global interpreter lock, short GIL. The GIL allows exactly one native thread to execute at a time. In other words, because my problem is CPU bound, I don’t achieve any parallelization. (Note that, if your application is IO bound, threads can still give you a big performance boost since one thread can run while another thread is doing IO.)
There are definitely ways around the GIL, such as forking, using a different Python implementation, and many more according to the Python Wiki entry Parallel Processing and Multiprocessing in Python. But frankly, the options all sound like overkill, not to mention overwhelming. There must be an easier way to simply use all my CPU cores.
Introducing GNU Parallel
In short, GNU Parallel is a command line tool that allows you to run shell scripts in parallel, using all available CPU cores. It has many features, such as
reading input from stdin,
distributing jobs to remote machines over SSH, and
options to control the number of cores used and the CPU usage.
Here’s a simple example taking input from stdin. We’ll use seq 5 to generate the sequence of numbers from 1 to 5, each number on its own line, and pipe that to parallel :
$ seq 5 | parallel echo
parallel will execute echo for each input line, passing the line as argument to echo. It run as many processes simultaneously as there are number of cores. The output looks as follows. Note that, due to the parallel execution, the order may be different.
1 2 3 4 5
An alternative way of passing data to parallel is through the use of input sources. The following example has the equivalent outcome as the one above:
$ parallel echo ::: $(seq 5)
Now the really cool part is that you can pass arbitrarily many input sources and parallel will execute the command once for each item of the Cartesian product of the input sources:
$ parallel echo ::: $(seq 5) ::: foo bar
This will print all combinations of the numbers 1 to 5 and the words foo and bar to screen.
1 foo 1 bar 2 foo 2 bar 3 foo 3 bar 4 foo 4 bar 5 foo 5 bar
If you want to run a snippet that is a bit more involved, pass it as a string and access the parameters individually:
$ parallel 'xyz -n{1} --word={2} > {2}-{1}.txt' ::: $(seq 10) ::: foo bar
As you can see, GNU Parallel addresses exactly the two problems I was facing: the combination of all parameters and the parallel execution. Let’s see how we can use parallel with the Python script above.
Running the Simulations with GNU Parallel
Remember how I hard coded the different parameters and combined them in the nested for-loops? Instead of doing that, we’ll have the arguments passed through the command line. All we have to do is adapt our Python script to read these input arguments. Thankfully, Python has the superb argparse module that makes it simple to build a nice command line interface.
Since we’ll be running just one simulation per script invocation, we can still simply print the results to stdout and use redirection to save it to a file.
With these two things in mind, this is how the script looks like:
import argparse import simulation parser = argparse. ArgumentParser ( description = 'Run the simulation.' ) parser. add_argument ( 'DAY', type = int, help = 'The day number.' ) parser. add_argument ( 'ALGO', type = str, help = 'Which algorithm to use.' ) parser. add_argument ( 'FACTOR', type = int, help = 'Effect multiplication factor.' ) args = parser. parse_args () print ( simulation. run ( args. DAY, args. ALGO, args. FACTOR ))
As you can see, the simulation script now has a simple interface, adhering to the UNIX philosophy Do One Thing and Do It Well. It runs one simulation for the specified parameters and outputs the results to stdout, allowing you to redirect it to a file, pipe it to another program, or simply look at it.
Now we’re ready to invoke the script with parallel and all the different parameters:
$ parallel 'python simulation.py {1} {2} {3} > output/{1}-{2}-{3}.csv' ::: \ > $(seq 30) ::: \ > greedy perfect smart ::: \ > 1 5 10
This will run the snippet 30 × 3 × 3 = 270 times with varying arguments on all CPU cores.
Bonus: Keeping Track of Progress
When running long tasks or a big number of tasks, it’s nice to know the progress of the parallel invocation. Luckily, parallel accepts the --bar flag, which gives you a nice-looking progress bar, showing you the percentage of processed jobs and some further details such as the number of processed and outstanding jobs.
Conclusion
By making sure that our script has a simple, yet functional interface and by printing to standard output, we were able to run it with GNU Parallel, achieving the desired goals of running the simulation with all possible combinations of parameters and making use of all CPU cores.
I’ve only scratched the surface of GNU Parallel’s possibilities. I hope this inspires you to include it in your daily workflow or when the occasional need for some quick and dirty concurrency arises. I encourage you to check out the excellent GNU Parallel tutorial, featuring dozens of examples. As it says on that tutorial:Back in October, John Bain, popularly known as TotalBiscuit, announced that he had terminal cancer, stating that "Average life expectancy is 2-3 years, though there are outliers that live much longer.” A couple of days ago, TotalBiscuit expressed some frustration about the criticisms of his work in places like Reddit. Despite the criticism impacting his mental health, he found himself unable to stay away from it. In order to maintain his sanity and mental health, TotalBiscuit announced today that he will be moving away from social media.
"Well, you’ve heard this many times before, but maybe this will actually be the time this happens. I’m done with social media. I’ve had it. It’s enough.
"Look, let’s be real here about the reality of what could happen over the next few years. In a few years, I could very well be dead—two to three [years to live] average is what I’m given for this particular form of this disease. I intend to outlive that by a significant margin, but if it ends up being the last few years of my life, I want to spend them not being fucking miserable. And if that involves disconnecting from everybody, so be it.
"My family is gonna come first, my fucking mental health is gonna come first. The expectation that everyone who ever made it on the Internet’s gotta be constantly connected to their fans all the time 24 hours a day 24/7 is insane. It’s unreasonable. Nobody can fucking handle it. Nobody. [sighs] God. You have no idea how many of my friends are in therapy just because of this job." — TotalBiscuitIn the lead-up to and during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, we’ll be profiling some of the activists and politicians invited to speak at the event. Find more of our Meet the Speakers series here.
The Republican National Convention released a partial list today of the politicians, activists, C-list celebrities and Donald Trump family members who will be speaking at next week’s convention. What the speakers’ list lacks in establishment GOP leaders it makes up for in fringe activists. One name especially stands out: Sheriff David Clarke, the Milwaukee law enforcement officer who has made a name for himself hurling anti-Obama vitriol on Fox News and elsewhere while quietly cozying up to anti-government extremist groups.
Clarke, who is African American, has built a conservative following by enthusiastically bashing President Obama, his Justice Department, Hillary Clinton and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Clarke has called the Black Lives Matter movement “black slime” that “needs to be eradicated from the American society and the American culture,” “garbage” and a “subversive movement” that seeks to overthrow the government, and said that the movement is driven by “an ideology of victimhood with a list of grievances that do not exist.” He has dismissed concerns about police brutality by saying that “black criminal abuse, black criminal brutality” is “the real brutality going on in the United States.” The real problem in “the American ghetto,” he has said, is “modern liberalism.”
Clarke said that Michael Brown, the black teenager shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was a “co-conspirator in his own demise” because he “chose thug life.” After Sandra Bland, a black woman who had been thrown to the ground during a traffic stop, died in police custody, Clarke went on Fox News to chastise her. He said that he would have used even more force against a group of black teenagers who were thrown to the ground by police outside a public swimming pool in Ohio, telling people who saw a racial component in the action to “shut up already.”
Clarke has been colorful in his condemnation of President Obama and Hillary Clinton for sympathizing with the Black Lives Matter movement, calling them “straight-up cop haters.” He called Obama a “heartless, soulless bastard” for speaking up about “goons” killed by police and said that the Obama administration’s attempts to address racial disparities in policing were a plot to “emasculate the police” in order to impose dictatorial control.” He accused the president of worsening racial divides in the country by pitting “whites against blacks” and “Hispanics against Americans.”
The sheriff is also happy to throw red meat to his conservative audience on a number of other topics. After the Supreme Court struck down state marriage equality bans, Clarke called for a “revolution” to “get this country back,” complete with “ pitchforks and torches,” urging his audience to launch a standoff against the federal government the next time a bakery or the like is fined for refusing business to a same-sex couple.
When Trump caused a national uproar when he attacked a judge because of his Mexican-American heritage, Clarke took to his radio show to defend the candidate.
Clarke first became a conservative hero when, in 2013, he aired radio ads in his county urging citizens not to rely on calling 911 but instead to learn to protect themselves against crime. Speaking at the National Rifle Association’s convention last year, he proposed adding a semi-automatic rifle to the Great Seal of the United States. Appearing on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ radio program, Clarke warned that a renewal of the federal assault weapons ban would lead to gun confiscations that would spark “the second coming of the American Revolution, the likes of which would make the first revolution pale by comparison.”
While Clarke has no patience for African Americans who have deadly run-ins with the police, he has repeatedly associated himself with anti-government militia groups who have staged armed standoffs with federal government agents or who threaten to defy federal law. Earlier this year, when a group of armed activists took over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, Clarke backed their cause, saying that the country had reached a “pitchforks and torches moment” that couldn’t be solved by an election.
In 2013, after he aired his ads discouraging citizens from relying on 911, Clarke accepted the “ Constitutional Sheriff of the Year” award from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an anti-government group that promotes the idea that county sheriffs are the highest law enforcement officers in the country and thus have the power to defy federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional. In his acceptance speech, Clarke declared that “government” was the “common enemy” of the “patriots” in the room. In a radio interview that year, he said that “on an everyday basis, to me, federal government is a bigger threat” than terrorism.
Just this year, Clarke spoke at a fundraising event for the New York chapter of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government group aligned with the Constitutional Sheriffs that urges law enforcement officers and military personnel to defy laws they believe are unconstitutional and encourages its members to form militias ready to defy an out-of-control federal government. At that event, Clarke called Black Lives Matter a “hate group” and vowed to do “everything I can” to get Trump elected president.Pretty rich for a guy like Uncle Joe Biden to come out and say that Donald Trump’s locker room talk about groping women amounts to “sexual assault.”
“The words are demeaning. Such behavior is an abuse of power. It’s not lewd. It’s sexual assault,” Biden said in a tweet Saturday afternoon.
Well if words about groping amount to sexual assault, then what does a history of actually touching women who clearly don’t want to be touched amount to?
Here’s a pictorial history of Joe Biden aka Sir Gropes-a-Lot …
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s wife, Stephanie
Reporter Amie Parnes
This Biker Chick From Ohio, Prior to Being Pummeled by the Sons of Anarchy
This Clearly Mortified Child
This Other Clearly Mortified Child – Senator Chris Coons’ Daughter
An Usher at the |
“I think what’s important here is to know who Raheel Siddiqui really was,” said the family’s attorney, Shiraz Kahn. “He was an intelligent and proud young American who wanted to serve his country. He was ambitious, dedicated, loyal and had a zest for life.”
At some point after his suicide threat, but before he is taken to the base’s Mental Health Unit the day after the threat, Siddiqui is brought into a “personal interview” with someone on the base. The records aren’t clear whether it’s an officer or enlisted man. Prior to the session, the interviewer is briefed on Siddiqui’s contention that he’d been hit. But he is never asked any specific question about it.
More than that, the person doesn’t report it, or submit a recruit incident report on the suicide threat.
Siddiqui is brought before the Recruit Liaison Service — an office where recruits are briefed on “the consequences of their words when they speak to the Mental Health Unit." Typically a drill instructor would remain in another room, the one with Siddiqui stands 10 feet away as he speaks.
Again, Siddiqui recants, saying he thought it was the only way to quit; saying he never had any mental health problems before, he was just making it up. He had done something “stupid,” he says, and he is now “motivated to return to training.” Sent on to the Mental Health Unit, he is cleared as being at “a low risk for harm” and recommended to be returned to training. But instructors do not mention nor is it noted on medical evaluation forms submitted to the unit that he had not only threatened suicide, he had articulated a plan for it.
“Recruits being seen at Mental Health Unit are under stress and may have mental health issues. It is therefore logical to conclude that their statements may be inaccurate or unreliable,” the report on the investigation into Siddiqui’s death said. “Had (the) Mental Health Unit known (about the plan) he would have been separated from the Marine Corps with a diagnosis of suicidal ideation.”
There are even supposed to be programs for recruits to receive "formal mentorship" and other attention to address problems they may have in adjusting and adapting to the training environment, said Marines spokesman Maj.Clark Carpenter. But the investigation left it unclear whether those programs were even in place.
When Siddiqui returns to his platoon, subordinate drill instructors are told “to ease” Siddiqui back into training, though none of them is told he had threatened suicide.
From there, the investigative record goes dark for a few days regarding Siddiqui — he would have gone through learning close-order drills and bayonet techniques, begun martial arts training, been pushed through sprints and cross-country runs. That may sound peaceful enough, but it’s not. From the beginning, with long hours and extreme physical requirements, basic training can drive people batty.
“Due to the inherently chaotic and stressful conditions occurring in the process of recruit training, particularly during the first phase of training, recruits often cannot recall specific dates or times of events they have witnessed,” the investigation said. Shams, in his experience, remembers an Alabama recruit suddenly blurting out a refusal to go on.
Coincidentally, however, on Thursday, March 17, someone associated with the investigation into the 2015 allegations involving the recruit ordered into a dryer, contacts the investigating officer on that case recommending he interview more witnesses. The drill sergeant involved had been allowed to keep working — and taken over Platoon 3042 — because the truth of those earlier complaints had been doubted. Now, suddenly, there was an e-mail from someone in that earlier platoon allegedly “substantiating the most serious allegations.”
And something else: Although it wouldn’t be made official and announced until month’s end, Cucinotta this same day reportedly decides to relieve Lt. Col. Joshua Kissoon, the commander of the 3rd Battalion because of an inspector general’s report, never released publicly, that apparently led to a loss of trust in his ability to command. Kisson is the one who assigned the drill sergeant to the platoon, despite the earlier allegations.
The next day was Friday, March 18.
A final confrontation
Throughout the aftermath of Siddiqui’s death, the question of whether his religion played some role has been prominent. It is also unanswered. If the investigatory reports are true, Muslims recruits may have been targeted on at least two occasions — Siddiqui’s and the one involving the Marine put in the dryer, who was allegedly interrogated as to whether “he was part of 9/11” and “who he was working for.”
On the other hand, the investigation also concluded that the abuse in the platoon was widespread — running recruits and subordinate drill instructors to the breaking point, with recruits being punched and assaulted in the shower and even ordered to choke themselves with their own dog tag chains — regardless of religion.
According to the report, the events of March 18, the day Siddiqui died, according to the report, appear to have nothing to do with his faith.
It began early, in the middle of the night, with Siddiqui asking another recruit to talk — and being shushed by his exhausted rackmate.
Then, at 4:15 a.m., as the platoon was lined up to leave for breakfast, Siddiqui, ordered along with the others to call out before going, refuses. His drill leader demands he sound off, and Siddiqui points to his neck and hands him a note saying he’s lost his voice, his throat is swollen, and he can’t eat or drink without pain. He says he also coughed blood.
“This recruit has to go to medical,” the note says.
The drill instructor says they’ll deal with it after chow. But he still hasn’t gotten Siddiqui to talk, to sound off, or to react as required. And sounding off is part of the training, the discipline required to become a Marine. At chow, the drill instructor asks Siddiqui for help distributing cups, but Siddiqui ignores him.
Sometime after 5:10 a.m., they’re back at the barracks. Siddiqui is ordered to report to the front of the squad bay, purportedly to fill out his medical forms. But he still isn’t talking, despite the instructor’s demands.
It’s become a battle of wills.
There's a protocol for dealing with this, says Germano: If a recruit is complaining of a medical condition, you get him to health services. And if they find he's malingering and still won't talk, you report him, you call the MPs if necessary and have him put in the brig.
But Siddiqui is ordered to run “get-backs” — dashing across the length of the squad bay and back, over and over, as hard as he can. The instructor, the investigators found, is yelling, and appears irritated, according to the report, by Siddiqui’s refusal to speak. Across the squad bay is all shouting and confusion, with the instructors barking orders as training continues and the other recruits responding, not allowed to look at what is happening with Siddiqui.
At an impasse with Siddiqui, the instructor knows he has to demonstrate his authority and obtain a response or discipline will be undermined. “Given the role of the drill instructor to lead recruits to surpass their own perceived limitations and weaknesses, (his) conduct at that point in time was not unreasonable,” concluded the report.
But rather than separating him from the group or taking other action, he just orders Siddiqui to keep running. At some point, Siddiqui puts his hands around his throat, thumbs on the front of his neck. At some point, he begins to cry.
The instructor barks something like, “I don’t care what’s wrong with you. You’re going to say something back to me.” Siddiqui drops to the floor in front of him.
Some of the other recruits thought he was faking unconsciousness. The instructor orders him up. Then he rubs his chest, hard, to get his attention. Then he slaps him — “hard enough to generate a sound across the squad bay” — though it’s unclear if it was once, twice or three times.
It’s against regulations to slap a recruit: Failing to obey that order can get you a dishonorable discharge, loss of pay and confinement for two years. Cruelty to a recruit could get you another year. Simple assault, another three months.
Siddiqui stands up holding his face. He turns and runs.
There is no way of knowing what was going through Raheel Siddiqui’s mind.
He runs past the last rack, veering toward the back of the barracks, throwing open the exterior door. The light wouldn’t have been up yet — sunrise wasn’t for another two hours. He ran to the stairway, placing his hands on the railing, his legs rising with him, preparing to vault over the side.
But his feet catch the railing, tripping him as he hurtles over, the report says. Instead of a controlled fall, feet first, he tumbles with his chest hitting the access railing as he hits the concrete three stories below, less than two seconds later. It is 5:35 a.m.
Someone calls 911. Paramedics call for air transport to Savannah, but it’s unavailable because of a threat of thunderstorms. A second helicopter, to Charleston, is arranged but would take half an hour. Siddiqui is rushed to nearby Beaufort Memorial Hospital instead, then transferred to Charleston. At 10:06 a.m., he is pronounced dead “Despite exhaustive operative and resuscitative efforts.”
An autopsy finds he died from blunt force trauma and deems the cause of death “suicide.” The Marines report concludes: “No recruit or Marine pushed or compelled (Siddiqui) to jump over the railing. … The tripping motion and uncontrolled nature of (his) fall caused him to land closer to the building than he otherwise may have and resulted in (his) impacting the steel railing of the access stairs below.
“The tripping motion and uncontrolled nature of (his) fall (also) makes it impossible to determine whether (he) intended to commit suicide or simply disregarded the likely and probable outcome of jumping from the building in an effort to escape the confrontation” with his instructor, it said.
Still, the Marines investigation concluded there was blame to be had, saying the alleged assault by his drill instructor was “likely the impetus” for Siddiqui’s decision to jump.
Two weeks ago, the Marines announced that no fewer than 20 people face disciplinary actions or charges in the problems at Parris Island uncovered by the investigations into and around Siddiqui’s death. A new command staff is in place. Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller has assured Dingell that reforms are being put in place — including a zero-tolerance policy for hazing and a review of suicide prevention protocols.
"We mourn the loss of Recruit Siddiqui, and we will take every step necessary to prevent tragic events like this from happening again,” said Neller. President Barack Obama, too, is apparently aware of the tragedy.
On Siddiqui's mother’s Facebook page, well-wishers try to comfort her. She posts photos of Siddiqui — in his cap and gown from high school graduation, or in his Home Depot smock, a wide smile crossing his face.
And there is a picture of his gravestone: “Loving brother, friend and devoted son.”
“May God rest his soul in peace,” it says.
Contact Todd Spangler: 703-854-8947 or tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler. Staff writer Niraj Warikoo contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2d8vVJvA little-known space plane quietly broke its own space endurance record this week as its current unmanned mission surpassed 469 days in space.
Much of the information about the X-37B and its mission is classified, but the little that is public points to it being a development vehicle for new Air Force space capabilities while serving a secondary role for the U.S. military and intelligence community as a testbed for new space-based surveillance technologies.
The current mission, dubbed USA-240, is the third for the X-37B and began on Dec. 11, 2012, atop an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral. The spacecraft is taken into orbit on a rocket but lands like the space shuttle by gliding down to Earth.
The X-37B, a classified reusable space plane being developed by the U.S. Air Force, has broken its own record for endurance. This week it surpassed the previous mission of 469 days in orbit.
That isn't the only similarity it shares with the space shuttle. It looks visually similar, sort of like a mini shuttle, and it, too, started life as a NASA project. The space agency solicited proposals in 1998 for projects that would push the boundaries of space development and exploration, and later awarded Boeing a $137 million contract for the X-37.
Originally envisioned as something that would be launched from the shuttle to test reusable launch vehicle technology, the X-37 never made it into space and eventually was transferred from NASA to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2004.
That's when it moved into the shadows.
It didn't emerge again until April 22, 2010, when the Air Force launched an Atlas rocket carrying what had been renamed the X-37B. Details of the mission were kept secret, but soon after launch, amateur satellite hunters spotted the X-37B orbiting the Earth at about the same altitude as military satellites.
The mission lasted 240 days, ending with a landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Dec. 3, 2010.
A second mission, using a second spacecraft, took to the skies just under three months later, on March 5, 2011. The gap allowed engineers to make some changes to the craft based on what had been learned in the first flight.
Again, little information was forthcoming from the Air Force, but the flight turned out to be a record breaker. Though the mission was designed to last up to 270 days, the Air Force said it would push past that point and kept the X-37B in orbit until June 16, 2012 -- a total of 469 days in space -- ending again at Vandenberg.
The current mission has now surpassed that record-breaking second flight.
The X-37B program appears to be aimed at giving the Air Force a space plane that can stay aloft for long periods, return to Earth and then be turned around fast and put back into orbit, said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and an authority on satellites and launches.
"The Air Force now has a policy of acquiring capabilities rather than missions, so some general somewhere probably thinks it would be spiffy to have a space plane that can launch at short notice," he said. "It's worthwhile learning lessons from the shuttle and how to do turn-arounds cheaper."
Mystery surrounds the actual missions being undertaken during these flights, but McDowell thinks it's serving a similar role as the space shuttle by carrying a science or intelligence payload.
"I believe it's testing some kind of experimental sensor for the National Reconnaissance Office; for example, a hyperspectral imager, or some new kind of signals intelligence package," said McDowell. "The sensor was more successful than expected, so the payload customer asked the X-37 folks to keep the spacecraft in orbit longer."
That theory is backed up by comments made by the Air Force to The Christian Science Monitor before its first flight that it would be involved in "various experiments" that will allow "satellite sensors, subsystems, components and associated technology" to be taken to space and back.
Another clue to the X-37B's role might be in its control within the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office, a Washington, D.C., unit that attempts to fast-track new technologies to help deal with specific threats that might have a short lifespan. That's distinctly different from the rest of the Air Force's space operations.
The Rapid Capabilities Office officially reports to senior U.S. military leaders but also, according to Aviation Week and Space Technology, exists as a "little acknowledged interface between the Air Force and the intelligence community."
Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.comVideo Top scientists have discovered grasshopper mice feel no pain when they are stung in the face by scorpions: they simply carry on gobbling up the fearsome poisonous arachnids.
Youtube Video CONTENDERS!! ARE YOU REEEEADY?!
The mighty mouse, native to the southwestern US, has managed to take the toxin, which is lethal to other animals, and turn it into an analgesic that numbs pain.
Michigan State University assistant professor of neuroscience and zoology Ashlee Rowe had already figured out that the mice weren't bothered by bark scorpion toxin, but didn't know why.
“This venom kills other mammals of similar size,” she said. “The grasshopper mouse has developed the evolutionary equivalent of martial arts to use the scorpions’ greatest strength against them.”
Rowe and her team scooped up a bunch of mice and scorpions from the desert to try to figure out why. They injected both the toxin and non-toxic saline solution into the mice's paws but found that the creatures reacted much more strongly to the solution, licking their paws to try to get rid of the sting.
"This seemed completely ridiculous,” said Harold Zakon, professor of neuroscience at The University of Texas at Austin. “One would think that the venom would at least cause a little more pain than the saline solution. This would mean that perhaps the toxin plays a role as an analgesic. This seemed very far out, but we wanted to test it anyway.”
Rowe and Zakon discovered that the bark scorpion toxin binds to sodium channels in the mouse's pain neurons, which blocks them from firing off a pain signal to the brain. The neurons have two different channels, 1.7 and 1.8, and toxins traditionally stick to the former to get the channels to open and fire off the pain to the brain.
Through gene sequencing, the boffins found that the 1.8 channel in the grasshopper mice has different amino acids to the 1.8 channel of other mammals that are sensitive to the scorpion stings – which include house mice, rats and humans.
“Incredibly, there is one amino acid substitution that can totally alter the behaviour of the toxin and block the channel,” said Zakon.
However, the team still need to figure out why the grasshopper mice doesn't just die from the toxin.
“We know the region of the channel where this is taking place and the amino acids involved,” said Rowe. “But there’s something else that’s playing a role, and that’s what I’m focusing on next.”
The full study, "Voltage-Gated Sodium Channel in Grasshopper Mice Defends Against Bark Scorpion Toxin", was published in Science. ®by Brett Stevens on June 6, 2017
As mentioned previously on this site, Breitbart has fired Katie McHugh for stating the truth about diversity, namely that if there were not Other groups here we would not suffer their conflicts.
This provoked widespread outrage among the Right, who are currently looking for an honest news source, which means one that bucks trends like political correctness and reports the relevant news in full. Previously, Breitbart looked like it was replacing the somewhat Left-leaning Fox News, which is undergoing changes to make it more Leftist-friendly.
The full exchange shows McHugh stating the truth that all mainstream media establishments seem to dance around, and then reminding someone who is not English that his opinion is not necessarily on point. In return, the Breitbart kaffeeklatsch erupted:
A number of Breitbart colleagues, who chose to remain anonymous, also attacked Ms McHugh for her Islamophobic comments. Speaking to CNN anonymously on Sunday, one said they found them “appalling†while another branded them “terribleâ€. …This is by no means the first time she has made inflammatory remarks about race. She once told her 19,000 Twitter followers: “Mexicans wrecked Mexico and think invading the USA will magically cure them of their retarded dysfunction. Lol.” It is rare for Breitbart, a publication which has been accused of writing racist and misogynist articles, to dismiss its employees for their controversial views. Although one exception is the case of Milo Yiannopoulos. In February, the alt-right figurehead, who was one of the site’s most high-profile writers, was forced to resign from the publication after his apparently pro-paedophilia remarks resurfaced in an old podcast.
McHugh said nothing that Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan and any conservative before 1965 would have admitted was true, and her comments are especially on point regarding recent Muslim terror attacks in the UK and France. If diversity did not exist, the problems of diversity — including the actions of other groups who want to dominate or destroy us — would not afflict us.
Breitbart has succumbed to DR3, or the tendency by conservatives to attempt to “prove” they are non-racist by accusing others of racism, creating a circular firing squad:
Many on the Dissident Right mock cuckservatives for engaging in “DR3†or DemsRRealRacists i.e. incapable of defending their values on their merits, they concede the Left’s moral premises, but accuse them of being the “real racistsâ€, homophobes, sexists etc.
DR3 afflicts the mainstream Right, which struggles for “respectability” or at least less censorship in a Left-leaning time. Big internet giants like Google and Twitter, major publications and big donors often will drop and ignore any publication which crosses the line on race, which in late Leftism means anything but foaming-at-the-mouth advocacy of diversity or having multiple ethnic and racial groups in the same society.
As an implicit endorsement of diversity, DR3 subscribes to the “Magic Dirt” idea that if we take people from the third world, bring them to our lands and instruct them in propaganda for our system and culture, they will take it up and suddenly become us. This both replaces us and replaces their own culture with ours as a dominant colonial power.
When conservatives take up “magic dirt,” it shows that they have been captured by the very group they claim to oppose, namely the Left, since they have adopted Leftist policies like diversity, equality and indoctrination.
Over the past two years, Breitbart has increased its hiring of ethnic minorities. Its policy appears to be shifting more to what they will probably call “moderate,” but in a time when almost everything is full Leftist, really means conservative-flavored Leftism. As a result, they need to lose the people who are pushing the Overton window farther to the right.
This is reminiscent of the time that National Review fired John Derbyshire for telling unfortunate truths about race. While he stopped short of criticizing diversity itself, it seems that being less than enthusiastic about having Other groups among us is cause for exile.
As this story saturates the Right-wing, especially the internet, it becomes clear that Breitbart is not hoping to become a better news source than Fox News, but simply replace it by doing what it once did. As the mainstream shifts more to the Left and everyone else — who dislike the fast food, soft drinks, politically correct and insipid mass culture anyway — heads toward a realist Right position, this means that Breitbart has backed the wrong horse.
Conservatives who gain power and influence in the system have a nasty history of betting on Leftism winning and instead of fighting, and then in anticipation of this defeat, choosing to shift Leftist so that as individuals they can accelerate their own careers instead of widening the pool by moving that Overton window.
From a personal standpoint, this is a smart move in the short term. They push all their competition back, and take on the sinecure of being Official Conservatives who say nothing that will disturb the herd by implying that our civilization has to change direction or it will fail. In the long term, however, they defeat themselves by becoming their competition, in turn rendering themselves irrelevant.
The future belongs to writers like Katie McHugh who state the plain truth not through attacks on specific racial groups, but in observing that diversity guarantees conflict and that the only solution is to go back to the nation being defined by a single ethnic and cultural group, preserving peace through separation.
Tags: breitbart, diversity, fox news, immigration, john derbyshire, katie mchugh, milo yiannopoulos, muslims, national review, self-censorship
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.By Crewman Becky | May 23, 2011 - 10:06 pm
If you happen to be “across the pond” between now and September you will have the wonderful opportunity to see Sir Patrick Stewart perform at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, in a modern day production of “The Merchant of Venice”
The London Evening Standard describes the play thusly; Set in modern Las Vegas, it has the dash of Ocean's Eleven, the verve of Legally Blonde and a demented delightfulness all of its own. Yet it's still palpably Shakespeare's protean drama about racial intolerance and the dark side of capitalism.
Aside from an unexpected enthusiasm for golf, Patrick Stewart's Shylock seems a misfit in the tawdry society he inhabits. His power over others' imagination is increased by his insistence on sequestering himself from their excess - typified by clownish Launcelot Gobbo, here an Elvis impersonator, and Susannah Fielding's brilliant, sinister Portia, who is a contestant in a vacuous gameshow.
They go on to say; Shylock resembles a sophisticated venture capitalist, and exercises care in his use of both money and language. To this end Stewart points the speeches' repetitions and contrasts, highlighting the way Shylock's vocabulary is thick with idiosyncrasies that vex his enemies. Dignified and poised, Stewart conveys brusque business sense and angry alienation, but has also found space in the role for humanity.
If we hear of them bringing this play over to the states we’ll let you know. For now, we’ll just have to pick up some fish and chips from our favorite pub and imagine the awesomeness of Sir Patrick Stewart performing live, on stage.
Play info:
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon (United Kingdom)
Now through September 2011
(Source; The London Evening Standard )Everybody seems down on Brayden Schenn these days, from Flyers fans to the coaching staff. He was bumped off the top line in a heart beat the start of the season, and this weekend, the rumor mill kicked back into full focus regarding Schenn's future with the team.
Of course, a trade of Schenn makes sense for a lot of reasons, primarily because the Flyers are insanely deep at forward and they could potentially, hopefully use him as a trade chip when trying to acquire some defensive help. You know, if they decide they want to improve the defense this season.
But as Andrew D. points out with his great tracking of Flyers scoring chances, Schenn has been one of the more productive players on the roster when it comes to creating chances. It's a small sample, but look at these numbers for the first five games of the year. The first column are chances he's set up, the second column are chances on which he was the primary attacker, and the third column is the total number of chances in which he was involved. He leads the team.
(It's also no surprise that Jakub Voracek has been the primary character in a total of 10 chances so far. Good stuff.)
These numbers might not carry through all season, and of course he only has three points on the year despite the hefty number of chances. The points will come if he keeps generating chances like this, and it does make you scratch your head a little bit when you see these numbers and realize that Craig Berube was so quick to bump Schenn off the top line.
He's creating offense when he's on the ice, and that's obviously a good thing for the Flyers.HERCULES, I MISS YOU!!!!
Category: Life Whats up beautiful people? Hope all is well in your lives. I’m very sorry about last week, I got caught up doing some other shit, it won’t happen again. Anyway, I’m going to open up about a different chapter of my life, I hope you dig it,
Shortly after I got out of prison, I got married. Yes, I loved her, but I was young, the real reason why I got married was, she was pregnant. Yes I have a child, shes not really a child anymore, shes 19, I haven’t spoken to her in years, not because of anything she did, but because of my own insecurities, this story, is how it all started.
It was 93, I was already separated, I had a roommate, and a dog, my dog, his name was Hercules, I had him since, 86, he was a beautiful Sheppard mix, that was a very loving animal, and alot of fun, he loved the snow, he loved his rubber balls, he was the only thing I really salvaged from the separation.
The split in a way wasn’t good, here after maybe 6 months after being apart, she had moved in with a guy, the guy seemed all right, but in reality, this was my little girl, at the time of the split, she was 18 months, by this time, she was 3, and every week there was drama, it was either this or that.
Anyway, one Sunday afternoon, her boyfriend, JOHN, picked up the kid, and said that the movie I had taken her to see the previous week was not appropriate cause JACKIE was having nightmares or some make believe bullshit, I asked her if she had nightmares, she said no, so I said, he didn’t know what he was talking about, and to keep his mouth shut, cause he was just the driver, he said some remark and then told me to fuck myself or some nonsense, I just looked at him, and spit in his face.
About 2 months after this, I’m working at a Sports betting service, its an all day Saturday, during football season. I get home from work about 7pm, I open the garage when I got home and left it open so the dog could go out. I go up stairs, turn on the T.V. and just start relaxing, within minutes I hear a bang and my dog yell, I run down stairs, and I see HERCULES running towards me, I check him, hes fine, no blood, no visible signs of anything. I do notice his kind of limping, I walk out past the garage, all of a sudden, BANG, I get hit from the side, but it was amateur hour, he hit me again, it was a 2 by 4, as I charged him, he slipped, I had him, I punched him a couple of times then, I hear a car door open, and there’s his fucking partner running at me, I start fighting this motherfucker, the piece of wood falls, and like a miracle, I pick it up, and whack the one fuck in the leg, he goes down but the other guy starts running, I chase him about a block away, finally I caught this guy, and started slamming him badly, it had been a bad year, and I took it out on this fuck, I kicked him in the back real hard, then I kicked him in the head, both kicks were with work boots on.
I asked him, why he attacked me, he couldn’t even talk, I ran back to the house, and called a cop friend who was off duty, I explained that I had never seen these guys before, by this time the other guy had taken off, and my side started swelling bad, my ribs were broken and badly bruised, I couldn’t really breathe, but I fucked both those motherfuckers up, the one real bad.
My cop buddy rushed over and when he got there, our friend was still on the floor,bleading. Some of the neighbors were out of there homes by then, my cop friend looked at me and said, we could finish him, or call the police and a ambulance, I chose the second option, at that time, I had enough bad karma on the horizon.
The next morning, I was going to see my daughter at 1pm, I knew it was these 2 fucks who sent those cocksuckers to get me, guilty conscience has no accuser, my ex calls me at 1130am, and asked if I was all right, if I still wanted to see Jackie, I said yes why wouldn,t I? But thats when I knew for sure. I didn’t say anything on the phone.
When they arrived, I was all smiles, my daughter looked beautiful, I hugged her, then told her to give Hercules a hug, while she was hugging the dog, I pulled up my shirt and showed those 2 miserable fucks the bruising on my ribs, then told them in a low voice, to next time, send the A-Team, both there faces turned red.
That was the beginning of a fucked up time in my life, that we’ll talk more about in the weeks to come. AS far as HERCULES, when I went back to JERSEY in 94 to pursue Comedy, I left him with my ex and a couple of years later, he passed. I’m
very sorry I never saw him again, but she wouldn’t let me, till this day, even with all my cats, I think about HERCULES from time to time.
Sorry again about last week, the next few weeks, I’ll give you some good shit, so check in with me on MONDAYS! Besides that….STAY BLACK!A student at Bevill State Community College's Sumiton campus was questioned by police Thursday after her gun accidentally went off during class.
The gun fired around 9:30 a.m. Campus security were at the classroom within a minute said spokeswoman Tana Collins. The school was not placed on lock down but a mobile alert was sent to students.
Students in a nearby building tell ABC 33/40 News they would have been unaware of the incident had it not been for the alert they received on their phone.
Authorities do not believe the student, whose name has not been released, brought the gun intentionally to the school. Sumiton Police rushed to the scene and were questioning the student. Collins said she could face discipline through the school's internal judicial system.
Guns are not permitted on community college campuses or allowed to be stored in student's cars said spokeswoman said Tana Collins.NEW DELHI: BJP has decided to induct Janata Dal leader Subramanian Swamy into the party. The decision has been formalized at the party's parliamentary board meeting on Thursday, July 4, 2013, with Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi proposing the move and most leaders including party veteran L K Advani supporting it.Party chief Rajnath Singh however prefers to wait for his predecessor and former party chief Nitin Gadkari, who is abroaf at present, to be back on July 8, before taking a final call on the matter. Singh is learnt to have told the parliamentary board on Thursday that one should finalise the matter after Gadkari's return. It was during Gadkari's regime that Swamy's Janata Dal had joined the NDA, about a year ago, but Swamy has been keen to merge with the BJP for a while.Swamy has had his cleared from the RSS for over a month now and many in BJP have been in favour of including him in the party fold. But many senior BJP leaders have not been in agreement with Swamy's extreme politics against Congress and its first family, the Gandhis, and his "maverick" ways. Hence even when he was being considered for being included in the NDA family, there were some serious objections initially to the move from BJP quarters. However, Swamy's close links to the Sangh Parivar helped him in first joining the NDA and now BJP.The common cause that BJP and Swamy seems to have is the fight against the cases of corruption involving the UPA government and its array of ministers. Swamy, the only face of his party, has been successfully pursuing cases against finance minister P Chidambaram in the courts, specially in connection with the 2G Spectrum scam and has hence been in the limelight in the recent years. With BJP too campaigning hard against the government's cases of corruption including 2G, Coalgate and other scams there seem to be enough in common between Swamy and BJP's agenda at present. When Modi brought up the issue of Swamy's intent to join BJP, at the parliamenatary board meeting on Thursday, the Gujarat CM mentioned that Swamy has been fighting against the UPA's corruption and his plank was the same as that of BJP and hence it would make sense to include him in the party.With Lok Sabha elections less than a year away, and the "UPA's corruption" being BJP's main poll plank against the Congress, the party leadership seems to have agreed to allow Swany into its fold, but apprehensions about whether he will stick to the party lines remain, considering BJP has more than once burnt its fingers with another "maverick" lawyer Ram Jethmalani, who had to be expelled from the party recently.A senior BJP leader had said when Swamy was joining the NDA, "there were similar objections on re-inducting Ram Jethmalani into Rajya Sabha on a BJP ticket, as he is also known for his maverick ways and hence does not toe the party line on many occasions. The apprehensions about Swamy are on the same lines, though his is a case of joining the NDA and not BJP". But this time Swamy is set to join BJP.When asked by one his disciples (Luke 11) how we should pray, Jesus replied by giving us “The Our Father”. The Our Father is the fundamental prayer of the New Testament and perhaps the most said prayer in history.
But the version most people are aware of would a translation into their own native language, or for many centuries, the Latin “Pater Noster”. But Jesus, being a 1st Century Galilean, spoke Aramaic. So when we gave his disciples the Our Father, he would have prayed it in that language.
Here’s an audio clip of the prayer:
Here’s how the prayer is written in Aramaic pronunciation:
Abwoon d’bashmaya (Our Father, Who art in Heaven)
|
the tropical Pacific," the bureau said. "The last time this occurred was during the [super] 1997-98 El Nino."
El Ninos can have a big impact on weather conditions, with reduced rainfall in the western Pacific and heavy falls on the ocean's eastern regions. They can also boost global temperatures, which are already running at record levels for the first five months of 2015, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week.
The bureau's latest update also shows major global models point to temperatures in a key region of the equatorial Pacific remaining above El-Nino threshold levels at least until March next year - potentially making the event a particularly long one.(WJLA) - A Virginia truck driver is accused of attempting to transport oysters, many of them undersized, out of state.
Rhoderick J. Newman, 66, was arrested and charged Wednesday night by Maryland Natural Resources Police. His truck, owned by Cowart Seafood Corp., of Lottsburg, Va., is being held in an NRP impoundment lot.
The maximum fine for Newman's offense is $1,000 per bushel.
Acting on a tip, officers pulled Newman over on U.S. 50 in Easton, where they discovered 188 bushels of oysters in his truck. For six hours, officers and cadets measured every oyster. All but one of the bushels contained oysters below the legal minimum of three inches.
According to the Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Service, the tractor-trailer load represents the daily limit of 16 oystermen power dredging and is worth over $8,000.
About 50 bushels of undersized oysters were returned to an Eastern Shore oyster sanctuary.
"When the season began, we promised to get the poachers from the air and from the water. Now, we are getting them on the highways and back roads and we're seizing their trucks," said Col. George F. Johnson IV, NRP superintendent. "Our mission and message is simple: 'We will get you.'"Data Breach, Electronic Healthcare Records, Fraud
New Report to U.S. Senate Describes How Criminals Put Data to Use
Why are hacked healthcare records so valuable? It's because stolen patient records often end up for sale on the deep web as part of information packages called "fullz" and "identity kits" used by fraudsters to commit a wide variety of crimes, says researcher James Scott.
Scott co-authored a new report, Your Life, Repackaged and Resold: The Deep Web Exploitation of Health Sector Breach Victims, which was prepared for the U.S. Senate by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a cybersecurity think tank.
The report describes the portion of the internet commonly referred to as the deep web as "an amalgamation of all of the sites that are not indexed by search engines and, in many cases, are not tracked by the same crawlers, ad services, cookies and other trackers that hinder anonymity."
Criminal groups often use the deep web to buy and sell health information and other data, Scott says in an interview with Information Security Media Group.
What Happens to Stolen Records?
Typically after a health record hack, the data will "go dark" for some time before resurfacing in different variations, he says.
"So, it will look like basic short-form ID theft material, but eventually the electronic health record will surface as a 'fullz' - the slang term on the deep web [for] a complete long-form document [containing] of all the intricacies of a person's health history, preferred pharmacy, literally everything," he says.
"What happens is the people who purchase those [fullz] then go to another vendor on the deep web for what's called 'dox,' the slang term for documentation, where they then proceed to have passports, drivers' licenses, Social Security cards - all these things that will help the counterfeit imitation of the victim.... So, you have electronic health record that will typically go for $20 apiece, and you'll spend a couple hundred dollars on 'doxs' to support that identity, and once it's an identity kit, you can sell it for $1,500 to $2,000."
Those ID kits are then used for a wide variety of criminal activities, including illegal immigration, pedophilia and launching more attacks using social engineering, Scott says.
In the interview (see audio player below image), Scott also discusses:
The challenges involved in tracking down the original sources of breached health data that surface on the deep web;
His advice to healthcare entities for preventing breaches that can result in patient data ending up on the deep web;
Why ICIT prepared the report for the U.S. Senate, and how the research potentially could be used by the federal government and law enforcement agencies.
Scott is a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a not-for-profit cybersecurity think tank based in Washington. He's an author on the topic of cybersecurity and an adviser to the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and intelligence community on cyberwarfare and the advanced persistent threat landscape.MAPS has completed the first double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the therapeutic use of LSD in human beings since the early 1970s.
LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a semi-synthetic compound first developed in 1938 by Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland. After Dr. Hofmann first discovered its effects in 1943, LSD quickly became recognized for its possible therapeutic effects. LSD also played a significant role in the discovery of the serotonin neurotransmitter system.
Experimental LSD capsule from our completed Swiss pilot study
Our completed Phase 2 pilot study in 12 subjects found positive trends in the reduction of anxiety following two LSD-assisted psychotherapy sessions. The study results also indicate that LSD-assisted psychotherapy can be safely administered in these subjects, and justify further research.
LSD is known for its ability to catalyze spiritual or mystical experiences and to facilitate feelings of interconnection. MAPS is interested in this substance for its potential to help people with a variety of conditions, focusing primarily on the treatment of anxiety associated with life-threatening illness, as well as for spiritual uses, creativity, and personal growth.
There is considerable previous human experience using LSD in the context of psychotherapy. From the 1950s through the early 1970s, psychiatrists, therapists, and researchers administered LSD to thousands of people as a treatment for alcoholism, as well as for anxiety and depression in people with advanced stage cancer. MAPS' completed and future research conforms to modern drug development standards, and will help guide the development of additional research into the risks and benefits of LSD-assisted psychotherapy.
Search our comprehensive Psychedelic Bibliography for scientific literature on the risks and benefits of LSD and other psychedelics.As iPad Grows, PC Replacement Cycle Slows
PC market growth has been decelerating for some time now and will continue to do so for some time to come. That’s the word from Barclays Capital’s hardware analyst Ben Reitzes, who says that there’s no end in sight to the PC market’s slow decline.
Why? As the use case for tablets and smartphones grows, particularly in enterprise and education, those devices are beginning to eclipse the PC. And in doing so, they’re extending the PC replacement cycle.
“We believe a new generation of consumers and IT workers are figuring out how to compute differently than those that started using PCs in the 90’s — relying more on mobile devices and the cloud — as PCs see significant ‘task infringement’ by the day,” Reitzes theorizes. “After years of denial, most PC industry players still don’t seem to realize what is happening — and don’t have contingency plans.”
And they really should. Because, according to Reitzes, those 350-million-units-shipped years are coming to an end. And quickly, too. He figures that, in a few years, the PC replacement cycle will be a year or two longer than it is now, resulting in a significant drop in shipments — a loss of 50 million to 100 million units in annualized demand by 2015.
That’s a dramatic decline, but one that’s not without its upside.
Tablet makers, for example, stand to benefit quite a bit from the PC industry’s misfortune. Reitzes expects 182 million tablets to be sold in 2013 — up from his prior estimate of 146 million. By 2015, he expects that number to hit 268 million.
And by 2016? An even 300 million.
And in each of those years Reitzes expects the iPad to account for the majority of tablet sales: 61 percent in 2013 and 2014, 60 percent in 2015, and 59 percent in 2016. “We believe that Apple will continue to gain share and be one of the main beneficiaries of the market move toward mobile devices,” Reitzes concluded. “Even with near-term margin pressures, Apple should still generate a disproportionate share of profit in computing over the long-term.”They might not build $150-million F-22 stealth fighters, but in other ways insurgents and terrorists are amazingly tech savvy. For one, they're hip to using grungy, bare-bones websites to spread tactics and ideology across the planet on the cheap, transforming once-isolated local and regional conflicts into genuine threats to global stability. Author John Robb calls this "open-source warfare," and believes it's the most important force shaping the 21st century.
If so, we're screwed. Seven years after the launch of Wikipedia – the user-edited online encyclopedia that brought the "open source" concept to the masses – the U.S. Army is still playing catch-up. The Army's idea of harnessing the 'net is to launch isolated websites, put generals in charge and lock everything behind passwords, while banning popular open-source civilian websites. Colonel James Galvin, head of the Army's "Battle Command Knowledge System," openly admits that when it comes to the collaborative internet, the bad guys have a "niche advantage."
It didn't have to be this way. Around four years ago there was a grass-roots explosion of informal web-based tools for soldiers. Four captains at West Point founded companycommand.com as a forum for junior officers to swap battlefield lessons. And the 1st Cavalry Division launched CAVNET to sponge up and spread patrol tactics in Iraq. Both were victims of their own successes. Galvin's office, located at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, was set up to institutionalize these forums and others. To the Army, that meant hiding them all behind the password-protected Army Knowledge Online web portal, and assigning trained moderators and high-ranking "sponsors" to each site. The result is forums that are less accessible, less nimble, less innovative and less effective than their counterparts in the shadowy world of terrorists and insurgents. Oh, and there still aren't any official Army wikis. [For what it's worth, the intelligence community is a little slicker at this. – ed.]
Besides adhering to strict security standards, Galvin stresses that the Army must also balance "both hierarchy and networking." "If you've got hierarchy, you've got direction – and if you bring in networking, you've got direction and collaboration." But limiting collaboration to AKO password-holders artificially shrinks the network, and makes the whole process perhaps too insular to be truly innovative. [Ironically, Army officials would actually make the opposite argument – that AKO isn't secure enough to share truly-sensitive information. – ed.]
I'm not saying that Army forums should be totally unprotected from insurgent snoopers. But they should be expanded, and loosened, to allow students, academics, journalists and, yes, even members of the general public to participate on some level. That's risky, sure, but worth it.
Galvin advises patience. "Our leaders are getting comfortable working in that [collaborative] environment," he says. And that means Army wikis aren't far off. But even if they arrived tomorrow, they'd still be seven years late.LAS VEGAS -- Ammon Bundy was at times on the brink of despair behind bars but said Monday he's now at peace as he awaits a judge's ruling on whether the stalled federal conspiracy trial against him, his father, older brother and a friend will proceed.
The 42-year-old has been staying at a relative's home in Las Vegas, supervised with GPS monitoring and a curfew, after spending a year and 10 months in custody following his arrest in Oregon.
Outside the downtown courthouse, wearing a cowboy hat, brown plaid shirt and a black Carhartt vest, he said he was buoyed by a new memo from a U.S. Bureau of Land Management whistleblower that alleged misdeeds by federal agents during the investigation of the 2014 armed standoff outside his father's ranch near Bunkerville.
Agent Larry Wooten sent the Nov. 27 memo to the U.S. Department of Justice, citing serious concerns about the "heavy-handedness" of Dan Love, the BLM agent who led the round-up of Cliven Bundy's cattle after the family patriarch failed to pay grazing fees and fines for two decades. Wooten alleged Love and other agency supervisors withheld evidence, abused their power and actively ridiculed the Bundys, though Wooten also said Cliven Bundy and his supporters "chose an illegal, uncivilized and dangerous strategy" to express their grievances.
Ammon Bundy said the government made a mistake by locking up his family for so long because it gave them a lot of uninterrupted time to pore over evidence and learn about the law. Ammon and Ryan Bundy were arrested in January 2016 during their armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon and their father was arrested the following month when he arrived at Portland International Airport to visit them in jail.
"We've been locked away for the last two years with discovery that's been sealed. We've done our due diligence going through every file, trying to understand every video, trying to understand every body cam, every dash cam,'' Bundy said. "We have understood that this has been going on, but we haven't been able to tell the public. So the fact that it has come out doesn't surprise us at all.''
Ammon Bundy speaks outside the federal court in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Monday morning, Dec. 18, 2017, as he awaits a judge's decision as to whether the federal conspiracy trial will proceed.
He said it may be easier for the public to accept Wooten's claims about alleged federal misconduct because they're coming from someone within the Bureau of Land Management.
He said he expects U.S. District Judge Gloria M. Navarro to dismiss the federal conspiracy case, or that he and the others will win acquittal if the trial continues. Navarro last week raised the prospect of a mistrial, striking certain witness testimony or delaying the trial if she found prosecutors violated their obligation to turn over evidence beneficial to the defense.
Ammon Bundy, father Cliven Bundy, older brother Ryan Bundy and Ryan Payne face conspiracy, threat, assault and extortion charges, accused of rallying militia and armed supporters to thwart a court-ordered roundup of Bundy cattle trespassing on public land. Outnumbered federal agents and rangers retreated and the Bundys were indicted a year and a half later.
The judge is expected to rule by Wednesday whether the case will continue in light of at least seven potential evidence violations she cited by the prosecution, and the surfacing of the whistleblower memo submitted to the defense on Dec. 8. Only three prosecution witnesses have been called since opening statements Nov. 14.
Ammon Bundy said his time in jail affected his wife, six children, his business and finances. He still owes about $180,000 in legal fees from his trial in Portland in the refuge takeover, which ended in acquittals for him, Ryan Bundy and five other defendants in fall 2016, according to court testimony.
He said his vehicle fleet business, which provides repair and maintenance services, has been curtailed and he wasn't allowed any contact visits with his wife and children until his release last month.
At times, with decades of potential prison time hanging over his head if convicted in Nevada, Bundy said he wondered if he'd ever get to spend time with his family again.
"The impact has been great and terrible -- terribly great because we have grown tremendously from this," he said. "I look back at the pain and suffering we have gone through, and I almost cringe today just thinking about it.
"But as long as we don't get bitter, as long as we don't get hard, we'll be able to survive and be better at the end. Even with the financial situation of my business and all of that being attacked, we'll be fine.... We'll make it.''
Ammon Bundy lifts his right pants leg to reveal the GPS monitoring device below his sock that the court ordered he wear while he is out of custody.
He said he's believed he and his family would prevail since he experienced a spiritual awakening while in custody in Portland. He also got through his jail time by looking forward to telling his family's story at trial in Nevada.
"I came to understand this case was going to be an instrument in bringing forth truth and exposing corruption of what the government is doing to not only us and not only to the agricultural community but people in general,'' he said.
He said he's gained strength and his wife and children have grown closer to God and "more determined to stand for what is right.''
"I'm not so tender, if you will. I've run out of tears,'' he said. "But I don't feel like I'm hardened.... I'm not bitter at the Bureau of Land Management. I'm not bitter at the prosecutors or the judge because I know that the light will be brought forth.''
But he said the public should be outraged about the government's delay in sharing evidence - including information about a live-feed FBI camera on a hill overlooking the Bundy ranch, a log tracking who was watching the camera and armed federal agents on watch outside the ranch -- and the whistleblower's allegations.
Prosecutors have been "digging a hole for us,'' but are going to be buried in it themselves, he said.
Prosecutors have argued that some of the information the defense requested is immaterial to the case, that they were not aware of some of the defense theories or that a document sought wasn't discovered because it wasn't in the usual investigative file but kept in one person's file. Prosecutors also have argued in court earlier that the defense requests for additional evidence marked a "tactic for delay.''
Since his Nov. 30 release, Ammon Bundy said he's trying to make up for lost time. The moment he hugged his wife and children was indescribable, he said. He devoured a "good steak'' at a barbeque on his second day out after losing about 40 pounds in custody.
He said he considered remaining behind as his father has chosen to do despite the judge's release order, but realized he could do more good outside of jail.
Still, he said, "We're not in any way free," pulling up his right pant leg to show the electronic monitoring anklet he has tucked inside his sock.
Asked if he'd lead similar armed standoffs if a mistrial or a dismissal is declared, "I hope that is not necessary.''
-- Maxine Bernstein
mbernstein@oregonian.com
503-221-8212
@maxoregonianAnother season of highly entertaining Westfield W-League action has almost come to an end with the Grand Final between Melbourne City and Sydney FC primed for this Sunday (2pm on Fox Sports 505 and ABC ONE).
This of course means the always controversial W-League Team of the Year from The Football Sack.
Between ten writers, The Football Sack has watched every single match of the season live with all ten coming together to collectively decide the Team of the Year.
Think we’ve still got it wrong? Tell us in the comments section below, on Facebook or on Twitter!
Some of the Contenders
Goalkeepers
Haley Kopmeyer – Brisbane Roar. The American stopper was a commanding presence between the sticks and organised her defence – often in a precarious high line – well from the back.
Hannah Southwell – Newcastle Jets. Made a huge impact on Newcastle’s season with a series of consistent and impressive performances at just 16-years-old.
Kaitlyn Savage – Adelaide United. Magnificent athletic ability enabled her to produce many high quality saves. Didn’t keep a lot of clean sheets but impressed on a consistent basis.
Lydia Williams – Canberra United. Six clean sheets and only seven goals conceded for the season in yet another stellar campaign.
Centre Backs
Alanna Kennedy – Sydney FC. The lofty centre back had another impressive season commanding an impervious backline, nullifying strikers and leading her team from defence.
Clare Polkinghorne – Brisbane Roar. The Roar skipper was as reliable as ever in the heart of defence. Just as capable of a crunching challenge as she is a smooth pass out from the back to feed her midfield, she chipped in with a few goals as well.
Ellie Brush – Canberra United. Strong in the air and in the tackle, brings a wealth of experience to the Canberra backline.
Emma Checker – Canberra United. serious knee injury brought to an end a fantastic season for Checker, a rock in defence for her new side.
Jennifer Beattie – Melbourne City. Briton who has been the rock at the heart of City’s defence. Comfortable on the ball and dominant in the air.
Megan Oyster – Newcastle Jets. Oyster’s dominant attitude has proved an essential part of Newcastle’s defensive line.
Wing Backs
Caprice Dydasco – Newcastle Jets. Hailing from Washington Spirit, Dydasco has shown Australia her potential and drive as a speedy midfielder.
Ellie Carpenter – Western Sydney Wanderers. The youngster had an impressively successful debut season, her determination and willingness to play all over the park earned her the accolade of playing every minute this season as she terrorised oppositions with her blistering speed.
Gema Simon – Newcastle Jets. Led the Jets to a respectable season through her impressive defensive displays and quality leadership.
Nicole Begg – Canberra United. Another feature of Canberra’s watertight defence, able to score goals from fullback as well.
Rebekah Stott – Melbourne City. World Cup goal scorer has flown under the radar at star studded City despite an almost flawless season from the New Zealand defender.
Steph Catley – Melbourne City. The 21-year-old wingback continues to improve and has looked a natural leader in a City side full of some of the world’s best footballers.
Defensive Midfielders
Chloe Logarzo – Newcastle Jets. Logarzo has consistently impressed in the Newcastle midfield with pace and strength.
Jessica Fishlock – Melbourne City. Welsh star ran the City midfield with her trademark mixture of grace and grit.
Kendall Fletcher – Canberra United. An absolute wall in front of the Canberra backline, Fletcher was strong in defence and efficient going forward.
Shannon May – Perth Glory. You always know you can count on May. It was another consistent season for the Matildas midfielder who boasts such a great range of passing.
Article continues after this
Attacking Midfielders
Abby Dahlkemper – Adelaide United. A sensational campaign saw Dahlkemper recently awarded Adelaide’s Player of the Season award. Dominated matches from both attacking and defensive midfield positions.
Caitlin Munoz – Canberra United. The veteran Matildas midfielder has had another brilliant season running United’s core.
Katrina Gorry – Brisbane Roar. The fact that most opposing teams set up to swarm her the moment she touched the ball shows how respected and talented she is. Capable of magic any time she was on the ball.
Kim Little – Melbourne City. Seattle Reign loanee has lived up to her billing as arguably the best player to grace the league with goals and assists galore.
Veronica Perez – Canberra United. United’s Mexican signing injected pace and toughness into the midfield and created chances all season long.
Wing Forwards
Ashleigh Sykes – Canberra United. A fast, dangerous winger capable of been an absolute menace to opposition defences.
Caitlin Foord – Perth Glory. Foord’s stocks continued to rise this season, as her movement and driving runs were ever present again.
Emily Condon – Adelaide United. Not one of the big name players but certainly a workhorse. Displayed great pace and agility down the wings while also providing forwards with a wicked cross.
Emily Gielnik – Brisbane Roar. Found success playing up front as well as out on the right. Her pace and strength was often too much for defenders to handle.
Erica Halloway – Western Sydney Wanderers. The Wanderers winger had a successful season demonstrating what the Westfield W-League had been missing: a healthy combination of power and skill as she spurred her team from the wing.
Jasmyne Spencer – Sydney FC. The speedy American striker was a godsend for the Sky Blue’s season. Her tenacity to run at defenders, willingness to win ball and lighting pace made her a weekly threat to oppositions.
Leena Khamis – Sydney FC. The Sydney veteran’s creativity and ball control is always an x-factor for the Sky Blues. A collection of goals and assists made for a commendable season.
Lisa De Vanna – Melbourne City. Incredibly experienced Matilda continues to adapt her game and has matured into a leader for both club and country.
Vanessa Di Bernardo – Perth Glory. The US import wasted no time filling the big shoes left by Sam Kerr’s absence with the attacker a class above this season scoring six goals in seven appearances.
Centre Forwards
Rosie Sutton – Adelaide United. Sutton is one of the more dangerous forwards in the comp, capable of scoring frequent goals while proving a nightmare for opposition defenders.
Larissa Crummer – Melbourne City. Spearheaded the Melbourne City juggernaut with a golden boot winning 11 goals, capping off an astounding 12 months.
Michelle Heyman – Canberra United. Canberra’s leading all-time goal scorer had another stellar season leading the line for the reigning Champions.
Coaches
Craig Deans – Newcastle Jets. Added structure and organisation to lead the Jets’ squad to a chance at finals football.
Joe Montemurro – Melbourne City. Ex-Victory coach managed to balance the best squad the league has seen whilst also giving younger players their opportunity. Finished the regular season without his side dropping a point.
Rae Dower – Canberra United. After been promoted from assistant coach this season, Dower has taken the reigning champions to the brink of back-to-back successes.
W-League Team of the Year
Goalkeeper: Hannah Southwell
Centre Backs: Megan Oyster & Ellie Brush
Wing Backs: Ellie Carpenter & Steph Catley
Defensive Midfielder: Kendall Fletcher
Attacking Midfielders: Kim Little & Katrina Gorry
Wing Forwards: Ashleigh Sykes & Vanessa Di Bernardo
Centre Forward: Larissa Crummer
Coach: Joe Montemurro
Assistant Coach: Craig Deans
Bench: Lydia Williams, Alanna Kennedy, Jessica Fishlock, Caitlin Foord, Rosie Sutton
Awards
Best Defender: Steph Catley
Best Midfielder: Kendall Fletcher
Best Forward: Larissa Crummer
Player of the Season: Kendall Fletcher
Young Player of the Season: Larissa CrummerWith tensions escalating between the United States and Russia, the White House still has no larger strategy on how to deal with fresh conflicts sure to arise in parts of Syria once the Islamic State is pushed out.
U.S.-backed local forces are squeezing the terrorist group out of Syria’s south and east, and already, other actors appear to be jockeying for control. That has led to a string of U.S. clashes with the Iranian- and Russian-backed Syrian regime, as well as with Iranian-backed forces on the ground.
Story Continued Below
In the latest case, the U.S. on Sunday shot down a Syrian regime jet suspected of dropping bombs near U.S.-backed fighters, and Russia threatened on Monday to target aircraft flown by the U.S. and its allies in the region.
A senior administration official insisted that the No. 1 goal in President Donald Trump's White House remains defeating the Islamic State. He said the Trump administration is still working on a broad anti-Islamic State strategy that will ultimately include how to deal with the power vacuum that will be left in Syria once the terrorist group is defeated. But he declined to give a timetable for the plan’s release.
“Good strategy takes time to develop. We’re interested in getting it right,” the senior official said. “We’ve got to defeat the bad guys in a way that doesn’t offer opportunities to other bad guys.”
Lawmakers and former U.S. officials warned on Monday that the Trump administration’s seemingly haphazard approach in the meantime could lead to a dangerous escalation and expansion of U.S. aims in Syria.
“Trump is quietly starting a new war that Congress has not declared. Red alert,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter.
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Robert Ford, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria now with the Middle East Institute and Yale University, said the so-called bad guys aren’t waiting for the Trump team to figure out what it will do.
“Events are moving very fast,” Ford said. “The Syrian government’s bold moves on the ground show that it, with the help of its Iranian allies, will not readily accept American attempts to dictate local governance in eastern Syria.”
It doesn’t help that there are so many actors – Iran, the Kurds, Russia, and Turkey to name a few – with a stake in Syria, and that so many have competing agendas.
“I have never seen so many international and regional conflicts playing out simultaneously in one military theater,” said Randa Slim, another Syria analyst also with the Middle East Institute. “At some point things will get out of control.”
Under President Barack Obama, the United States focused on defeating the Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq. It offered air power and Special Forces to back Iraqi, Kurdish and other allied fighters on the ground in both countries. But Obama declined to get involved in the Syrian civil war pitting the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad against rebel factions.
The Trump administration has followed a more aggressive version of the same approach, and it has succeeded in continuing to degrade the Islamic State. The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, many of whom are Kurdish, recently began trying to oust Islamic State fighters from Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria.
Meanwhile, Assad, backed by Iranian and Russian military might, has managed to gain the upper hand in the civil war. But despite the belief in many corners that Assad’s fight against the rebels helps fuel the Islamic State, Trump also has tried to avoid getting entangled in the Syrian civil war. The sole exception: In April, the Trump administration fired missiles at an Assad airbase to protest his use of chemical weapons.
America’s downing Sunday of the Syrian warplane — a Russian-made Su-22 fighter-bomber — was the first time the U.S. had shot down a Syrian aircraft since Syria began spiraling out of control in March 2011. The U.S. move led Moscow to warn that it will treat American jets that venture west of the Euphrates River as potential targets. Russia also said it was cutting off its deconfliction channel with the United States. The channel lets the two sides coordinate aircraft movements in Syria to avoid collisions.
In recent weeks, the U.S. also has clashed with Iranian-backed forces maneuvering for space in Syria, especially around what’s known as the Tanf border crossing. U.S. Special Operations forces have been in the Tanf area training local forces. In one incident, U.S. F-16s hit a convoy of Iranian-armed fighters alleged to have ignored warnings to stay away from the Tanf base on May 18.
One reason Iran and the Assad regime may be provoking the United States now is that they may suspect that the Trump White House is distracted by the the scandal involving suspected Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Critics accuse Trump of being too cozy with the Kremlin, though on Syria his administration has bucked Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Trump administration is likely looking at ways to peel Russia away from its alliance with Iran in Syria, even though recent indications are that the Russians and the Iranians are getting closer. Still, some analysts said the United States will probably have more luck coming to terms with Russia than with Iran, a longtime nemesis.
“Often times, there’s a lot of bluster coming out of Russia, but deep down they do want to talk,” said Anna Borshchevskaya of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Putin does not want World War III.“
Iran considers the Islamic State an enemy, but analysts believe Tehran also is eager to create a “land bridge” across Syria that makes it easier to send supplies to various parts of the Middle East where it has proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shiite Muslim militias in Iraq. The push for a land bridge makes it even more likely that Iran or its allies will run into the United States.
What’s striking about the string of recent clashes is that the United States has been provoked by offensive actions taken by Iranian-allied groups or the Syrian regime, said Andrew Tabler, also of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Tabler, who has called the scramble for supremacy in eastern Syria a new “Great Game,” said it’s not clear why Iran and other parties believe now is a good time to needle the United States.
“I think they are testing the mettle of the United States,” Tabler said of the Iranians. He added, however, that, whereas Obama hesitated over taking military action in Syria, “what’s interesting about the Trump administration is that they lay down red lines, and if you cross them, they react.”
Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is advising the Trump administration on Iran policy. He noted that the administration is nearly finished with a review of U.S. policy toward Iran and that how to deal with Tehran’s role in Syria is part of those discussions.
“A rollback strategy against Iran starts in places like Syria,” Dubowitz said. “The administration is making clear they’re not looking for a direct confrontation. They’re not looking for a fight, but if Iran, Assad and Hezbollah continue to push into areas in southern and eastern Syria, they are prepared to take the fight to Iran and its allies.”Photo
TOKYO — Japan has a reputation for getting the latest electronics gadgets before the rest of the world. But the Japanese will have to wait for the latest video game console from one of their own companies, Sony.
Sony said Monday that it would not sell the PlayStation 4 in Japan until Feb., 22, 2014, about three months after scheduled release dates in the United States and Europe, which are Nov. 15 and Nov. 29.
Andrew House, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, said the main reason for the delay was a shortage of games aimed at Japanese players. Japanese game developers have been slower to adapt to the trend toward networked, multiplayer games than their counterparts elsewhere, he said in an interview Monday after Sony announced the release date at a news conference.
“It has been something of a learning curve for Japanese developers in getting up to speed with the networked style of play,” Mr. House said. “We need to make sure we have great games for Japanese consumers in place.”
Sony also wants to make sure that it does not repeat supply chain glitches that plagued the release of the PlayStation 3.
Mr. House said the company was not seeing any shortages this time around, even though it had already received more than 1 million pre-orders for the console. At the current pace, he said, Sony was on track to do better than the PlayStation 3; Sony says it sold about 3.5 million copies of that console in the first fiscal year in which it was available.
“I have every hope that this will be our largest launch for any holiday season console,” Mr. House said. “We are experiencing demand that, in my experience in the industry, we have never seen before.”
The PlayStation 4 is a vitally important component in the plans of the Sony chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, to turn around the performance of Sony’s electronics business. The console has received favorable early reviews from the gaming community thanks in part to a $399 price, $100 less than Microsoft’s Xbox One, which will also be released in the United States in time for the holidays.
Toru Hanai/Reuters
Like Sony, Microsoft does not plan to release its new console in Japan until next year, easing some of the pressure on Sony in its home market. And Japan has been tough for the Xbox to crack, so Sony can probably count on doing well in in its domestic market anyway.
While Japanese consumers will have to wait for the new console, they can console themselves with the PlayStation Vita TV, a new version of Sony’s portable game system. Vita TV will give users access to more than 1,300 games, as well as a variety of online video services, via their television sets.
Vita TV will also act as a sort of set-top box for PS4 and televisions, so that the console can be used without physically connecting it to a TV.
With Vita TV, at least, Japan gets bragging rights; while Sony said it would begin selling the device here on Nov. 14, there was no word on international availability.It had been requested that we make a short video covering the top worst hacks in movies. Being the community that we are, it seemed like an interesting request. We asked for your input, and you were happy to deliver! However, the proposition of creating a “top 10” list turned out to be quite difficult. There were just SO MANY horrible scenes that I started thinking about how to even categorize them. We could probably to a “top 10” in any of the following categories without even having to dig too deeply:
hacker lingo
mocked up interfaces
fake input devices
virus screen-takeover moments
access denied messages
hardware taped together
Honestly, after breaking it down in such a manner, making the top 10 movie hacking failures, felt painfully general. It is like making a list of “top 10 animals that ever existed”. The state of technology portrayal in movies is frankly abysmal. It is obvious that the only people who know less about tech than “hollywood” are the people making laws about it.
So, lets take a look at this list and see what we ended up with.
10. The Core
There’s a scene where they have to get through a door and it won’t budge. To open it, they’re going to have to crack into the control panel and hotwire the the thing. What do they find inside? A breadboard. Ok, well, we all know that in that environment, you wouldn’t be finding any breadboards. Then again, I’ve seen some duct taped together networks |
This is because there is a contrast between the style of driving and the nature of the track as compared with the conditions on a public road […] are so great that no reasonable person could understand that the performance on the [Top Gear] track is capable of a direct comparison with a public road."
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Yeah, Elon, so there!
Top Gear's Andy Wilman said in April that he believed the lawsuit was more about Tesla trying to promote themselves. With this clear ruling, it's becoming more likely that Andy may have been right. (Hat tip to Anders!)At this moment, Emmy voters are picking their favorites for the year from June 1, 2016, to May 31, 2017. The nominees they choose will be announced on July 13, and then the winners will be announced on Sept. 17.
That all seems very straightforward, but there are interesting complications. This past season, “Billions” brought in a fascinating new character named Taylor Mason, played with beautiful innocence and brilliance by Asia Kate Dillon. Taylor is a nonbinary character who prefers the pronouns “they,” “them,” and “their,” which has given the macho-driven series a great twist. Turns out you don’t need to be a cocky dude in order to succeed on Wall Street. Dillon, who also appears on “Orange Is the New Black,” is also nonbinary.
So: The Emmys. Showtime decided to submit Dillon in a supporting category, but which one? At this point, the categories are divided into male and female, with no nonbinary option. The MTV Movie & TV Awards show has decided to present the best acting awards based on performance, with no gender specificity. (Dillon presented that award to Emma Watson earlier this year.) But the Emmys aren’t there. So Dillon had to choose.
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“I reached out to the Academy,” Dillon told Variety, “and just asked them: What do these words mean to you? They said Academy rules have always stated that any performer can enter either category for any reason. They said, ‘But given where we are now, what would you like to do?’ And when given the choice between actor and actress, I used the word ‘actor,’ because it’s non-gendered and non-sexed.”
With “Game of Thrones” out of the running for this year’s Emmys, since the sixth season didn’t air during the eligibility period, it’s quite possible there will be room in the supporting actor category for Dillon. They certainly deserve a nod.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbertLabour has announced plans to scrap secondary tax for workers with more than one job - but National says it's already implementing the policy.
In the current system, those with more than one job often pay a higher rate on their secondary income. It is expected they claim a refund on the wash-up at the end of the financial year.
However, Labour says this is too complex, overpayments are often not claimed back and the system hits hardest those in casual work.
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Within five years of taking office Labour would develop an alternative to secondary tax. In the interim, it would implement special tax codes until an Inland Revenue computer upgrade comes online.
"Many low paid workers are having to work two or three jobs to make ends meet and support their families," leader David Cunliffe said this morning.
"The current secondary tax regime makes life even more difficult for them and is an additional obstacle to meeting the basic costs of living.
"Labour will address this hardship by making sure that these workers...have access to the money they earn when they need it - in their wage packets."
The policy would not reduce the final tax that any taxpayer owes but Labour says it would make the system "fairer and more transparent."
They also argue there is no cost in replacing secondary tax, and any extra cash IRD holds as a result of taxpayers not claiming refunds is offset by a corresponding liability on its books.
However, National's revenue spokesman Todd McClay said they were already going ahead with the policy.
He said IRD's Business Transformation plan will "address the PAYE system, including secondary tax and end-of-year square-ups."
Cunliffe launched the policy on a visit to Otara and Mangere markets this morning. He also took his election campaign there last week as Labour and National battle for crucial south Auckland votes.
Once considered Labour's heartland, National has chosen Manakau as the venue for their campaign and flagship policy tomorrow and are making a strong pitch for Pasifika support.
Meanwhile, on TV3's The Nation this morning, Labour's Grant Robertson did not rule out lifting the top tax rate as part of post-election coalition negotiations with the Greens.
The Greens have pledged 40 cents, Labour 36.Green Flash is rapidly growing as one of my favorite breweries. I only discovered them recently due to a friend and luckily, unlike some other recent breweries I’ve found, Green Flash is widely available in Ohio! In the past I’ve had their Palate Wrecker DIPA (review here) and The Hop Head Red (review here) both of which I loved. I’m now extremely excited to try my favorite beer style from one of my new favorite breweries. On to the beer!
Brewery:Green Flash
Beer: Trippel
Style: Belgian Tripel
Alcohol by Volume: 9.7%
Ingredients: Pale malt, Styrian Golding and Czech Saaz
IBUs: 24
Oh how I love the beautiful color of a tripel! It’s GOLD Baby! Bright, hazy, beautiful golden liquid of the gods. Superb layer of snow white head that lets it’s lace linger down to the last drop. It’s been way too long since I had a Belgian.
Good aroma of spicy hops with some nice banana esters as well. Classic Belgian scents combined with a slight hint of alcohol as well.
Bit heavier on the spice flavors then some tripels, but not overly so. Lots of citrus fruit action happening on my tongue here. That is all slightly balanced by a nice malt build. Not the best tasting tripel I’ve ever had, but a good one.
Smooth and crisp mouth feel with a very light body and plenty of carbonation.
Overall I’m a little disappointed. It’s been a while since I had a tripel so I was pretty psyched for this one. That with the combination of it being a Green Flash beer, and the first Green Flash that I wasn’t wowed by. Whatever putting that stuff aside this is still a tasty beer that I’m happy to drink. Am I gonna recommend it to people? Eh, probably not. There are many other tripels and Green Flashs that should be had long before this.Ahoy, mateys! Below Deck returns this September, and Season 4 isn't going to be an easy ride. "I always get excited about seeing how the crew are going to mesh. You hope for the best — but you plan for the worst," Captain Lee Rosbach says about the team he's assembled for charters throughout the British Virgin Islands. And from our peek at the first trailer, it definitely looks like it's going to be a mix of highs and lows aboard the 154-foot mega yacht Valor. Captain Lee will be joined by familiar faces in chief stew Kate Chastain and chef Ben Robinson (who recently sailed on Below Deck Mediterranean). Below Deck Season 2's Kelley Johnson is also back, and this year he's been promoted to bosun. "For me, it's definitely about redemption," Kelley says of returning to Captian Lee's crew. Joining the vets are Trevor Walker (senior deckhand), Nico Scholly (second deckhand), Lauren Burchell (deckhand), Emily Warburton-Adams (second stew), and Sierra Storm (third stew).
In addition to trying to please their charter guests this season, there's quite a lot of romance on the ship. "Love is in the air and it's spreading among the crew," Kate notes. But not everyone is excited to be working in such close quarters, as longtime pals and co-workers Ben and Kate seem to be at odds ("I don't like working with you anymore," Ben tells Kate).
Below Deck Season 4 premieres at September 6 at 9/8c. Check out a full tease above, and prepare for the new season with some throwback photos of your favorite yachties, below.Not to be confused with Medea gene
Maternal effect dominant embryonic arrest (Medea) is a selfish gene composed of a toxin and an antidote. A mother carrying Medea will express the toxin in her germline, killing her progeny. If the children also carry Medea, they produce copies of the antidote, saving their lives. Therefore, if a mother has one Medea allele and one non-Medea allele, half of her children will inherit Medea and survive while the other half will inherit the non-Medea allele and die (unless they receive Medea from their father).
Medea's selfish behavior gives it a selective advantage over normal genes. If introduced into a population at sufficiently high levels, the Medea gene will spread, replacing entire populations of normal beetles with beetles carrying Medea.[1] Because of this, Medea has been proposed as a way of genetically modifying insect populations. By linking the Medea construct to a gene of interest - for instance, a gene conferring resistance to malaria - Medea's unique dynamics could be exploited to drive both genes into a population. These findings have dramatic implications for the control of insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
Construction of Medea [ edit ]
Medea, which has been found in nature only in flour beetles, is the only selfish gene that has been simulated in the lab and tested in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The toxin was a microRNA that blocked the expression of myd88, a gene vital for embryonic development in insects. The antidote was an extra copy of myd88. The offspring receiving the extra copy of myd88 survived and hatched, while those without the extra copy died. In lab trials where 25% of the original members were homozygous for Medea, the gene spread to the entire population within 10 to 12 generations.[2]
Etymology [ edit ]
Medea was named for the Greek mythological figure of Medea, who killed her children when her husband left her for another woman.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
^ Wade, M.J. and Beeman, R.W. (1994) The Population Dynamics of Maternal-Effect Selfish Genes. Genetics 138: 1309-1314. ^ Science: 316(5824):597-600. doi:10.1126/science.1566060 Chen, C-H. et al. (2007) A Synthetic Maternal-Effect Selfish Genetic Element Drives Population Replacement In Drosophila.: 316(5824):597-600. [1]ST. LOUIS -- Chicago Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville apologized Friday for his behavior on the bench during the second overtime of Thursday night's Game 1 of a Western Conference first-round series against the St. Louis Blues.
The officials were meeting to discuss whether the Blues should be called for delay of game after the puck was sent out of play at 6:51 of the second overtime. A penalty would have given the Blackhawks a 5-on-3 advantage for 36 seconds.
Quenneville was seen on camera gesturing to the officials that the puck went over the glass. When the call went against the Blackhawks, Quenneville appeared to grab his groin area and yell something at the officials.
"I was definitely excited," Quenneville said Friday. "Disappointed [in] the call, but I'll apologize for my behavior. It wasn't appropriate at all. It was a bush-league move on my part."
After a review of the Quenneville's actions, he was fined $25,000 by the NHL.
Asked Saturday about the fine, Quenneville replied, "I can't complain. It was a stupid move on my part."
Blackhawks forward Patrick Sharp said he saw a highlight of Quenneville and thought it was an example of his coach's competitive spirit on the bench.
"Joel's a passionate coach, and he's intense on the bench," Sharp said. "We certainly feel that as players. I think sometimes he wants to get his skates on and go out there and play with us. He's got a fire behind the bench that really filters through the team and makes us play that much better."
The Blues won, 4-3, when Alexander Steen scored 26 seconds into the third overtime.The Detroit Department of Transportation announced the department's largest service expansion in 20 years on Thursday.
According to DDOT and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, the expansion will add about 1,500 trips per week for customers and reduce the average wait time by the end of it in January.
The first wave of expanded service begins on Saturday, Sept. 3 when DDOT will add the first three of six new 24-hour routes across the city. Three more will be added in January, giving the city nine 24-hour routes.
There will also be five new express routes that will help connect Detroiters to the city's job centers. The commute time will be cut by up to 30 minutes in each direction. The routes include:
#95: Northeast (e Outer Dr.) to downtown
#96: West (Joy Rd.) to downtown
#92: Northwest (Grand River) to downtown
#89: Southwest (Fort, Vernor) to DMC, Wayne State and Henry Ford Hospital
#80: East (Jefferson, Lafayette) to DMC, Wayne State and Henry Ford Hospital.
DDOT will also begin Saturday-only nonstop service to Eastern Market from every city council district beginning this month. It will be called Fresh Wagon and came after a series of public meetings with DDOT.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence believes North Korea’s ability to reach the United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile is low, but its capabilities will increase, making continued investment in missile defense essential, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the ballistic rocket launch drill of the Strategic Force of the Korean People's Army (KPA) at an unknown location, in this undated file photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang on March 11, 2016. REUTERS/KCNA/Files
North Korea has publicized a series of tests of its weapons technology since detonating its fourth nuclear bomb on Jan. 6, showcasing its push to develop long-range nuclear missiles despite international sanctions.
Brian McKeon, U.S. principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, told a U.S. Senate hearing that North Korea’s nuclear and missile program posed a growing threat to the United States and its allies in East Asia.
He said North Korea was seeking to develop longer-range nuclear ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States and was working to make its KN-08 road-mobile ICBM operational.
“Although the reliability of an untested North Korean ICBM is likely to be very low, North Korea has used its Taepodong-2 launch vehicle to put a satellite into orbit, thus demonstrating technologies applicable to a long-range missile,” he said, referring to a North Korean rocket launch last month.
Admiral Bill Gortney, the officer responsible for defending U.S. air space, told the same hearing that while U.S. intelligence assessments were that North Korea’s ability to hit the United States was low, it was prudent to assume it had the capability.
“We don’t base our readiness levels on that low probability... We are prepared to engage that particular threat,” he said.
“Eventually, we assess that this low probability will increase, that’s why the investment to have us outpace that technology is absolutely critical.”
Gortney said he agreed with a South Korean assessment that North Korea was capable of putting a nuclear warhead on a medium-range missile that would reach all of South Korea and most of Japan.
He also said he thought it “safe to say” that North Korea’s neighbor and traditional ally, China, no longer exerted the level of potential controlling influence it once had now that current North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was in power.
Gortney said the U.S. ICBM assessment was based on the fact that no tests had been observed of such a missile.
“However... the (Taepodong-2) shows that they have the capability and so you put that capability with the road-mobile capability, with the right engines, with a design of a re-entry vehicle, with a nuclear weapon, and a miniaturization; it’s only a matter of time before they put it together.”
On Saturday, North Korea said it had carried out a successful test of a new ICBM engine and there is an increasing feeling among international arms experts that the country’s missile technology may be more advanced than previously thought.
A U.S. government source told Reuters this week North Korea could have a primitive but operable ICBM “later this decade.”The aftermath of the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others – six fatally – last week has resulted in no plans for sweeping antigun legislation.
Instead, gun control proposals forwarded by members of Congress in the past week have been notably limited in scope – seeking to address only narrow subsections of the population or perceived legal loopholes. The reason: the political calculus of gun control has changed dramatically in the past 20 years, resulting in a strongly pro-gun Congress.
"Let's be honest here: There haven't been the votes in the Congress for gun control," Sen Charles Schumer (D) of New York said on NBC's "Meet the Press." ''We're looking for some things where we can maybe find some common ground."
Senator Schumer, for instance, is forwarding a plan to require the military to inform the FBI when an enlistee is rejected for excessive drug use. Such a policy would have prevented Jared Loughner, the primary suspect in the Tucson, Ariz., shootings from buying a weapon, Schumer said.
Mr. Loughner had attempted to enlist in the Army but was rejected for failing a drug test, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Similarly, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D) of New York is seeking to ban the extended ammunition magazines that allegedly were used in the rampage. With fewer bullets in each clip, attackers would have to reload more frequently, allowing time for them to be subdued.
Rep. Peter King (R) of New York wants to ban guns from an area within 1,000 feet of some high-ranking federal officials.
Meanwhile, at the state level, states are considering expanding gun rights. Arizona, for example, is considering a bill that would make it the second state – after Utah – to allow concealed weapons on college campuses.
The change on Capitol Hill is reflective of a change in the US. The gun culture has broadened beyond aficionados – a fact that was embraced by the Democrats in recent elections. The previous Democratic majority in the House was built significantly on welcoming pro-gun conservative Democrats into the fold.
Indeed, the gun-rights community has made inroads precisely by refusing to back down, even in the face of mass shootings like the one in Arizona. Now, with momentum on their side, gun-rights lawmakers largely can call the shots on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California, who was the principal sponsor of the assault-weapons ban in 1993, told The Los Angeles Times Friday that there was little political will to support a measure that could be seen as curtailing gun rights.
"It's a very hard battle now," she said.
• Wire material was used in this story.At the launch of our recent college Green Week, Trinity College presented the final stages of its bid to secure the Green Flag Award. Part of the assessment comprised a summary of the plants and animals which, along with the rarefied species of Drama studientis and the Lesser Spotted Theoretical Physicist, contribute to campus biodiversity. Foxes were included in this list which surprised me since I had never come across one campus.
Happily though, last Friday evening one made an appearance just in time for the end of Green Week. Displaying the characteristic “boldness” of its habituation to city life and unperturbed by the passing cars, bikes, and rugby players, a large, healthy-looking fox trotted along the road beside me and into a small patch of scrubby bushes outside the Physics building. It must be a member of the den that resides in the Provost’s Garden – which received celebrity status in a recent Irish Times article. It’s intriguing to speculate whether the Trinity foxes cavort on the cricket pitch long after the last reveller has left the Pav on a Friday night? Similarly, I would love to know whether they are exclusive Trinity residents or do they dodge the shoppers on Grafton Street to visit their cousins in St. Stephen’s Green? Perhaps they also visit Merrion Square – pausing along the way to pay homage to some long lost relatives entombed inside display cases within the Natural History Museum.
Urban foxes have received some bad press recently after the rather gruesome story of the fox which bit off a baby’s finger in south east London. The RSPCA was quick to stress that, while truly horrific, this incident was extremely unusual. Despite their reputation for pilfering unguarded bins, foxes are usually quite shy and wary of coming too close to humans. However, in the wake of the London attack, Mayor Boris Johnson, labelled urban foxes as a “pest and a menace” and there were many calls for a large-scale culling operation to be instigated.
These emotive responses to an isolated incident should not be allowed to dictate future policy for dealing with urban foxes. In his recent New Scientist article, Stephen Harris points out that we are more likely to be attacked by pet dogs rather than foxes and culling programs simply don’t work since new animals just move in to fill vacated areas. In his view, it’s human rather than fox behaviours which give cause for concern. He argues that natural history programs which show cavalier presenters coming in to close contact with wild animals encourage people to seek unnatural and sometimes dangerous proximity with urban wildlife. For example, leaving food out in the garden to attract foxes can lead to some great sightings of these beautiful mammals but placing that food close to a house or near open windows or doors is just asking for trouble. Moreover, feeding foxes is a divisive issue in itself – is it akin to leaving food out for birds or does it equate to just attracting unwanted pests into our gardens? Personally, I have no issue with leaving out scraps but buying cat or dog food just for foxes seems excessive, especially when our untidy cities are veritable all you can eat buffets for these city slickers.
Whether you regard them as pest or surrogate pet, foe or friend, foxes are an inescapable feature of urban landscapes. With Trinity’s campus as their playground, who knows what the one I saw gets up to after dark?
Author
Sive Finlay: sfinlay[at]tcd.ie
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wikimedia commonsNew Smartphone App Helps Lonely Women in Japan Make Female Friends, Forbids Date Requests
by USJ Staff 1.26k
When they finish school, many people find that it suddenly becomes extremely tough to make new friends. After being surrounded by peers for a dozen or more years of student life, their social life takes a hit as they get tossed into adult society and spend most of their days at the office, mixed in with people they might not have much in common with or particularly want to spend time with once their shift ends.
The problem becomes even more pronounced for those who move away from their home towns to come to the big city for work, where they find themselves separated from the social circles they built in their student days and prevented from making new ones because of the hustle and bustle of the urban lifestyle. But Japanese smartphone app Tipsys is aiming to give a hand to women who could use a friend, as it’s a social network specifically designed to help women make platonic female friends.
Tipsys allows users to add a number of tags and details to their profile, starting with things such as your hobbies, when you’d like to hang out with some new friends, the neighborhoods that work for you to meet up in, and even your per-outing budget. You can also specify whether you drink (down to your preferences between beer, wine, and sake) and pre-designate that even if the party is still going strong, you’ll be cutting out in time to get on the last train home instead of pulling an all-nighter.
Of course, with just about any social networking service that aims to bring people together, there’s the issue of whether people will simply use it as a way to fish for dates. But again, that’s not the purpose of Tipsys, which clearly states in its rules and regulations that those who use its system to ask someone out on a date will have their account deleted. That’s not just a policy put in place to discourage men from posing as women to sign up for Tipsys, either, as the administrators say the no-asking-other-users-out rule applies to women looking for same-sex relationships as well.
Tipsys isn’t entirely against helping create romantic couplings, though, as it does allow a user to ask others if they’d like to participate in a gokon, or group matchmaking party. Still, you can prevent even those overtures by specifying in your profile that you’re not interested in such invitations, as the true aim of the service is simply to help women make same-sex platonic friends.West Nile virus: State set for spike in cases PUBLIC HEALTH
David Wexler, vector control inspector Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District, dons a respirator and gloves before he treats an area using vectobac 12AS in a channel which was sampled and found to contain a number of mosquito which was above the districts threshold on Friday, June 15, 2012 in Concord, Calif. less David Wexler, vector control inspector Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District, dons a respirator and gloves before he treats an area using vectobac 12AS in a channel which was sampled and found to... more Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close West Nile virus: State set for spike in cases 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
Public health experts are bracing for an especially active West Nile virus season resulting from an unusually warm winter combined with a new federal regulation that is hampering efforts to control virus-spreading mosquito populations.
State vector control agencies have identified eight times as many cases of West Nile virus in dead birds and almost 20 times as many cases of the virus in mosquitoes this year compared with last. West Nile has been detected in 15 California counties, including Contra Costa, Solano and Santa Clara in the Bay Area.
"Last year our first bird was on June 29. This year was on April 9," said Deborah Bass, a spokeswoman for the Contra Costa Mosquito and Vector Control District. "We're obviously out working diligently on this."
Bass and other vector control officials advise residents to start taking precautions against West Nile virus, which means draining any standing water on residential properties - even a bottle cap filled with an inch of rainwater can draw mosquitoes - and reporting dead birds. Residents also are encouraged to report standing water that isn't on their property - for example, a neglected swimming pool behind an empty house - to their vector control district.
West Nile virus is spread to humans by mosquitoes that acquire it from birds. After a human has been bitten by a mosquito, it can take two to 12 days for symptoms to show up. Symptoms include fever, headache, body aches, skin rash and swollen lymph glands.
Most people fully recover, but the virus can cause life-threatening swelling of the brain or partial paralysis. Last year 158 human cases of West Nile virus were reported in California, and nine of those people died. No human cases have been reported yet this year.
But cases of West Nile in birds and mosquitoes are already much higher than usual for this time of year. This year, 95 cases of West Nile have been found in dead birds and 91 samples from mosquito pools have tested positive.
Thriving in warm air
The unusual winter combined with a wet spring probably contributed to the increase in cases because mosquitoes thrive in higher temperatures - they reproduce and mature from larva to adult faster. Plus, the virus replicates faster at higher temperatures.
But vector control agencies also have been hampered this year by regulations that went into effect in January, requiring extra permitting procedures to spray pesticides on water supplies, said officials with the Mosquito and Vector Control Association of California, a nonprofit group that represents state vector control agencies.
A bill that would repeal the new regulations is before the U.S. Senate. Environmental groups oppose the bill because they say it would weaken the federal Clean Water Act. But the new regulations may actually lead to more pesticide use, said officials with the vector control association.
The extra permit rules mean it takes longer for vector control officials to visit possible mosquito sites, and they're missing opportunities to deal with larval mosquito populations in relatively small pools of water, according to the association.
More pesticides
If they can't control the larvae, vector control officials instead have to kill an adult mosquito population, which means using more pesticides over a wider territory, said David Brown, manager of the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District, which has reported more West Nile cases in birds and mosquitoes than any other part of the state.
"We're a little frustrated because we think the regulation has had some unintended consequences," Brown said. "We all want to control mosquitoes in the larval state. It's much preferred over controlling them when they're flying and can travel miles."Since the fall of communism, Romania's ancestral, cultural link to its forests is being undermined by corrupt political and economic interests.
This familial bond to the forest can partly be explained as stemming from the fact that the Romanian people often sought refuge in the woods during the numerous battles that took place throughout the country's tumultuous history.
The forest became a symbol of protection and life, helping perpetuate their nation. The woods served their shielding role not only in ancient and medieval times, but also during Romania's most recent history, ensuring a safe haven for anti-communist fighters, who resisted and opposed the communist regime from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s.
Since the fall of communism, the ancient bond has been tampered with by political and economic interests, as approximately 200,000 hectares of forest have been sold by the Romanian government during the past few years.
Rampant corporate criminality in the forests
According to an audit report created by the Romanian Court of Auditors, between 1990 and 2011, over 80 million cubic meters of forests were illegally cut and sold, producing damages of over $5 billion for the Romanian state. In 2014 alone, the National Forest Inventory indicated that around 9 million cubic meters of forest were illegally exploited.
After decades of silence, on 9th and 16th May as well as 5th June, hundreds of thousands of Romanians reaffirmed their ancestral connection with the forest, by taking to the streets of cities across Romania to protest against the country's astonishing illegal logging and demand the adoption of better legislation than the proposed new Romanian Forestry Code.
Despite the protests, the suggested law was adopted without changes on 21st May 2015.
In Romania, the cost of forests is ten times cheaper than in other European states. If in Austria, a hectare of forest is sold for €10,000, in Romania the same surface costs between €1,000 and €3,000. This attracts investors from many foreign countries, including Germany, Austria, and the United States.
According to Romanian law, foreign investors cannot purchase fields or forests directly, but through Romanian firms. The most telling example would be Harvard University, which owned 35,000 hectares of forest in Romania, making it the second largest owner of forests in Romania after the Romanian government.
However, Harvard decided to sell its forests in Romania, after the representative of Scolopax, the Romanian firm through which it made its purchases, was accused of taking more than $1 million in bribes to induce the university to buy them at an inflated price.
Many of the foreigner investors are only interested in exploiting the forests and exporting the wood and obtaining profit. One of the key companies that the protesters have been demonstrating against is Austria's Holzindustrie Schweighofer, the biggest wood processing company in Romania.
The best form of defence is attack
In April 2015, the company became involved in a media scandal after the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) released a video of one of leaders of the company willingly and knowingly accepting illegally exploited timber and encouraged additional illegal cutting through a reward system. The company denied the allegations.
In turn, in July 2015, the company sued a nonprofit, Neuer Weg Association, one of the most active NGOs monitoring the Schweighofer's activities, for publishing defamatory articles on its blog and sending emails with untruthful information to journalists in Austria and Germany.
Neuer Weg has denied these allegations, by emphasizing that the statements contained on the blog are true and based on documentary evidence as well as discussions with credible witnesses, the veracity of which can be easily proven in court.
These incidents come after, in 2014, one of the Austrian company's suppliers, Susai Servcom, was fined by the Forestry Inspectorate for cutting unmarked trees in Romania's Retezat National Park and for inconsistent transportation notices. In response, the Schweighofer, responsible for the wood processing, promised to improve its system seeking to attest the wood's provenance and refuse trees from national parks.
Protesters had other reasons to be revolted by Schweighofer. In the autumn of 2014, the company sent an open letter to Prime Minister Victor Ponta threatening to conduct mass firings among its over 2,500 employees, if the new Forestry Law was to include a clause limiting the volumes of wood that any individual company could process.
In May 2015, the company threatened to withdraw from Romania if the law was adopted. According to Romania Curata, that threat was sheer bluster, since Romania is losing around 100,000 jobs, given that Schweighofer is exporting semi-manufactured products, while also externalizing most of the profit, since it is a foreign company.
In the event the law was passed on 13th June - complete with restrictions to require more domestic processing of timber into finished products - and Schweighofer remains in business.
Still not good enough
Apart from voicing their disapproval of abuses and questionable activities of wood processing companies such as Schweighofer, the protesters also opposed the draft legislation of the new Forest Law.
While acknowledging that it brings some improvements over the previous one, mainly because of the limits on the maximum quantity of lumber that a company can exploit, its opponents are, overall, displeased with its content.
One of their key problems with the new Forestry Law is that it is no longer necessary to prepare forest management plans or studies for pieces of forest smaller than 10 hectares, which means losing control over cuttings occurring on such surfaces.
Another problematic modification to the Code is that Romania has decreased its reforestation commitments from two million hectares to one million by 2030. The protesters also demand that the new Forestry Code punish illegal logging more stringently, delineate the implementation of sanctions and demand the circulation of the investigation files from the Anti-Corruption Agency.
The law may also cost Romanians dear. Under one controversial provision, explains law firm Cameron McKenna, "Owners of forest land subject to the restrictions imposed by forestry regulations or other applicable legal provisions may receive compensation from the state for loss of profit incurred by such restrictions on use of forest lands."
A partial victory that has rekindled Romanian democracy
Ultimately, the protesters want to ensure that Romania's forest wealth is safeguarded and used responsibly, keeping the interest of future generations in mind as well.
There is a European dimension to the matter at hand. The EU Timber Law prohibits trading on the EU market of illegally harvested timber, regardless of its origin. However, the situation in Romania suggests that the application of the legislation remains a problem that the European Union should be more amply involved in tackling.
The Romanian protesters are resolute in their fight to demonstrate their ancestral bond to forests and continue challenging the content of the Forestry Law. Their movement has only just begun. This will be the third time in three years that Romanians initiate a substantial long-term non-violent protest against one of their government's policies or initiatives.
The first two were a protest movement against a Canadian-led cyanide-based gold mining project and fracking. Therefore, all were environmental initiatives intended to prevent or end a practice seen as harmful, indicating a majority of the Romanian public's commitment to their country's sustainable development, built around preserving and responsibly utilizing their country's natural riches.
At the same time, the three protest movements were not only able to influence political decisions, but also to further an on-going debate within the society regarding the rapport between politicians and the Romanian citizens and the latter's ability to demand and exert change in their country.
By doing this, they are rapidly transforming Romania from a communist and post-communist society to one of the most viable democracies in Eastern Europe and the European Union in general.
Raluca Besliu is a freelance journalist from Romania. She runs a blog about young changemakers and entrepreneurs called Taking on the Giant. You can follow her @Raluca_Besliu
This article was originally published by openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you enjoyed this article then please consider liking Can Europe Make it? onFacebook and following us on Twitter @oD_EuropeIf the rugby league crystal ball is correct, there will be no room in our game for players under 90 kilograms and 180 centimetres by the year 2024.
That means that we could not fit Clive Churchill into the modern game – he was 175 centimetres and weighed 76 kilos. Johnny Raper would also struggle, and the try-scoring freak Ken Irvine at 173 centmetres and 73 kilos was far too short and light.
The wingman in 2024, according to the NRL, will be just under 100 kilos and 187 centimetres. No more ‘Little Masters’ or ‘Chooks’ or ‘Mongos’.
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While the once small halfbacks and five-eighths continue to get bigger and taller, the trusty hooker forward is the only player who will not change, which means he will morph into the game’s smallest player.
The NRL competition and rules committee includes Wayne Bennett, Tim Sheens, John Lang, Trent Robinson, Daniel Anderson, Laurie Daley, Darren Lockyer, Michael Buettner, Mark O’Neill |
envious of, but for some reason or another, they aren't getting the points at present.
But it's certainly not through a lack of quality...
Goals - 8
You will probably find yourself saying 'How is that impressive? Barnsley have already scored 19'. But what you are missing is the fact that Villa have carved open the opposition for every one of their goals.
All of Villa's goals have come from open play. While Barnsley have still managed three more goals in that category than Villa, there are only four other teams to have scored more without the use of set pieces.
Newcastle United have scored nine of their 15 goals thus far from set pieces, which is something to look out for when the two teams clash on Saturday. The game will pit two contrasting styles against each other.
Chances created - 95
The claret and blues have created more chances than any other team in the Championship this season. This stat further highlights how wasteful they have been in front of goal, but the opportunities are coming.
Di Matteo will be hoping that his costly strike force will start finding the net regularly with them soon.
Long balls per game - 69
That number might seem a little excessive, but only Fulham (67) have played less long balls than Villa this season.
Surprisingly, Villa don't feature very highly in terms of short passes per game (321) which might suggest that the club is operating with individuals in attacking areas who are more comfortable dribbling with the ball.
And that theory is backed up by the team averaging nine dribbles per game. Only a handful of their rivals tend to have more in 90 minutes.
What type of passes are Villa tending to use (per game)? WhoScored
Shots per game - 14.3
We've already discovered that the lack of goals isn't down to chance creation, it is down to a poor conversion rate.
Villa are having around 14 shots per game, but only four of them are hitting the target and working the goalkeeper.
When you think back to some of the gilt-edged chances that have been squandered in recent weeks, most of them haven't even hit the target.
Ross McCormack hitting the post from two yards against Brentford? Jonathan Kodjia miscuing the side-foot volley in the same game?
Villa paid a lot of money to acquire the right personnel to finish these chances, the forwards need to start delivering.
Possession - 51%
Teams like Barcelona and Real Madrid can average 70-80% possession each week, but the Championship is a fiercely competitive league between very evenly matched teams.
All of the so-called big boys feature towards the top of the list.
The big difference between Villa and the other names on that list is that they are all sitting high up in the table.
Tackles per game - 17.4
Only Brighton, Birmingham City, Burton Albion, Huddersfield and Nottingham Forest have made more tackles than Villa.
This doesn't show off their footballing prowess, but what it does do, is prove that they aren't a soft touch.
They have also had the most yellow cards in the division with 26 in their eight matches so far and average 13 fouls per game, with just Newcastle and Wigan seemingly more physical.
Interceptions - 17.4
Di Matteo's side seem to be reading the game well and have made more interceptions than all of their Championship rivals bar Ipswich and Burton.Australia's climate extremes are bad enough without further changes, researchers say. Credit:NSWRFS At a regional level, Australia's "angry summer" of 2013 - which smashed many previous records and was notable for extreme heatwaves and widespread bushfires - could become a typical event in less than 20 years, she said. "We're seeing a lot of extremes but that's the part of the climate system that we're vulnerable to," Dr Lewis said. Daytime temperatures of 50 degrees could be experienced during summers in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, while the mercury in Sydney and Canberra will nudge 45 degrees during extreme periods, she added. 'We expect land surfaces to warm up faster than the oceans - and there's a lot of interior in Australia that can warm quite quickly," she said. "We also expect polar regions to warm faster than the tropics - [so] it looks like Australia could have those extremes a little earlier than North America, Asia or Europe." The paper came out on Monday, the day national leaders and delegations are gathering in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh to discuss the implementation of the climate agreement agreed late last year in Paris. That agreement came into force on Friday after almost 100 nations - but not yet Australia - had ratified the deal.
Australia may ratify the agreement before the Marrakesh meeting ends on November 18. The Turnbull government is likely to face stiff questions at the event over the adequacy of Australia's goal of cutting 2005-level emissions by 26 per cent to 28 per cent by 2030, and whether its policies offer a plausible path to that target. While 2015 beat 2014 as the hottest year since reliable data records began in the 1880s, the odds strongly favour the bar being set even higher this year. (See tweet below by Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies.) Dr Lewis noted that natural variations - such as the big El Nino event last year in the Pacific - meant the public should not expect every month or year to break new global heat records.
"We're not expecting every year to be hotter than the previous one but the trend should be for us to be experiencing more extremes," she said. "The median time of emergence of 2015 as the new norm occurs between 2020 and 2030 under all emissions trajectories," the paper found. (See chart below of observations and the forecast warming of four main carbon emissions scenarios, with RCP8.5 the highest.) The paper aimed to provide a technical definition for determining the "new normal", a term regularly bobbing up in science and public discussion around extreme climate events. (See Tweet below for a recent example:)
Global temperatures are now running more than 1 degree above pre-industrial-era levels. In Paris, almost 200 nations agreed to keep temperature increases to less than 2 degrees, with an aim of even 1.5 degrees, in order to avoid dangerous climate change. 'Dispiriting' Dr Lewis was also critical of people such as Senator Malcolm Roberts who on Monday launched a report titled: "On climate, CSIRO lacks empirical proof." "We're trying to communicate the need to pay attention and adapt," Dr Lewis said. "There's a certain amount of warming already locked in, and we should be preparing.
Loading "But as a community we're not likely to be taking this seriously if we're hearing influential voices that it's not a problem and that it's been falsified," Dr Lewis said. "So it's really dispiriting." Follow Peter Hannam on Twitter and Facebook.As a big fan of Bethesda’s open world RPGs, I’ve been utterly absorbed in Skyrim for the past week or so. As I’ve been playing, I’ve been struck by the way that certain mechanisms obscure and distort the way the space of the game is presented to the player. Some of these mechanisms are common to this series or lineage of games since at least Oblivion, so they’re definitely relevant to my examination of Fallout 3, but Skyrim seems to push them even further, and even has significant differences in the way they operate.
There are three mechanisms that I see as being both the most prominent ways Skyrim does this distortion, and which are, though not unique to video game spaces, certainly mechanisms with no direct analogue to real-world spaces. These are level of detail reduction, perspective distortion, and the fast-travel system.
By level of detail reduction, I mean the various means by which the game’s graphics engine renders visual elements with less detail the further away they are from the viewer. In Skyrim these include using less complex geometry, using lower resolution textures, and not displaying elements such as grass, non-player characters and so on for far away landscape. Doing this reduces the rendering load, and allows the game to run on less high-powered hardware, but it also serves to create an impression of distance. Human players are accustomed to being able to make out less detail on far away objects in the real world, but Skyrim renders landscapes with lower detail at a much closer distance than that which would reduce perceptible detail in the real world. That is, landscapes in Skyrim get less detailed at much less distance than real-world landscapes do. This creates a kind of optical illusion, that produces the impression that landscapes affected by level of detail reduction are further away than they actually are, meaning the player gets the impression that there is greater distance between their present location and the landscape they’re seeing. A stretch of landscape that might actually only take a few minutes to cross looks much further across than it is, and this creates the impression of there being much more space in the game’s world than is in fact the case. One thing that’s particularly interesting about level of detail reduction is that the degree to which it happens varies based on what the hardware the game runs on can support, and the graphics settings chosen (or altered using a mod or console commands) by the player. Some technically-minded PC players will go to great lengths to ‘correct’ what they see as a significant flaw in the game’s graphics. But even on the highest settings, there’s a significant degree of distortion created by level of detail reduction.
Perspective distortion creates a similar optical illusion. What I mean by perspective distortion is primarily the way that the game’s graphics engine renders far away landscapes as smaller than they would appear with a more natural perspective. Just like the level of detail reduction, this creates the impression that these landscape elements like mountains and cities are further away than they actually are. But there’s also a degree of distortion in the way that mountains are rendered taller than they actually are, relative to the surrounding landscape. Perspective distortions such as these create a sense of the spaces involved being much larger than the physical geometry actually is in practice. Unlike level of detail reduction, perspective distortion does not conserve system resources in itself. In fact, applying the distortion when rendering the game’s visuals creates an additional overhead. But like level of detail reduction, it creates an impression of immense space without that space needing to actually be present in the game world’s physical geometry. So in a way, it helps conserve system resources by allowing the impression of distance to be created with less game world geometry.
Unlike the other two mechanisms, fast-travel isn’t solely a matter of visual presentation of the space, and while the other two appear in pretty much the same way in Fallout 3, Skyrim’s fast-travel is a little different in one particularly important respect. While fast-travel from the map in both Fallout 3 and Skyrim only allows you to travel to previously visited locations, Skyrim also includes another form of fast-travel: horse-drawn carriages that can take you to the game’s major settlements instantly, whether you’ve been there before or not. This is a bit like Morrowind’s public transport fast travel systems, though much less limited: every one of Skyrim’s horse-drawn carriages can take you to every one of the major settlements. I discuss fast travel systems in much more depth in my MA thesis, but what’s important here is that both these forms of fast-travel involve moving between geographically distant locations without any regard to the space between. Significantly, many of the destinations that the horse-drawn carriages can get you to do not feature a horse-drawn carriage departure point. Once you’re there, you have to either use fast-travel or walking or riding normally to get anywhere else. The conjunction of the horse-drawn carriages and map-based fast-travel means that the major settlements in Skyrim can serve as hubs for exploration of the surrounding space, but it also means that it’s easy for the player to visit a large number of locations in the game world without really establishing a clear idea of how they relate to each other in the game world’s physical geography. Sure, you’ll always see where they are in relation to each other on the map, but the map’s scale can only be understood by reference to direct experience of the space it represents. And as has been established, that experience is always subtly distorted.
What these three mechanisms do is disconnect the player’s perception of distance and spatial relationships between locations from the actual spatial relationships between those locations as they exist in the game world’s physical geography. And there’s a particular emphasis on exaggerating the distance between locations. It’s very easy to get the impression that two locations are much further from each other than they actually are. What’s particularly interesting to me is the way this works with the way that spaces in Bethesda’s open world RPGs have been designed, at least since Morrowind, with a degree of abstraction. This is is something I (perpetually) mean to cover in its own post, but I’m talking about the way small towns and cities seem to be stand-ins, symbolic representations, of larger actual settlements within the fiction of the game, and particularly relevant to the question of distorting space, the way that relatively short distances between settlements seem to be symbolic of longer distances in the fiction. These means of spatial distortion seem to support that abstraction to a greater degree in Skyrim than in previous games in this lineage, even as Skyrim features larger actual settlements and distances than the prior games mostly have. They’re almost a means of extracting that fictional distance from the abstraction actually present in the geometry, decompressing the space in the player’s perception.
The relationship between different places is crucial to establishing sense of place, and these mechanisms don’t so much destroy those relationships as they do distort and disrupt it. This makes accounting for them and taking them into consideration essential to understanding the way that sense of place is created in these games.
AdvertisementsBy now, you may have seen that many of our friends – including Adobe, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla – have announced their plans to support a move away from Flash. If you’re a web content creator, this shouldn’t be shocking news. The trend has been moving away from closed browser plugins for a while. We ourselves stopped supporting Flash in 2013 and our own Unity Web Player in 2016. For Flash, recent events are noteworthy, because specific information has been released, allowing the industry to plan for a Post-Flash world.
Creating Interactive Web Content with Unity
As the industry turns the page on Flash, Unity will continue to support interactive experiences on the web through WebGL. We’ve officially supported it as a build target since 2015, and had even helped craft specifications before then. Today, we actively collaborate with our browser friends – Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple – to ensure compatibility and an optimal experience. We will continue to do so.
While collaborating with the industry, we continue to make our own implementation better and better. Some recent improvements: We added support for WebAssembly, which promises faster start-up times and better performance; so much so, that it could be a game changer (more details). We’ve also introduced linear rendering for better graphics. In addition to adding new features, we continue to optimize our own implementation and performance. There’s still some limitations: memory, threading etc… these can manifest in performance issues on 32-bit browsers and mobile devices. We expect some organic resolution, as end users adopt 64-bit browsers and more powerful mobile devices. Furthermore, we expect browsers will continue improving their implementations of WebGL and WebAssembly. We’re especially excited about Shared Array Buffer support, enabling native multithreading for much better performance.
The result of all this is that today, with Unity’s WebGL export, you can deploy your Unity projects to the web, just like any other platform Unity supports (Official Compatibility List).
Need to see what you can do with WebGL and Unity today? Check out some web games, on our Made with Unity site.
Thoughts for the Future
While the industry has (and will continue) to rapidly change, we believe the web is an important platform to support. We, Unity, built our name by supporting a wide range of platforms. As always, we will continue our mission to Democratize Game Development by supporting you all, by supporting the platforms and technologies you want to create for, such as mobile, web, VR – and perhaps all three in a single experience!When you head into downtown Raleigh for First Night on Sunday, it might be a good idea to have a strategy for how you’ll get out.
That’s because while people will trickle in to downtown over many hours on New Year’s Eve, they’ll leave in a great wave shortly after the midnight fireworks. The result can be gridlock.
First, decide where you want to park. The large parking decks are clustered around the Raleigh Convention Center and along Wilmington Street. The Downtown Raleigh Alliance provides a list of parking lots with a map at www.godowntownraleigh.com/get-around/parking. Know how to get to where you want to park and, more importantly, which route you want to take to get out.
Second, be aware of the streets that will be closed. Of course, there’s Fayetteville Street, the center of the festivities, and all of the streets that cross it. Not only does that include Hargett, Martin and Davie streets, but also Morgan Street, on the south side of the State Capitol, which will be closed between Salisbury and Wilmington streets from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m.
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Other temporary street closures include:
▪ Edenton Street, on the north side of the State Capitol, between Salisbury and Wilmington, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
▪ Salisbury Street, between Jones and Davie streets, from 6 to 7 p.m.
▪ Lenoir and South streets, between Salisbury and Wilmington, around the times of the fireworks, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.
Want to avoid driving downtown? GoRaleigh will run shuttle buses from park-and-ride lots at Triangle Town Center mall and the N.C. State park-and-ride lot at Oval Drive and Initiative Way on Centennial Campus. Buses will run every 30 minutes from 5 p.m. until 12:30 a.m., and regular fares apply: $1.25 one way and $2.50 round trip. Off-duty Raleigh police officers will provide security at the park-and-ride lots.
The free R-Line bus that circles downtown and connects to the Glenwood South district will run until 2:15 a.m. For information, go to www.godowntownraleigh.com/get-around/r-line.
There will also be two taxi cab lines running from 8 p.m. until 1 a.m. You’ll find them on the east side of Salisbury street, between Morgan and Cabarrus streets, and on the west side of Wilmington Street, between Morgan and Davie streets.Porsche has been extremely guarded about what’s behind the black louvered panel that hides the new 911 RSR’s engine bay. Under that panel, Porsche made the best use of the 911's meager backseat space by stuffing in a 510-horsepower endurance racing flat-six engine to make the RSR they use for legendary races such as Daytona and Le Mans.
Here, you can see a big firewall that separates the engine bay from the cabin of the car. The roll cage extends into the engine bay just as if it were the 911's backseat, however, its only passenger produces the 510-horsepower, 991-generation 4.0-liter engine that makes it go. Of course, this also necessitates the use of a rear-view camera as well as a collision avoidance system inside the cabin.
The reason for this change, as we know, was to accommodate a gigantic rear diffuser that was recently allowed for GTE-spec race cars. That diffuser sits where the bottom of the 911's rear engine usually sits.
All of the changes were sparked by the need to fit in that rear diffuser and catch up to the rest of the cars the 911 RSR competes against. The front aero was changed to balance out the car. The rear wing moved to a top-mounted design. More quick-change parts make things easier to access and get to.
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Then there’s the engine, that went to what Porsche calls a “rigid valve drive” with a solid lifter camshaft to eliminate the extra weight of a hydraulic system. It’s a preview of what goes into the next GT-series road cars, like the 911 GT3. Its exhaust, which is routed through that meaty diffuser, has separate pipes now, changing the sound.
Going mid-engine has had a number of benefits, like more manageable tire wear from distributing the load more evenly across all the 911's wheels. The window of tuning—as in, the range of set-up options where the car still works well—is also a lot larger, per the Porsche representative I spoke with.
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I was relieved to hear from Porsche crew members that one signature feature of the 911 RSR didn’t go away with the move to a mid-engine layout: its ability to run well in the rain. It wasn’t annoying or snappy, which is good.
Other, less obvious changes were safety upgrades made in response to driver Richard Lietz breaking his arm at Virginia International Raceway in 2014. There was enough cockpit intrusion in Lietz’s crash that Porsche opted to move the new RSR’s seat 50 mm inboard and fix it in place, such that the geometry of the roll cage will be ideal for whoever sits in it. The pedals and the steering wheel now move instead to accommodate different-height drivers.
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Mostly, though, I’m jealous of this 911's rear passengers. The newest, most state-of-the-art flat-six engine beats whiny people any day.
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AdvertisementRep. Brian Higgins, D-Buffalo, is calling for action in the Commodore Perry neighborhood off of South Park Avenue. He will hold a news conference at 10:30 a.m. Monday to announce his plans for the deteriorating housing complex that stretches from near downtown into South Buffalo's Old First Ward.
The Perry complex sits less than a mile from Canalside, and while the six towers and some of the low-standing apartments are occupied, more than 300 of the oldest apartments are vacant, some for more than a decade.
The Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority is looking for state or federal funds to knock them down, and to rebuild low-income housing as part of a larger mixed-income neighborhood.
Many residents say they are convinced the housing authority is delaying repairs at Perry because the property will be sold, either to developers or to the Buffalo Bills for a new stadium. The area has been mentioned as a possible site for a new stadium for the Bills, but team owners Terry and Kim Pegula so far have shown little interest in building a new stadium in the city or anywhere else.
The Commodore Perry apartments consist of three sets of apartment complexes that, at one time, totaled 1,000 apartments. Today, there are about 740 units. The three sets are:
- Six high-rise buildings built in 1956, containing about 326 apartments, nearly all occupied.
- Rowhouse apartments built in 1956. A majority of 84 are occupied.
- The original flat-roofed, rowhouse apartments built in 1939. These are in the worst shape. Initially, there were 634, but many were demolished in the late 1990s, leaving about 330. Almost all are vacant.
The housing authority has been working for the past decade on redevelopment plans for the full 41-acre Perry complex.
Those plans call for retaining the six high-rise buildings and demolishing 300 to 400 low-rise brick apartments, and then replacing them with new housing and related amenities. Demolition costs are pegged at $10 million, while combined demolition and redevelopment costs have ranged from $44 million to $200 million depending on the extent of the plan.
The agency at one point received a federal planning grant for the Perry redevelopment project, and now is hoping to receive money for the demolition and redevelopment from a housing fund that New York State recently approved. The agency also hopes federal redevelopment funds could become available.In the preface to the Dilbert collection This Is the Part Where You Pretend to Add Value, Adams openly gives his impressions of 16 years of employment at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell:
“If I had to describe my 16 years of corporate work with one phrase, it would be ‘pretending to add value.’ … The key to career advancement is appearing valuable despite all hard evidence to the contrary. … If you add any actual value to your company today, your career is probably not moving in the right direction. Real work is for people at the bottom who plan to stay there.”
Other office workers have presented similar accounts. In The Living Dead, David Bolchover rues “the dominance of image over reality, of obfuscation over clarity, of politics over performance,” and in City Slackers, Steve McKevitt, a disillusioned “business and communications expert,” gloomily declares: “In a society where presentation is everything, it’s no longer about what you do, it’s about how you look like you’re doing it.”
The simulation, the glossing over, the loss of meaning, the jargon, the games, the office politics, the crises, the boredom, the despair, and the sense of unreality—these are ingredients that often reappear in popular accounts of working life. The risk when they only appear in popular culture is that we begin regarding them as metaphors or exaggerations that may well apply to our own jobs but not to work in general. But what would happen if we started taking these “unserious” accounts of working life more seriously?
Consider the last novel by David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, in which an IRS worker dies by his desk and remains there for days without anyone noticing that he is dead. This might be read as a brilliant satire of how work drains liveliness such that no one notices whether you are dead or alive. However, in the strict sense of the word, this was not fiction. In 2004, a tax-office official in Finland died in exactly the same way while checking tax returns. Although there were about 100 other workers on the same floor and some 30 employees in the auditing department where he worked, it took them two days to notice that he was dead. None of them seemed to feel the loss of his labors; he was only found when a friend stopped by to have lunch with him.
How could no one notice? I talked with over 40 people who spent half of their working hours on private activities—a phenomenon I call “empty labor.” I wanted to know how they did it, and I wanted to know why. "Why" turned out to be the easy part: For most people, work simply sucks. We hate Mondays and we long for Fridays—it's not a coincidence that evidence points towards a peak in cardiac mortality on Monday mornings.
There are, of course, exceptional cases. According to a Gallup report from last year, 13 percent of employees from 142 countries are “engaged” in their jobs. However, twice as many are “actively disengaged”—they’re negative and potentially hostile to their organizations. The majority of workers, though, are simply “checked out,” the report says.David Gomersall, 25, attacked John Coxall, 80, using a bed sheet wrapped around his hands (Picture: NTI)
A prisoner strangled a fellow inmate to death because he looked too much like Santa Claus, a court has heard.
David Gomersall, 25, put John Coxall, 80, in a headlock before choking him with a sheet wrapped around his hands on December 3 last year.
He had been due to see a mental health nurse on the day of the killing but failed to attend.
Gomersall denied murder at Nottingham Crown Court.
The court hard how the pensioner tried to shout ‘help me, help me’ as he was brutally murdered in his cell before being discovered by prison guards.
In a police interview played to the jury on Monday, Gomersall, who was serving three years for threatening to kill someone, said: ‘I grabbed him in a headlock.
‘I had a piece of bed sheet wrapped around my hand. I kind of choked him with the bedding sheet thing. He looked like Santa. How can you kill Santa, man?’
He claims ‘the voices’ in his head told him to carry out the attack at HMP Nottingham (Picture: Google)
Jurors heard a prison officer found Coxall, who was in jail for breaching a restraining order over an ongoing neighbour dispute, dead on the floor of his cell.
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Gomersall told Detective Constable Emma Braybrook, from Nottinghamshire Police, during the interview: ‘The voices kept telling me to kill him.’
Prosecutor Shaun Smith QC said: ‘As David Gomersall was later to tell the police, Mr Coxall did put up some resistance.
‘But what little he was able to offer was snuffed out by this man’s youth and by this man’s strength as he sat astride him.
‘He used so much force to pull the ligature tight that he fractured some of Mr Coxall’s ribs.’
The jury was told that the issue was not whether the defendant carried out the killing, or his intention but what his mental state was at the time.
The trial continues.Sometime in the late 1980s, the British invaded and changed comic books forever. Superman may stand for the American way — at least most of the time — but it took Scotsman Grant Morrison to write one of the best modern interpretations of the Man of Steel with All-Star Superman. Morrison’s latest work, Supergods, is an analysis of what superheroes, caped crusaders, and masked men can tell us about ourselves and our culture. It’s a fascinating discussion, and one that continued when he got together with fellow comic book icon and Sandman maestro Neil Gaiman to discuss their medium, their lives, and each other’s work in a wide-ranging conversation that EW was lucky enough to listen in on.
NEIL GAIMAN: First off, congratulations! You’ve got a book out.
GRANT MORRISON: Oh, thank you. It’s great after 30 years of actually taking it seriously to finally write it down.
NG: I’m in this wonderfully blank position on this one, because I haven’t actually seen the book. So instead of doing that thing where I say, “I really liked that thing and can you expand upon it?”, we’re now in the position, as we would be over dinner, when I say, “So you’ve got a book out! What’s it about?”
GM: It’s about us. It’s about all the things we went through as kids, with comic books and superheroes. Why have they taken over the world and why are they so ubiquitous on the buses and on the tube trains and such? I devised a theory. That thing that was started in 1938 has been growing and growing and colonizing more minds and is starting to come into our real lives. I kind of think that superhero movies tend to represent this Utopian ideal of humanity because we’ve run out of them. There is no space program here anymore. I’m sure in China people feel slightly different about this, but certainly here in the West, it’s almost a time of disaster and apocalypse. It’s kind of obvious that a superhero would arise in a time of disaster and apocalypse and stand with hands on hips to remind us that we’re all okay.
NG. I find myself peculiarly reminded of these strange stories that it seems everybody who’s written comics extensively has. Was it you that told me of the mysterious Superman pauper?
GM: He was a real person, but he played it all in the character of Superman.
NG. Alan Moore talked about running into John Constantine one time, and…
GM: What happened to you?
NG: I had a few of them. The one that always haunted me — you’d think that it’d have been Morpheus — but it’s always been Death.
GM: She fancies you, Neil, let’s face it.
NG: One of [the stories] was the point where I realized how absolutely sane, in the sense of “lives in the real world,” Dave McKean is.
GM: Oh, God, yes. Thank God.
NG: You wouldn’t think to look at Dave’s imagery. He was going to the San Diego Comic-Con and he got there late. He was coming over from the UK and his plane came in incredibly late. I asked what happened and a guy had died on the plane, and they had to land and get him taken away to a hospital. It was this whole big thing, a guy in the middle of a transatlantic flight just died. “But I could tell I was coming to Comic-Con,” Dave said, “because there was one of your fans on the plane.” I said, “Oh?” And he said, “Yeah, she was dressed as Death.” And I thought, you know, if it were me, I would have wondered, just for a moment, “What are we saying here?” Dave, of course, has that gloriously rational mind that never does that, whereas you and I are both slightly mad.
GM: Yeah, slightly. Only slightly.
NG: But I like to think that some of the great discoveries have been made by the slightly mad.
GM: Oh, definitely. And I think that slightly mad is just an interesting perspective, isn’t it? That the non-slightly mad don’t quite have, so I think it’s well worth having.
NG: If it wasn’t for being slightly mad, neither of us would do what we do, or be willing to take seriously the ideas that we take seriously and then watch as they wander out into the world.
GM: And then other people start to take them seriously, and then suddenly you’re living in it.
NG: Of course, you can’t really say this because you start to sound incredibly big-headed, but you wonder how much of the stuff that exists in terms of the cultural media landscape exists because you made it up, years ago.
GM: We both know there’s a lot of that. We’ve been working long enough that obviously people have been influenced and inspired, which is fantastic, because we, in turn, were inspired by others like us. It’s hard to avoid sometimes. You don’t want to be big-headed about it, but it’s undeniable.
NG: You can point to giant, obvious ones. The one that I saw most recently, which was neither of us but we can talk about him because he’s not on the phone call, is Alan [Moore]. The Egyptian demonstrators wearing V for Vendetta masks.
GM: Wasn’t that amazing? And that’s become the default face for anarchists. They all wear that now. Everyone wears that on anti-corporate demos, and on all kinds of marches and protests. I’m amazed that that thing has become the real version of what Alan set out to create.
NG: Although it’s kind of a candy version. But what I love about it particularly in Egypt was that it wasn’t a candy version. It actually did what it was meant to do. I think there’s a difference between wearing it on a corporate march just so that you can’t be spotted, and the idea that they brought down a government. They brought down a bad government! And they brought it down wearing Guy Fawkes masks.
GM: And hopefully playing torch songs on an old piano, as well.
NG: Singing “Old Gangsters Never Die.”
GM: The Superman guy that we met in San Diego was a real person, but it was very much in the mold of what I would describe as a shamanic encounter.
NG: I remember you telling me it was really late at night.
GM: It was half-past-one in the morning and I was sitting up with Dan Raspler, who was the JLA editor at the time, and we were talking about Superman, that whole idea of trying to revamp Superman in the year 2000 and deal with all the problems that had been created in the 1990s. Remember when all the imaginary stories became true stories and suddenly there was nowhere else to go? We were talking about how Superman couldn’t solve these problems and we went down into that little park that’s across from the convention hall, and as we look up there was a guy walking across the tracks with his friend, but this guy’s Superman. And he’s not just any costumed convention-goer, but he’s perfect. He was like Billy Zane-meets-Christopher Reeve and he really suited the costume. So I ran over him and said, “This is quite amazing, this is the perfect time for this to happen. Could you come over and speak with us?” He came right over and he started talking in the persona of Superman. So if I said to him, “How do you feel about Lois?” he’d say “Well, Lois doesn’t quite get that I’m an alien as well as a human.” He was so in the character, but what really got me was the way he was sitting. It was this absolutely relaxed pose with one knee up and the arm bent over, and that’s what broke Superman for me. Suddenly I realized that Superman wouldn’t be a poser, he wouldn’t be a Muscle Beach steroid guy; he’d actually be completely relaxed because nothing could hurt him. He could be so open and friendly to everyone because no one can punch him or hurt him. He can’t get a cold, or be damaged by anything you’re carrying or wearing. For me that was the power of that, whether you want to frame it as magical or not, it actually informed the stories I wanted to write. I felt I understood him in a way I hadn’t until that moment.
NG: I remember responding incredibly well as a kid to Julius Schwartz’s The Private Life of Clark Kent stories. Just the idea that he would go off and try to solve things as Clark Kent. The stuff that we probably mocked when we were just starting out in comics, because it was close enough to us that we mocked it. Things like Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which I now look back and think, “This is actually every bit as good as I thought when I was 14.” But when I was 24…
GM: When you’re 24 you see it in a historical context which has changed and a lot of it seems very shrill and strident, but then you look back on it and you think, well, that’s perfect. The time needed that, after Vietnam and with the President about to betray everyone.
NG: Whenever I see you now, you are this glorious bird of paradise, but I remember, just as for you I will always be a nervous, hungry young journalist, I remember you as a kid in a black raincoat, incredibly shy. The thing that would get you animated was the point where you’d start talking about a story, and you would come to life.
GM: |
of trepidation due to a general distrust of the government. Just because you are promised tax-free distributions twenty, thirty, or even forty years from now, doesn’t mean the economy won’t change so much that the rules are forced to change.
Hopefully that won’t happen and Roth IRA distributions will remain tax-free for the long haul, but many investors fear the worst. After all, thirty years from now is practically a lifetime away.
6 Reasons to Get a Roth IRA
Although Roth IRAs are far from perfect, no retirement savings vehicle offers terms that everyone will love. In the real world, there are plenty of reasons a Roth IRA could be the perfect addition to your long-term savings and retirement strategy. Here are 6 times when a Roth IRA makes perfect sense:
1. You think you’ll be in a higher tax bracket when you retire.
If you think you’ll be in a higher tax bracket when you retire or have reason to believe taxes will be higher across the board, contributing to a Roth IRA now might be a tax-savvy move. By contributing with after-tax dollars that were charged a lower tax rate now, you can save money by not paying taxes on your distributions later. At least in theory, this is how it is supposed to work.
2. You want to diversify your exposure to taxes.
If you’re contributing to tax-advantaged retirement accounts in addition to a Roth IRA, you’re in the best position to diversify your exposure to taxes – both now, and in the future. All of us will pay now, or we’ll pay later, but by having traditional retirement accounts and a Roth, you’ll experience a little bit of both.
3. You’re already maxing out your work-sponsored retirement accounts.
If you’re maxing out your tax-advantaged retirement accounts and still want to save more for retirement, a Roth IRA might be a smart bet. After all, it just gives you another place to stash away your retirement dollars – and the money you invest could grow considerably over time.
4. You want to invest for retirement, but think you might need to get your money out one day.
Since you can deduct your contributions from a Roth IRA at any time without penalty, a lot of people use them as a form of long-term savings. They may not think they’ll need to access that money, but they want to leave the door open to the option.
A Roth IRA is a smart place to invest your money if you know that you may need it before retirement.
However, it’s important to note that a Roth IRA will inevitably have more risk than other long-term savings vehicles like Certificates of Deposit (CDs) or savings accounts. With a Roth IRA, you can actually lose money.
5. You want flexibility in terms of when you take withdrawals.
Where 401(k) plans and traditional IRAs force you to begin taking withdrawals at age 70 1/2 at risk of paying a large penalty if you don’t comply, the Roth IRA has no such requirement. Therefore, this type of account is a great option for anyone who doesn’t want the hassle of forced distributions when they get old enough.
6. A Roth IRA is a solid estate-planning tool – at least when it comes to taxes.
If you don’t think you’ll need every penny of your retirement funds, a Roth IRA is a great place to stash away your extra dollars. Since distributions are generally tax-free, you can usually leave your account to your heirs, which will allow them to take tax-free distributions.
With your tax-advantaged retirement accounts, on the other hand, your heirs will need to pay income taxes on your retirement funds as they withdraw them.
The Bottom Line
If you think a Roth IRA might be in your future, don’t delay. Get started now by choosing one of the above accounts to get started with. Not sure which account you want? Our posts on the best places to open Roth IRA and the best online stock brokers can help you figure out which broker will work best for your retirement goals, and your personal investing style.
Sources:
Treas. Reg. § 1.401-1(b) (1)(ii) and Revenue Rulings 71-295 and 68-24
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-10-84.pdf
This information is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized tax advice. We suggest that you discuss your specific tax issues with a qualified tax advisor.Every company is a tech company, and that’s a big problem. Or rather, either every company is a tech company but most suck at it, or most aren’t tech companies but should be. Either way, we’re gonna have a bad time. Stock photo companies oughta be making more images of hackers because that cat burglar / hoodie dude behind a computer isn’t going to cut it when sh*t hits the fan on a weekly basis.
Somehow, no one seemed to realize that connecting the Internet to everything was a terrible idea despite also being a great idea. We built information super-highways…yay, great…but most businesses forgot the guardrails.
The Equifax disaster is just warning shot compared to what’s to come.
It used to be that getting hacked or breached meant you had to change all your passwords. Attackers hit tech-first companies that at least had a basic understanding of security, and a limited amount of your immutable personal information. The Yahoo breaches from 2014 and 2015 that impacted over 1 billion users were huge, but not nearly as harmful as what happens now.
Today, the hacks and breaches are hitting banking and credit companies, government databases, voting machines, and public utility infrastructure. That stolen data can’t always be changed, like your date of birth. Unless the government decides to reissue everyone a new social security number, once it’s stolen, it’s permanently vulnerable to exploitation.
For a quick recap, the Equifax breach hackers stole data including the full names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, home addresses and more from 143 million Americans. That data could be used to steal people’s identities, take out fraudulent loans, or power social engineering attacks where hackers call your bank or cell phone carrier and use info only you should have to trick them into providing access to your accounts.
A brief look back on Techmeme surfaces plenty of other hair-raising attacks.
And those are just a few of the headlines from the past month. We have years or decades of this to come.
That’s why we need every company to become a good tech company. Double the security budgets, break up sensitive into different databases, stop issuing unrandomized backup passwords. Clamp down with hardcore firewalls and physical security. Always update to the latest operating system security patches. Let us two-factor everything. Train customer service reps to spot social engineering hacks, and make sure every employee knows how avoid phishing attacks.
Meanwhile, software makers like Microsoft need to step up and take more responsibility for protecting older versions of their operating systems. And governments need to more aggressively punish companies with weak security such that it’s too expensive to risk. The US failed to approve a 2015 bill proposed by Obama that would require public disclosures of breaches within 30 days, with penalties for keeping people in the dark. While some states have adopted their own disclosure rules, they’re a haphazard patchwork.
Europe has set a good example with its new laws coming into effect in 2018 that levy stiff fines against companies that don’t disclose a data breach within 72 hours (with some exceptions). Violators can get slapped with a penalty of up to 2% of their global annual revenue, which would have stuck Equifax with over $60 million in fines.
Unfortunately, not all these changes are going to happen. So the future will require people and governments to make a new type of judgement call: How secure must a company’s technology systems be such that the benefit of giving it access to information or infrastructure outweighs the risk of havoc caused by a potential breach.
Most people won’t have the knowledge or interest to be able to accurately make this call. Most governments will be too slow-moving or penny-pinching to effectively make this call. The companies will knowingly downplay the risk to boost their businesses. And the hackers will laugh all the way to the bank, whether they want to steal everything inside or just burn it down.A couple of questions…
~ How the hell did Alex get Sidney pulled into the game? Where the hell would they have met? Wren didn’t know her.
~ Who pulled Jenna out of the blind school after Spencer was shot? Who gave her tea and what did the Braille papers tell her? She smiled like she was very pleased.
~ Who was Bethany Young? Was she another child of Mary’s or just the child of Mr. Young who Jessica was having an affair with? Why did she have to call Jessica Dilaurentis “Aunt Jessie?”
~ Did Alex want Sidney to shoot Spencer to kill her or just injure her?
~ Why did Noel decide to help CeCe torture the liars??
~ Who was the guy in the doll house in the suit with the short brown hair? The one Spencer said “felt familiar to her?” Was it Wren? Maybe Noel? Or just another “who the F knows” moment?
~ What did Ali mean by, “You know why I picked you, right?”
Anyone have any answers?This article is over 2 years old
Ukip leader sets out his vision for a ‘self-governing, self-confident’ country in the event of a vote to leave the EU
David Cameron will not remain as prime minister if voters back Brexit on 23 June, Nigel Farage has claimed.
The Ukip leader told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show that voters have the chance to make Britain a “self-governing, self-confident” country by supporting the Leave campaign at the forthcoming referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.
Poll boost for Remain campaign Read more
He also said he believed a vote to leave the EU would force Cameron from No 10.
Farage said: “If we win the referendum we have to make sure that a British government carries out the will of the people.
“I have seen referendums all over Europe where the people’s voice has been ignored.
“So Ukip being strong and making sure that the government and the prime minister - which won’t be David Cameron in my view - but whoever it is, making sure they do go for Article 50 of the treaty and start the process of political divorce.”
Farage was also asked to set out his vision of a post-Brexit Britain.
“Self-governing, self-confident and much more global in outlook,” he said.
“We have become too obsessed with Europe. It’s an important market place but there is a big world out there.”
Farage made the case for increased social mobility when he was asked what sort of country Ukip would deliver if it was in power.
He said: “The big thing I can see is there are 7% of people in this country, people like you and me, whose parents are rich enough to send us to private school and that 7% are now dominating business, politics, the media, even sport and the rest of the population is being left behind.
“I think we need a lot more social mobility in this country. I think much of that comes through the education system.”A Massachusetts state official announced Wednesday that the total cost of the Big Dig, also known as the Central artery/Tunnel Project, is estimated at $24.3 billion, making it the most expensive highway project in U.S. history. We did some of our own digging and made a list of seven things that cost less than the Big Dig. They may surprise you.
7. Hubble Space Telescope, 1990 - Final cost: $4.5-$6 billion
(AP)
One of the largest space telescopes ever built, the Hubble was as important to astronomy as any telescope could be. After years of delays, the telescope finally went into orbit in April 1990, millions of dollars over budget.
6. The Large Hadron Collider, 2009 - Final cost: $6 billion
(AP)
The LHC has been called the biggest and most expensive scientific experiment in human history. Still, the cost of the particle collider is only a fraction of the cost of the Big Dig.
5. All of Mark Zuckerberg’s Shares In Facebook, 2012 - Value: $13.7 billion
(AP)
Mark Zuckerberg owns 443 million shares of Facebook. At the time of this article, Facebook’s stock price is valued at roughly $31, making his shares worth $13.7 billion – nearly $10 billion less than the cost of the Big Dig.
4. Airbus A380, 2007 - Final cost: $15 billion.
(AP)
The airbus A380 is the largest passenger airline in the world, carrying up to 555 people and one heck of a price tag.
3. Eurotunnel's Channel Tunnel, 1994 - Final cost: $21 billion
(AP)
The Channel Tunnel ("Chunnel") connects Britain to France and is considered one of the seven wonders of the modern world. But that came at at price. After going 80 percent over its predicted budget, the Chunnel ended up costing a whopping $21 billion.
2. The entire net worth of Michael Bloomberg, 2012 - Value: $22 billion
(AP)
In other words, if the cost of the Big Dig were a person, it’d be the 17th wealthiest person in the world.
1. Sending the entire population of Flint, Michigan to the most expensive four-year college in the country, 2012 - Final cost: $24.2 billion
(CBell34.com)
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, the most expensive college in the country is Sarah Lawrence College with a price of $59,170 including room and board. With Flint’s population of 102,434 that means the entire town can be sent to the four-year college with still a few million dollars left over.The fall sees the end of the boating season for most of us. The colder months can take its toll on a boat left out in the harbor, pier side, or even in a covered trailer spot. This is why winterizing your boat and protecting it from the cold temperatures is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to extend the life of their precious asset.
How much time and effort you spend on maintaining your boat in the winter will define how your boat performs next season, and will also save on any additional maintenance costs you might have to incur come springtime. If you are counting on your insurance policy to take care of some of the repair costs for you, think again. There is a lot of damage resulting from neglect and a general lack of winter maintenance, which your insurance policy will not cover.
The best place to begin is to create a winter boat maintenance checklist of all the items that you need to get done. The owner’s manual of motor and your boat will be a salient and ideal place to begin for recommendations on the right sort of winterization for your boat. But here are a few generic but specific and necessary items that should find its way onto your checklist.
Choose the Storage Location
During the harsh temperatures of the winter season, it is important that you boat be out of the water if at all possible and preferably in a climate-controlled boat storage area. This is an expensive proposition though, and if it isn’t one that you can afford, at least try shrink wrapping your boat, which is a cheaper option. Essentially, your boat should be covered with a sturdy cover such as a tarp.
Wipe Down the Deck
The deck of your boat, especially a teak one, doesn’t need extensive treatments such as varnishing, but does well with a simple wipe down to remove salt water.
Clean the Hull
Make sure you clean the hull of your boat using the right cleaning agents and a sponge in gentle, circular motions. Avoid those that contain harmful chemicals or bleach which may compromise the state of your hull.
Sand a Steel Boat
Corrosion can cause a lot of damage to a steel boat. Keep corrosion at bay by sanding, scraping, chipping, and grinding down areas that are damaged.
Flush Inboard Engines
Begin by running the engine and changing the oil while still warm to allow the oil to drain better.
Remove and dispose of the oil filer.
Fill up the engine again and check it for leaks.
As your final step, use non-toxic antifreeze to flush the engine using an intake hose.
Start up the engine and allow the circulation of the antifreeze until it begins to exit via the exhaust.
Don’t forget to change the fluid in your transmission.
Remove the spark plugs, spray each cylinder with fogging oil, and wipe the engine down with a towel sprayed with some fogging oil.
Care for Your Outboard Engines
Check the fuel you have remaining in the tank and use fuel stabilizer to treat it.
Use flush muffs with fresh water to flush the engine.
Remove the cowl from the engine and with it running, spray some fogging solution into the air intakes located in the front.
Keep the engine running and take out the fuel line from it. This helps to avoid build-up of deposits from any fuel that may have evaporated.
Keep spraying the fogging solution until the engine shuts off.
Treat the threads and propeller shaft with water resistant grease.
Perform an oil change on the gear in the lower unit.
Use a marvelous wax to polish and lubricate the exterior of the engine.
Use a solution of soap and water to wash the engine down.
Inspect Stern Drives
Check stern drives for barnacles or plant life.
With the gear case drained, check the oil for any moisture which might point to leaking seals that you should immediately repair.
Use a solution of soap and water to wash the lower unit.
Make sure all fittings are greased and fluid levels in the lift or hydraulic pumps are inspected.
Store Outboards & Stern Drives in Down Position
If possible, you want to store your stern drives and outboards in the fully down position. This will help any rain water or snow melt drain out of the lower unit or drive instead of into it and help prevent a problem if it freezes again with water now inside the drive unit.
If you shrink-wrap your boat, consider shrink wrapping the drives also to help deter water intrusion even further.
Thoroughly Check Bilges
Begin by using a solution of hot water, soap, and a stiff brush to clean oil spills.
Spray the clean bilges with a moisture displacing lubricant.
Prevent the water from freezing by adding some antifreeze.
Read Your Manufacturer’s Manual for Fuel Care
Check your manufacturer’s manual for exact details on how to deal with your fuel tanks.
Some suggest adding stabilizer to the fuel, while others recommend filling fuel tanks. There is less condensation that occurs in tanks that are full.
Change the water separator and fuel filters.
Drain Fresh Water Tanks
Make sure you drain the hot water heater and the fresh water tank completely.
Disconnect the in and out lines of the water heater and reconnect them together.
Add non-toxic anti-freeze into the hot water system.
Keep all facts turned on until the antifreeze can be seen emanating from there.
Keep Your Interiors Bare
Make sure that your interiors are as bare as possible. Remove flares, fire extinguishers, fenders, lines, electronics, and so on.
Clean your drawers and lockers out completely.
Clean out your freezer and refrigerator.
Turn cushions on edge to allow air to circulate around them.
Keep mildew at bay by installing a dehumidifier or using odor and moisture absorber products.
Remember Each Boat is Different
Your boat may have additional measures that need to be taken. Contact the manufacturer if your manual doesn’t cover winterizing and storage. It also won’t hurt to find an online usergroup specific to your boat and see what other people have done – including learning from their mistakes.
What Else?
Do you do something that isn’t listed? We’d love to hear about it – just leave us a comment in the box below.Banish any unpleasant odors in your fridge and pantry simply by leaving a small bowl (I like to use empty ramekins) of bicarb soda inside. You don’t need to do anything else! Feel free to leave it up to 6 months to absorb any odors before replacing it with. When you’re done, sprinkle it around your sink before washing it down to give your sick and drain a quick clean as well. 2. Use Vinegar to remove arm pit stains on white shirts
Yellow pit stains are unfortunately unavoidable for some especially in the warm weather. However, removing them is a cinch! Simply soak the affected area with some vinegar and then gently rub the vinegar into the area. You can also use an old toothbrush to do this as well. Let it sit for up to 15 minutes then wash as normal. 3. Mix vinegar, water, tea tree oil for a multi-purpose spray
Make your own chemical-free household cleaner by filling an empty spray bottle (Grab one here) and mixing 1 part water and 1 part vinegar. Vinegar can be a little harsh on the nose so you need to add some essential oil to give it a nice, natural fragrance. Start with 10 drops then work your way up as needed. This rivals any store-bought cleaner but at only a fraction of the price. 4. Disinfect your laundry with natural essential oils
Adding essential oils to your laundry increases the cleaning power as they help fight grease, stains and odor. Plus, they’ll also add a natural fragrance to your washing. Just add 10-12 drops of your favorite essential oil to the recommended amount of liquid detergent. Mix well, and then add to your wash as normal. Lavender and citrus oils like orange and lemon work great. 5. Deep clean the microwave with just a hot bowl of water
When it comes to cleaning things that come into contact with our food, it’s a no-brainer to stay away from harsh chemicals. So the next time your microwave needs a deep clean, all you’ll need is water and lemon. Fill a bowl with water, and squeeze some lemon in. Drop the rinds into the water as well, and microwave until the water boils. As the water boils, it condenses on the sides of the microwave, loosening gunk and dissolving food splatters. Once you’re satisfied with the results, use a clean sponge to wipe everything clean. 6. Make a stainless sink sparkle with just vinegar
If your kitchen sink is lacking its lustre, it’s easy to make it shine bright with eco-friendly materials you already have at home. Once you’ve give your sink a quick wash and rinse removing any food debris, sprinkle the entire sink with bicarb soda. Using a soft sponge, scrub the basin in a circular motion. Rinse the sink with vinegar (which will bubble and fizz, this is normal) then lightly rub with the sponge and rinse the sink with water. Finish by buffing with a paper towel and a touch of olive oil. 7. A spa treatment for your chopping boards using lemon and salt
Your chopping board is one of the hardest working members of your kitchen so treating it to a regular ‘spa treatment’ will not only keep it clean and germ free but also ensures its longevity. To give it a deep spa worthy clean, sprinkle the board with coarse salt and scrub with half a lemon. Once you’re satisfied, rinse with hot soapy water and let dry overnight. 8. Spray vinegar for crystal clear shower screens
Say goodbye to unsightly soap scum building up on your shower screens. To bring back the shine, simply spray some vinegar onto the shower screen, then using a soft sponge, gently scrub the screens to loosen the soap scum and evenly coat the entire surface with vinegar. When you’re ready, rinse with warm water and while still wet use a squeegee to help dry the shower quickly. 9. Super strength oven cleaner: Vinegar and bi carb soda
Vinegar and bicarb soda go hand in hand when it comes to cleaning, and cleaning your oven is no exception. Firstly, scrape out any loose burnt stuff you can see in the oven. Sprinkle a generous amount of bi carb soda over all the other burned spots that couldn’t be dislodged. Follow with some vinegar (in a spray bottle) all over the bicarb and step back as the vinegar and bicarb soda work their magic – 30-45 minutes. Once time is up, take a tough scrubbing sponge or wired scrubber and start working at the stubborn spots. When you’re done, rinse with a cloth and warm water. You might need to wipe and rinse a few times for a thorough clean. 10. Natural carpet freshener
In between deep cleans, your carpet can quickly loose its freshness with kids and pets running all around the home! To make your own carpet freshener, mix a cup of bicarb soda, ½ cup of borax (this will keep fleas away, not required if you have no pets of course) and 15-20 drops of your favourite essential oil. Lightly sprinkle this mixture on your carpet, and let sit for 15 minutes before vacuuming as normal. Bonus! 11. Beauty hack: Coconut oilNext Game: at Denver 12/10/2016 | 8:07PM (CT) MY 9 92.1 The Fan
Backstopped by a career-high 38 saves from freshman goalie, the top-ranked University of Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs skated away from their weekend duel at the University of Denver with a series split, winning 3-1 Saturday night at Magness Arena.The victory propelled UMD (11-3-2 overall; 8-2-0-0 NCHC) past the No. 2 Pioneers (12-3-3; 6-1-3-2 NCHC) and back into the NCHC's top spot, while also snapping Denver's 15-game unbeaten streak."A really good win for our team," said UMD head coach. "It was a grind-it-out kind of win. Two good teams. We battled hard and got a good win."On a night when victory wasn't assured until the final horn, the Bulldog penalty kill played a leading role, denying Denver on all four of its power-play opportunities with a gutsy, hustling effort that had every winning ingredient."We blocked some shots tonight, and you have to do that," said Sandelin. "You've got to have guys willing to do that. Hunter (Miska) was sharp, too."Just as they did one night earlier, the Bulldogs staked Miska to an early lead. Senior left wingerdid the deed, collecting a clever indirect pass through the neutral zone from sophomore defenseman, then cruising up the right side and squeezing a shot through Tanner Jaillet's legs at 4:01 of the first period. It was Osterberg's ninth goal of the season, pulling the senior wing within one goal of team-leadingSkating with the lead, UMD was then whistled for three first-period penalties, but Miska and the Bulldogs were equal to the task, stymieing Denver and even drawing a Pioneers penalty while shorthanded, thanks to a hustling, who was hauled down by Denver's Blake Hillman during the Pioneers' second power play. It helped keep the Bulldogs on equal footing, figuratively and literally, and UMD closed the first period with a lead thanks in part to 12 Miska saves, including a sparkling left-pad kick stop to deny Denver's Will Butcher with two minutes remaining.Another Denver power play midway through the second period tilted the momentum, but ultimately it was the Bulldogs who capitalized on a fortuitous break when Denver's Michael Davies shattered his stick on an attempted blast from the left point. The puck trickled to UMD junior center, who led a quick counterattack with sophomore left winger. Junior defensemanjumped into their wake as his penalty expired, but UMD had all the puck support it needed with a pair of fourth-line righties speeding into the Pioneers' zone. Spurrell fired from the left side and Exell drove to the net, smacking the rebound past Jaillet to extend UMD's lead to 2-0."You need four lines that can play," said Sandelin. "And those guys gave us a good game."Denver answered three minutes later, with senior wing Evan Janssen stuffing a rebound past Miska to make it 2-1, but it was as close as the Pioneers would come, despite firing 58 shots, 12 of which were blocked by Bulldogs.The third period included several Denver flurries and three glorious UMD scoring chances in tight against Jaillet, but neither team found the back of the net until UMD winger, who ranks among the nation's top three in freshman scoring, added an empty-net goal at 19:00 to seal the victory for UMD.The Bulldogs, who are unbeaten in nine of their last 10 regular-season road games (7-1-2), will put the finishing touches on 2016 by hosting Bemidji State University this Friday night before heading to Bemidji, Minn., the following evening to complete the non-conference home-and-home series.Film grain is something that is useful to every colorist, visual effects artist, and all filmmakers in general. Whether you like the look of film grain or not, it can be a very useful subliminal tool that can help reduce the visible banding, add texture after noise reduction, and generally take the digital "edge" off your footage, sometimes without even making grain visible.
In a time when many are shooting at very high resolutions, up to 6K, and digital cameras, even at 1080p, are so sharp and clean, adding film grain helps adds some "motion" to the frame that our brains have almost subliminally come to expect. On the technical side, it can help break up visual "banding" and help bring back some "life" after a heavy noise reduction pass (when necessary). Unfortunately, as Vimeo and YouTube compression mainly destroys all but the heaviest of grain, the best experience is on the big screen or watching BluRays, especially older films. You'd be amazed at the variety and uniqueness of each film stock AND each film, as the process of film development itself caused variations between each reel of developed film. Working with digital negatives, we only have to match different digital cameras formats, but color timers (the analog precursor to digital colorists) working with film had to match each DAYS work coming back from the film development lab, and ensure all the negative was being developed consistently and up to that timer's personal level of quality.
The other night I was trying to finish a project at UHD (16:9 4K) and when searching for high quality 4K film grain, I was sorely disappointed. Either the scans we so costly that they ate the projects entire budget or they looked like badly faked digital grain (some looked liked they were created with the noise effect in After Effects, honestly). In my frustration, I came upon an idea that would allow me to create my own "emulated" film grain AND give it some variety (hence the emulated aspect, as I manually attempted to add the "Kodak" and "Fuji" qualities I saw in true high-quality 1080p film scans). As I'm experimenting with the development, I decided it would be a great time to get feedback WHILE giving back. In other words, These 4K ProRes film grain clips can be downloaded for free using the link below. I simply ask that you will leave some feedback so I can make them better in the future. They are available as 35mm & 16mm, along with Kodak and Fuji variety, that can be purchased for FREE and downloaded using the link below.
UPDATE January 2019: Due to an upcoming change to our branding strategy, these free assets have been migrated over to our sister site, PixelTools.
Instructions & Tips for Use: In your chosen NLE or compositor, layer the film grain on top of your footage. Change the blend mode to overlay or soft light. The film grain is fairly subtle (especially 35mm), so you can stack, rotate, flip and otherwise manipulate them for a more intense and varied effect. You can also adjust opacity, contrast or sharpening of the grain to intensify \ reduce the effect. In testing, 8mm doesn't stack as well due to the large size of the grain. For a more realistic feel, apply the grain to log footage prior to the normalization to Rec709.
License: Please enjoy these grain clips and share them with others. You are free to use them on commercial projects, but please provide a credit to PixelTools. Please do not sell them or attempt to pass them off as your own work (aka steal).‘‘I had to find a contemporary interpretation of a mountain chalet that didn’t feel cliché and could be totally integrated in the landscape,’’ Porfiri says. She proposed constructing a towerlike house stacked up against the mountain ‘‘to make the most of the land’’ and building it in a hybrid of pine and larch imported from Corsica because it ‘‘has branches only at the top so you can have very clean planks with no weak points.’’ From there, she laid out the floor plan, giving the four guest rooms, Flohr’s suite and office, Nina’s suite and the salon spectacular views, and arranging the playrooms, kitchen and the Swiss-required bomb shelter (which she turned into a walk-in refrigerator) around them. The idea, when one entered the house, was to have it unfold little by little, an accumulation of small spaces and nooks that you’d pass through before arriving in the magnificent great room, with its 18-feet-high cathedral ceiling and sweeping views of Lake St. Moritz and the surrounding Engadin valley.
Flohr had asked Porfiri to incorporate as much regional tradition and European craftsmanship in the design as possible, so for the limestone walls near the spa, she had a local artisan carve indigenous drawings that resemble cave art, and for the voluminous claret-red curtains in the living room and the walls in Flohr’s bedroom, she hired the Italian textile artist Gaia Clerici, who rolled, beat and pressed wool felt into a rough-hewn fabric. Then there are the house’s various extravagant details, which have less to do with European craftsmanship and more to do with, well, Bond-worthy opulence — things like the cashmere felt linings in the wardrobe drawers and the tiny steam jets in the walls that maintain the humidity level at a precise 52 percent. ‘‘Dry air is one of the downsides of mountain life,’’ Flohr says. ‘‘You feel it and it makes you tired.’’
Flohr himself commissioned several artworks, including a colorful Barry McGee mural behind the squash court and an Os Gemeos painting for the hallway; adjacent to the garage gallery, there is a Tom Sachs installation featuring elements from a stop-motion safety video starring Thomas and Nina dolls on a VistaJet. Flohr created an artwork, too: His original plan was for the spa to have a view of the valley, but it wound up being located in the interior of a lower level. So he purchased a high-definition camera, mounted it on the front deck, and has it project a live digital feed of the lake and mountains on the spa’s wall across from the chaises longues.
By December 2013, after four years of construction — ‘‘the longest project of my career,’’ Porfiri says — Flohr’s fantasy house was nearly complete. All that remained unfinished was his office. He’d long ago told Porfiri that he wanted it to have a James Bond feel; he also mentioned Eero Saarinen’s iconic midcentury TWA terminal at New York’s J.F.K. airport, Charles de Gaulle airport’s early 1970s-designed Terminal 1 (before it was remodeled) and Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
Porfiri watched old Bond films (‘‘there was a certain look to those movies,’’ she says), later finding the room’s centerpiece, the desk, at auction. (Flohr liked it so much that he bought a second one for his office in London.) From this enviable perch, with his chocolate lab Mars curled up at his feet, Flohr oversees his global empire. ‘‘The minute I am finished my work wherever I am in the world, I get on the plane and come here,’’ he says. ‘‘Wouldn’t you?’’Trying to one-up each other with memes has turned out poorly for a group of recently admitted Harvard students, who had their acceptance offers withdrawn by the Ivy League school. According to The Crimson, this all began in a general Facebook group for Harvard students, where a bunch of meme-loving students joined together to create an offshoot dedicated to posting photos with captions in place of, you know, communicating. When that group’s memes proved to be not quite dank enough, a bunch of students splintered off into a private Facebook group chat, where they reportedly posted more obscene memes. Thus, the “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens” group was born, with acceptance into its hallowed, digital halls requiring that prospective members post something “borderline offensive” in the original meme group so that these wannabe provocateurs would know that you were down, we guess.
The Harvard administration somehow caught wind of the content, which The Crimson reports included “images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat.” “Horny bourgeois teen” chat members also “joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.” The college maintains responsibility for even the “unofficial groups” that spin off from the sanctioned one; they’re covered in the school’s policy about Facebook groups, which includes a reminder that “Harvard College reserves the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character.”
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School officials reached out to the students for an explanation of their memes, which must not have gone over that well, because Harvard ended up rescinding acceptance offers to 10 students (so far). Opinions on the decision vary, with some students telling The Crimson they don’t believe any internet activity that’s unaffiliated with the university should be monitored, let alone result in a rejection from the school, while others think Harvard acted accordingly. But they’ll all probably be a bit wary of group chat invitations going forward.
[via New York Magazine]If you’ve been following along, you’re probably aware that I collect cookbooks. Specifically, cookbooks created by New England civic organizations between 1950 and 1980 for fundraising purposes. With yard sale season in full swing, I find myself solvent with new recipe ideas, among them one I found in this vandalized and water-damaged collection.
The picture on the cover somewhat suggests the architecture of Calvary Baptist Church in Easthampton, but I bought the book in Millbury and it has no date (I’ve never been to that Church, I just tried to do some due diligence in my |
men of authority. She's not afraid of men."[12]
In 2006, she won an Imagen Award at the Imagen Foundation Awards for Best Supporting Actress in Television for NCIS. In 2008 and 2009, she was nominated for the same award. Also in 2008 and 2009, she was nominated for an ALMA Award for Outstanding Actress in a Drama Television Series. In 2011, de Pablo was nominated once again for an Imagen Award, but this time it was for Best Actress in Television, not Supporting Actress. She won the 2011 ALMA Award for Favorite Television Actress—Leading Role in Drama.[13]
On July 10, 2013, it was reported by CBS that de Pablo would be leaving NCIS for undisclosed reasons, although she remained on long enough to conclude her character Ziva David's storyline at the beginning of season 11.[14] De Pablo later told Cindy Elavsky that Ziva could come back because she did not die.[15] However, in the season 13 finale of the series, it was stated that her character had apparently died in an explosion in Israel.[16]
After NCIS [ edit ]
In January 2014, de Pablo was announced to have been cast in the film The 33, about the 2010 Copiapó mining accident, as the wife of one of the miners.[17] She was also cast in the 2015 CBS miniseries, titled The Dovekeepers, based on the Alice Hoffman novel.[18] In March 2016, Deadline Hollywood reported de Pablo is slated to return to series television as Laura Kale in Syfy's thriller-drama, Prototype, pending negotiations.[19] In April 2016, TVLine columnist Matt Mitovich confirmed Cote's return to series television.[20] The show was to feature "three unlikely colleagues—two of them played by de Pablo and Jack Davenport—who inadvertently stumble upon an invention that challenges the very nature of quantum physics—a discovery which in turn puts their lives in grave danger."[21] In August 2016 Deadline reported that Syfy passed on the show.
On August 28, 2018 Deadline announced that de Pablo and former NCIS castmate, Michael Weatherly, would be the executive producers of the upcoming CBS detective drama MIA, written by Shepard Boucher.[22]
Music [ edit ]
De Pablo performed a portion of Tom Waits' song "Temptation" on the NCIS episode "Last Man Standing", which first aired in the U.S. on September 23, 2008. Her full performance of the song, including some lyrics in French, appears for the first time on NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack, which was released on February 10, 2009.
She is also the singer in Roberto Pitre's Vivo en vida where she sings "Samba in Prelude" and "Cry Me a River".[23]
Cote was also featured on The 33 official soundtrack, singing Gracias a la Vida.[24]
Personal life [ edit ]
De Pablo was in a long-term relationship with actor Diego Serrano,[25] but they were reported as having broken up in June 2015.[26]
As of 2011, she resides in Los Angeles, California.[27][28]
Filmography [ edit ]
Video game Year Title Voice role Notes 2002 TOCA Race Driver Melanie Sanchez
Awards and nominations [ edit ]
Year Association Category Work Result Ref. 2006 Imagen Awards Best Supporting Actress in Television NCIS Nominated [2][29] 2008 Nominated [30] ALMA Awards Outstanding Actress in a Drama Television Series Nominated [2][31] 2009 Nominated [32][33] Imagen Awards Best Supporting Actress in Television Nominated [34] 2011 Best Actress in Television Nominated [35] ALMA Awards Favorite Television Actress—Leading Role in a Drama Won [36] 2012 Favorite TV Actress-Drama Nominated [37]Cold Waters - Killerfish Games
What's New Trailer
It is nearly a year since Cold Waters was released and in that time we've made continuous updates, improvements and added additional content, all to the base game and all forCheck out the "What's New" trailer above to see highlights of these major additions since release which include;An all new campaign takes you to the warm waters of the Pacific where you'll take on the People's Liberation Army Navy of China in an attempt to maintain naval control and bring stability to the region.By popular demand, the formidable Seawolf class is now playable along with the Los Angeles Flight 2 and Flight 3.Adding to the tension, immersion and putting you firmly in command, your crew now call out warnings, updates and verify orders you've given.We got a lot of feedback about the controls and listened to what players wanted, namely a full point and click interface with tool tips to command your submarine. So we added it (and made it fully modifiable to build the user interface you want).Not every contact is a target anymore! Fishing trawlers, container ships, tankers and whales roam the ocean making it crucial to correctly identify your targets before firing on them.The terrain system has been completely overhauled to improve performance and visual quality. In addition, urban areas, cities, all new port facilities and air bases have been added, many of which may well be targets for your land strike missions.Can't remember the difference between a Kanin and a Kashin, or a Luda and a Luhu? You won't have to with the in-combat ship recognition manual, a comprehensive encyclopedia of the various ships and submarines outlining their capabilities, sensors and weapon systems.Over 35 new vessels, mostly comprising the People's Liberation Army Navy as well neutral shipping, have been added in conjunction with new weapon systems and aircraft to support them.Available on the Los Angeles Flight 2 and 3, these batteries of missiles let you stock up on additional anti-ship or anti-land missiles which can be fired in rapid volleys.Similar to neutral shipping, oil rigs are also dotted about the oilfields of the North Sea and South China Sea.Mick confirms the striker remains sidelined along with Ambrose, Hyam and the Hunt brothers
McGoldrick ruled out
Hyam still sidelined
Hunt brothers and Ambrose also miss game
Mick McCarthy has confirmed to the Club website that David McGoldrick again misses out through injury ahead of tomorrow night’s clash with Birmingham.
The Town striker picked up a thigh injury against Rotherham earlier this month and the knock will again keep him sidelined as the fixtures come thick and fast.
Darren Ambrose (hamstring), Noel Hunt (knee), Stephen Hunt (hamstring) and Luke Hyam (knee) are also all set to miss the clash against Gary Rowett’s side.
“Didz isn’t fit and won’t be involved tomorrow,” Mick told the official Club website.
“Darren Ambrose isn’t quite right either and Luke Hyam is still missing.
“Stephen Hunt still isn’t fit and of course we will be without his brother Noel, who will be out for some time with a knee injury.
“Aside from that, all the others who were available for Reading at the weekend are okay.”
Latest on www.itfc.co.ukTribes of the Wilting Forest
The tribes of feral catfolk, know natively as Ka'tis, that inhabit the Wilting Forest keep to themselves. Viewing the economically inclined Catfolk of Rahamba with distain, they believe following natures guidance and studying the ways of Chauntea will bring their kind prosperity.
The Ka'tis reflect their closeness with nature in their appearance. Unlike the Catfolk of Rahamba, the Ka'tis resemble their feline ancestors more than they do a human. They have elongated snouts, prefer to walk on all fours(though they can walk bipedal) and have intricate fur patterns; ranging from leopard spots to cheetah print to black fur of a panther. Their language is close enough to traditional Feline that most Catfolk of Rahamba would have little difficulty understanding them.
The main tribes that make up the majority of the Ka'tis are: Jezuan, Heselda and Lofade. Some smaller tribes travel with the pack but do not attribute any of their efforts to obtain status. The Jezuan Tribe has guided the pack for 54 years; or since the Grún Clan of Z'teal was stopped by Trennen the Woodsage. Trennen and his wife, Dereka, were tasked with reclaiming the woods south of the river after the Grún Clan was removed. Since their return from liberating the southern forest, they have guided the Ka'tis with the hunt.
Jezuan Tribe: The Jezuan Tribe makes up the core of druidic studies within the pack. The druids and rangers of other tribes in the pack are given to the Jezuan tribe to train and learn the ways of Chauntea. They are repected by all tribes and are seen as a neutral tribe, serving only the forest. Close to 50% of all Ka'tis are within this tribe.
Heselda Tribe: The Heselda Tribe is made of tradesmen and sorcerors. They can trace their roots back to the first of the Ka'tis sorcerors. Said to have inherited their magical prowess from an Avatar of Mystra, the tribe is the only among the pack that do not worship Chauntea exclusively. They do not dismiss the ideas of Chantea, but believe their innate spell casting is proof enough that other gods listen to them. Only 14% of all Ka'tis are within this tribe.
Lofade Tribe: The Lofade Tribe is comprised of rogues and fighters. Young catfolk with a passion for fighting are fostered within this tribe. Viewed as the major fighting force for the pack, their cunning and familiarity of their environment make them unmatched fighters in the forest. 30% of the Ka'tis are within this pack.
The Seasons and The Hunt The Wilting Forest rapidly grows and decays in 'waves', stemming outward from the river, as the vegetation pass along their nutrients through their interconnected roots. The Ka'tis Pack moves through the forest as it wilts and blooms, searching for edible and medicinal plants, shelter in the ever changing landscape and the animals which they hunt. The seasons are not as prevalent here, The Wilting Forest maintains its own balance. The tempatures do not get below 55 degrees or above 90 degrees, regardless of season. The wild burst of growth and decay, that effect the vegetation, allow the creatures that live off them to have steady food. With the food source always moving all inhabitants of the forest follow to compete for resources. For days whole acres of the forest can be dead and abandoned, while the growth booms in the surrounding woods. The Living Roots of Kin'drai are the source of this forest. They allow the nutrients of the vegetation to recycle infinitely. They were laid by Chauntea to help foster plant life and are partially grounded in The Weave. They permeate the ground to a depth of roughly 60 ft. and can vary in width from 1 foot to only millimeters thick. It takes 10 days for vegetation to go from dead to full bloom to dead again, at any given point within the forest. These patches are roughly 4 miles in diameter. When the vegetation in an area dies, the Yal-si, moves into the dead woods. The Yal-si is a 14 ft. tall, 450 lb shadowy figure that consumes the dead vegetation within the forest. It remains in this forest as a neutral protector, engaging in combat with only outsiders that harm the forest.Peele, Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley and maverick producer Jason Blum — the team behind 'Get Out' — gathered together for THR 100.
"Where was that place? We’ll never go back there again. It was a bit loud,” Universal Pictures chairwoman Donna Langley says to Get Out filmmaker Jordan Peele and producer Jason Blum, the architect of the micro-budget genre film, on a recent Friday afternoon in her serene office on the studio’s lot.
She's referring to an intimate dinner in mid-March at Kettle Black, a trendy Italian eatery in Silver Lake. They were celebrating Get Out crossing $100 million in only three weeks, a stunning accomplishment for a $5 million horror-thriller from a first-time feature director. (Peele, the famous other half of Comedy Central's Key & Peele, drove to the restaurant in a new Volvo XC90, a celebratory gift from Blumhouse Productions). The movie has gone on to gross more than $250 million at the worldwide box office.
There's an easy dynamic among these three colleagues, who occupy very different wires on Hollywood's power grid but who have intersected thanks to Get Out, about a young black man caught up in a sinister plot when visiting the wealthy parents of his white girlfriend.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter for THR 100, the trio talked about how Get Out came about and why Peele wants to take things slowly before tackling a big-budget tentpole.
Jordan, you began working on the script for Get Out in 2008. How many people passed on making the film?
Peele: Many. [Laughter]
Blum: I have all the rejection letter and emails. I've been collecting them quietly. Jordan doesn't know that.
Peele: I have to frame them.
Blum: There were a lot of younger executives who advocated for the project, but their bosses told them they were idiots.
How did it finally get off the ground?
Blum: I read the script and met with Jordan and said, "let's make this movie." Then I sent it to Donna. She and I have made 25 movies or so together, and have a very easy relationship. Happily, she loved it and we were off the races.
Langley: I don't read all of Jason's scripts right away because they are usually horror films and I have to be somewhere in a brightly lit room with other people. But with this one, he called each of us individually and said you have to stop what you’re doing and read this.
Why did Get Out strike such a chord?
Peele: The reason I made the film was because I felt the way we talk about race is broken.
Langley: I think one of the most powerful things about the movie is it highlights the trap of inertia when everything is seemingly hunky dory on the surface. You don’t have to dig that far to find that it’s a hornet's nest. That was a powerful awakening, and it happened at the same time that everything was happening in the country politically.
Jordan, do you ever see yourself taking the lead on a big tentpole? You recently turned down directing Akira for Warner Bros.
Peele: The most important thing for me is maintaining as much of the virtues of the process of Get Out as possible. My goal and plan is to rise in budget slowly. It doesn’t make any sense for me to jump to an enormous budget when it changes the process entirely. I pinch myself and realize how lucky I am to be able to have created something. And if i can do that again, isn’t that the best?
How often to do you hear a filmmaker say that, Donna?
Langley: Rarely. It's very unique to Jordan. He is so purposeful, and his intention is so clear.
Peele: At that budget, I could actually make Get Out how I wanted to make it and not have people looking over my shoulder trying to make sure I got every piece of it right.
Jordan, your next movie, due out in in 2019, is an untitled social thriller that will cost Universal and Blumhouse roughly $25 million to make. Any hints as to what it will be about?
Peele: I'll tell you this, it's going to be a very different movie than Get Out. Don't expect a sequel.
A question for all three of you — what was your first job?
Blum: I sold cable TV door-to-door after college in Chicago. I'd knock on doors and ask, "do you know what cable TV is? We have something called ESPN." It was the early days of cable, maybe 1991.
Peele: By the way, if Jason Blum was selling you cable back then, you’re buying it.
Langley: Working in a very swanky private health club in London. I became the duty manager.
Peele: Mine was at a toy store in New York City called The Enchanted Forest.
Blum: Is it still there?
Peele: No. They sold very crafty, artisan toys. It was very cool.
Langley: That sounds amazing. I'm going to work for that outfit.
What does power mean to you?
Langley: Real power is having the ability and the resources to tell an amazing story or to say yes to a filmmaker and change not only the filmmaker's life but the world.
Blum: Power opens doors. You get things done that you want to get done more quickly. And hopefully, to Donna's point, you want to get things done that are good for the world.
Peele: I'm still getting used to it. What I've found is that there is a greater ability to collaborate.
A version of this story first appeared in the June 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.Mr. Smith and his brother, Thomas, founded Taser in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1993, and the company now is worth about $1.3 billion. Taser cameras have captured thousands of altercations between the police and the public and several controversial police shootings, including ones in Albuquerque and Cincinnati.
Image Axon body cameras are worn by officers in dozens of big cities including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington and Dallas. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times
Yet as Taser works to sell cameras and software to more departments, it is coming under fire for questionable business practices. In some instances, it has paid police chiefs to travel to Taser conferences. In other cases, chiefs who have bought Taser products have joined the company as consultants shortly after leaving public service. And several cities have awarded contracts to Taser without competitive bidding.
So far, these issues have done little to blunt Taser’s momentum. Last quarter, for the first time, Taser booked more sales for body cameras and related software than it did for its stun guns.
Interest in body cameras was already picking up two years ago, as police departments around the country started responding to calls for greater accountability. Then, in August 2014, a white police officer killed Mr. Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson. The officer was not wearing a body camera, and witnesses disputed his account of the altercation that led to the shooting. The officer was not charged, and critics said that had he been wearing a body camera, the outcome might have been different.
Video captured by body cameras can be difficult to interpret. Yet as more Taser cameras are deployed around the country, the grainy images they produce are playing an increasingly important role in the aftermath of deadly shootings.
At times, the video can exonerate officers. In 2009, shortly after Taser began selling its cameras through its Axon division, Sgt. Brandon Davis shot and killed a man in Fort Smith, Ark. Video recorded by his body camera captured the shooting, and Mr. Davis was cleared of wrongdoing.
In other instances, the footage can portray police as needlessly aggressive. In 2014, a Taser Axon camera worn by an officer in Albuquerque captured the fatal shooting of a homeless man by officers who did not appear to be threatened. The two officers have been charged with second-degree murder and are expected to stand trial soon.
Even when body cameras are worn, they are not always effective. When two police officers fatally shot Alton B. Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., on July 5, they were wearing body cameras made by a Taser competitor. A police spokesman said the cameras became dislodged during the altercation with Mr. Sterling, and the video was unlikely to reveal much; Baton Rouge is making a transition to Taser cameras.On Halloween we showed you one of the more unusual watches from A. Lange & Söhne, the Grand Lange 1 Lumen. Today we have a more subtle take on the Grand Lange 1, the new Moon Phase. It starts with the same basic structure as the other members of the Lange 1 family, but adds a beautiful moonphase indicator to the center of the main dial. It's not just good looking though – this moonphase is accurate for over 100 years without needing any adjustments.
As you would expect from Lange, this watch is much more than a Grand Lange 1 with a moonphase indictor thrown in for good measure. The movement utilizes the hour-train to keep the moonphase wheel in constant slow motion with a seven gear train. This allows the moonphase to be tuned very precisely, which is how the accuracy of one day in every 122.6 years is achieved – that's 99.9978% accurate if you're keeping track at home. Just in case you need to make adjustments though, this can be easily done with the pusher between 7 and 8 o'clock.This is a guest blog post by David Neal, medical student and Director on the Policy Team of the Cambridge-based Polygeia.
A new campaign asks you to help defeat life-threatening diseases caused by parasitic worms. All you need to do is use social media to share your attempt at the dance move “the worm” to raise awareness for one charity’s efforts to fight some of the most insidious diseases of the developing world.
That’s right. Don’t believe me? Check it out:
A dance campaign to fight parasitic worms
Worm vs. Worms aims to raise awareness of the scale of the problem caused by neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), and to encourage donations to support access to essential medicines. Launched in the UK at the inaugural conference of Polygeia, a student-led think tank, Worm vs. Worms is supported by Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) and the END7, a campaign to end seven NTDs by 2020.
A group of students from the University of Cambridge challenged others to match their dance attempts and donations. Many people have already taken up the challenge, posting videos of their own individual and group attempts at “the worm” and donating to the cause. New participants are sharing videos on Facebook and Twitter, under the hashtag #wormvsworms.
In the UK, donations for the campaign are sent to SCI by texting WORM55 and an amount (e.g. £5) to 70070. At time of publication, the campaign had already raised about £250. It costs only 50p to provide medication to protect one person in the developing world for a whole year, so the new campaign has so far protected 500 people. In the US, challenge participants can donate through The Life You Can Save.
What are neglected tropical diseases?
NTDs affect over 1 billion people worldwide. They cause immense suffering, often leaving those affected disabled and disfigured. Despite the scale of their recognised contribution to global poverty, NTDs have long been under-funded by comparison to HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. END7 has previously drawn attention to the scale of the problem and cost-effectiveness of the solution with a video called How to Shock a Celebrity, which featured actors including Tom Felton and Eddie Redmayne.
WARNING: The following video contains extremely disturbing footage.
Critics of previous viral social media campaigns have suggested that such campaigns do not motivate people to work for real change on an issue and that the problems are instead trivialised. However, I believe that in the case of such a little-known cause, it can only be a good thing if the campaign continues to grow.
I think it’s important to introduce as many people as possible to NTDs and the suffering they cause. Sometimes it’s ok to make that engagement entertaining. When you care about issues that are serious, there’s always a danger of taking yourself too seriously as a person, and I’d like to think we’ve shown that this is something we aren’t doing!
As a fifth-year medical student and initiator of “Worm vs. Worms,” I’m amazed by how far the campaign had already spread. I think people are having a lot of fun filming their attempts—there’s something inherently hilarious about doing “the worm,” and it’s a challenge to try to pull it off better than the last person.
So, all that remains is to say: “I nominate you!”
David Neal is a Director on the Policy Team of Cambridge University-based student-led group Polygeia. He is a medical student in Cambridge and has a BA degree, also from Cambridge, in Psychology and Biological Anthropology. He has interned at the World Health Organization and the UK Department of Health. You can contact David at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @DavidPNeal1.We’ve covered most of the major building blocks of encryption and how you can use them in Perl. With those building blocks in mind, we can cover one of the most common uses of encryption that a programmer will encounter, which is how to handle passwords.
Password handling has a long history, most of it bleak. Many systems started without any passwords at all; keeping the computer physically locked in the room was considered good enough. As time went on, the machines got passwords, but CPU time was still expensive, and programmers hadn’t thought much about the security implications of storing passwords in plaintext. And that is what they did.
Still more time passes, and somebody figures that having a big database of passwords in plaintext isn’t such a good idea, so the crypt() function on Unix is used to encrypt things. This was originally based on DES (which, as we know from the block cipher post, is no longer good enough), and it truncates your password to 8 characters of 7-bits each. It then uses that password with a 12-bit salt to encrypt a string of all zeros.
What’s a salt? It’s a random value appended to the string, which should be unique for each user. We use these to thwart an attack called a Rainbow Table. Here, an attacker knows that you don’t use a salt, or knows the salt you use on all your passwords. With that information, the attacker can precompute a list of passwords and their assoicated hashes.
In the example below, we assume the same salt (“12345″) is used for crypt() (like much of the standard C library, this function is available to us directly in Perl). We start with the password “aaaaaaaa” and iterate through a few possibilities using the magic string mode of the ++ operator:
$ perl -E '$p = "aaaaaaaa"; for (1..5) { say $p. ":". crypt( $p, 12345 ); $p++; }' aaaaaaaa:12Tez3EWIho0. aaaaaaab:12kdu.nuXXcPQ aaaaaaac:12XbtbeyxB4bQ aaaaaaad:12s3LAvuhOz9E aaaaaaae:12CP4cko54fzk 1 2 3 4 5 6 $ perl - E '$p = "aaaaaaaa"; for (1..5) { say $p. ":". crypt( $p, 12345 ); $p++; }' aaaaaaaa : 12Tez3EWIho0. aaaaaaab : 12kdu.nuXXcPQ aaaaaaac : 12XbtbeyxB4bQ aaaaaaad : 12s3LAvuhOz9E aaaaaaae : 12CP4cko54fzk
Combined with a dictionary of common passwords (and variations like “p4ssw0rD”), the attacker doesn’t need to brute force each password individually. They just need to match the hashed value to the plaintext value. With a bit of googling, you’re sure to find textfiles of precomputed Rainbow Tables, so the attacker doesn’t even have to do the hard part themselves.
Getting back to crypt(), we once again note that it forces an 8-character password of 7-bits per character (plain ASCII). This would be 8 * 7 = 56 bits, which is the DES key length. We already know that this is inadaquate against modern brute force attempts. On top of that, even security-concious users don’t use passwords with the entire ASCII range, and many applications will break if you tried (ever use a password with a vertical tab in it?). That puts further limits on the size of the search space.
In short, crypt() should be completely avoided.
The next generation used a cryptographic hash. The advantage of this method is that the original plaintext password can’t be feasibly recovered, even by the people who own the database or write all the code. (If a web site’s password recovery system ever emails you back your original plaintext password, that means they didn’t do it right.)
Doing things this way usually started with MD5:
$ perl -MDigest::MD5=md5_hex -MCrypt::Random=makerandom -E '$salt = makerandom( Size => 32 ); say $salt. ":". md5_hex( $salt. "foobar" )' 3892167202:c3d2ca5074af216141d567d1b3aebcbd" 1 2 $ perl - MDigest :: MD5 = md5_hex - MCrypt :: Random = makerandom - E '$salt = makerandom( Size => 32 ); say $salt. ":". md5_hex( $salt. "foobar" )' 3892167202 : c3d2ca5074af216141d567d1b3aebcbd "
As weaknesses in MD5 were exposed, things moved to SHA1 and others, but it was the same idea. When the user wants to be authenticated, we hash the provided password with the same salt (the part before the colon above) and check if we get the same value as our stored hash.
One weakness happens with Timing Attacks. With the standard string eq comparison (or equivilent in most other languages), a string is matched by going through character-by-character to see if each one matches in turn. It fails as soon as it hits a non-matching character.
This means that "aaaaab" eq "aaaaac" takes slightly longer to fail than "aaaaab" eq "aac". Mallory can use this slight difference in speed over many different requests to see if he’s getting closer to the right password, somewhat like the Mastermind game. This fail-fast property helps keep programs speedy, but it’s a problem here.
You might think that this difference in speed would be too small to be practical over the Internet, but in fact it was sucesssfully done against OAuth and OpenID.
Mallory’s attempt is complicated by salt and hashing, but making the system completely immune is not difficult, so why not just do it? Here’s how:
sub match_strings { my ($self, $str1, $str2) = @_; return 0 if length($str1)!= length($str2); my @str1 = split //, $str1; my @str2 = split //, $str2; my $does_match = 0; foreach (0.. $#str1) { $does_match |= $str1[$_] ^ $str2[$_]; } return $does_match == 0; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 sub match_strings { my ( $self, $str1, $str2 ) = @ _ ; return 0 if length ( $str1 )!= length ( $str2 ) ; my @ str1 = split //, $str1; my @ str2 = split //, $str2; my $does_match = 0 ; foreach ( 0.. $ #str1) { $does_match |= $str1 [ $_ ] ^ $str2 [ $_ ] ; } return $does_match == 0 ; }
We start by checking that the strings are the same length. If we were matching plaintext passwords, this would tell Mallory that he needs a longer or shorter attempt. Note that hashed passwords of the same encoding type will always match in length.
Next, we split the strings into individual characters and iterate over them. With each loop iteration, we XOR the same location in the strings with each other. We then OR that with the current result. If this result ends up staying zero all the way to the end, the strings match.
So far, we know that we should use an irreversible method of encryption, we should use a salt from a cryptographic random source, and we should match the hashed strings in a way that does not fail-fast. Up until a few years ago, that would have protected you against any practical attack out there.
As tends to happen, something new came along. Graphics Processing Units were being used in more and more general computing tasks, and it was found that a GPU could be used to crack hashed passwords. The massive parallel processing speeds offered by GPUs allowed all our then-best schemes to fail.
The mistake we made is that general cryptographic hash algorithms are meant to be fast. Not so fast that they tradeoff security, but all things being equal, a fast algorithm is obviously better than a slow one. Trouble is, if it’s fast to hash a password on your end, it’s equally fast for an attacker to do it on their end.
We are saved here by the fact that a user logging in to a system generally doesn’t mind if it takes an extra second for that one request. But for an attacker making millions of attempts to brute force a password, that extra second adds up. Since we get to choose the algorithm, we should choose one that’s delibrately slow, perhaps one that we can tune to make slower as Moore’s law picks up.
This is where bcrypt comes in (so called because it’s a variation on the Blowfish block cipher). With bcrypt, there is a “cost” parameter that can be tuned upwards as Moore’s Law makes CPUs and GPUs faster. This parameter controls how many loops the algorithm will go through before producing the final output.
The advancements don’t stop with bcrypt, either. GPUs are good at raw processing, but terrible when moving things in and out of memory. So if you use an algorithm that forces you to move things in and out of memory a lot, Mallory can all but give up on cracking passwords with GPUs. This is what scrypt does. The algorithm is still a bit new and hasn’t been completely vetted yet by the cryptographic community, but it may become the new gold standard for storing passwords.
How should we implement all this? One observation from all the above is that for a few decades now, there’s been a war between new attacks and new ways to thwart attacks. We don’t appear to be anywhere near the end of it. That means we should code our apps in a way that can absorb a new algorithm easily. If tommorow morning, bcrypt turned out to be totally broken, you should be able to switch to scrypt in production by early that afternoon at the latest.
When we store the password, we need to store something that shows how it was encrypted. We then have a configuration value somewhere that lists the preferred encryption method for passwords. For algorithms that have cost parameters, like bcrypt and scrypt, we also need to encode that information and configure it alongside the encryption type.
Fortunately, Authen::Passphrase gets very close to doing everything right. Using a string representation based on RFC 2307, it encodes the encryption type, salt, any cost parameters, and encrypted string into a single compact value. The one thing it doesn’t do is match strings in a way that protects against timing attacks.
I also think it could benefit from a plugin system. The current implementation uses lexical hashes within the package to map encryption types to the implementing class, with no way of adding to those hashes outside of the lexical scope (at least, not that I’ve found). New encryption types could be added by CPAN dists more easily if there was a way to add new types dynamically. By breaking out existing classes into separate dists with a plugin system, it could also fix a criticism in one of its CPAN reviews, which is that it’s a maze of twisty dependencies.
Regardless of the above, this is still the best CPAN module I’ve found for storing passwords in Perl.
Let’s say we have a new user signed up with their passphrase in $passphrase. Do this:
# These should come from a general configuration my $PASSPHRASE_CLASS = 'Authen::Passphrase::BlowfishCrypt'; # AKA bcrypt my %AUTHEN_PARAMETERS = ( salt_random => 1, # Creates a good salt for us cost => $BCRYPT_COST, # Tweak as necessary ); my $auth = $PASSPHRASE_CLASS->new( %AUTHEN_PARAMETERS, passphrase => $passphrase, ); my $hashed_passphrase = $auth->as_rfc2307; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 # These should come from a general configuration my $PASSPHRASE_CLASS = 'Authen::Passphrase::BlowfishCrypt' ; # AKA bcrypt my %AUTHEN_PARAMETERS = ( salt_random = > 1, # Creates a good salt for us cost = > $BCRYPT_COST, # Tweak as necessary ) ; my $auth = $PASSPHRASE_CLASS -> new ( %AUTHEN_PARAMETERS, passphrase = > $passphrase, ) ; my $hashed_passphrase = $auth -> as_rfc2307 ;
We now save the $hashed_passphrase string into our user database.
Later, the user comes back and wants to login. With our stored encrypted password in $db_passphrase, and the incoming passphrase to be checked in $passphrase, we first check if the password matches. If it does, change the encryption if necessary:
my $matched = 0; my $auth = Authen::Passphrase->from_rfc2307( $db_passphrase ); if( $auth->match( $passphrase ) ) { if( ref($auth) ne $PASSPHRASE_CLASS ) { my $new_auth = $PASSPHRASE_CLASS->new( %AUTHEN_PARAMETERS, passphrase => $passphrase, ); my $new_db_passphrase = $new_auth->as_rfc2307; # Save $new_db_passphrase back into your database for this user } # Also check for bcrypt cost, but be sure not to assume bcrypt is used. Left as an # exercise to the reader. $matched = 1; } # return $matched for successful/unsuccessful login 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
: use a simple list of hd connections
greybus: get rid of cport_id_map_lock
greybus: kill greybus_{get,put}_gbuf()
greybus: kill gbuf->kref
greybus: move the definition of struct gbuf
greybus: define struct gb_message
greybus: start using struct gb_message
greybus: move gbuf initialization to caller
greybus: use null gbuf->transfer_buffer
greybus: embed gbufs into operation message structure
greybus: kill the gbuf slab cache
greybus: kill off the last of gbuf.c
greybus: fix an allocation flag bug
greybus: prepend cport byte for all gbufs
greybus: improve data buffer alignment
greybus: fill in destination data at send time
greybus: allocate space without gbufs
greybus: free space without gbufs
greybus: cancel buffers via magic cookie
greybus: stash hd as context for all URBs
greybus: send buffers without gbufs
greybus: rework message initialization
greybus: send messages, not gbufs
greybus: cancel messages, not gbufs
greybus: rework receve handling
greybus: kill the last gbuf remnants
greybus: stop storing hd in message
greybus: stop storing dest_cport_id in message
greybus: pass gfp_flags for message allocation
greybus: explicitly mark cookies as opaque
greybus: tidy up svc_in_callback() and cport_in_callback()
greybus: get rid of message status
greybus: use "operation_id" for certain values
greybus: refactor gb_connection_recv()
greybus: fix battery_operation()
greybus: fix uart request_operation()
greybus: fix vibrator request_operation()
greybus: get rid of uart request_operation()
greybus: distinguish incoming from outgoing requests
greybus: send operation result in response message header
greybus: define gb_operation_status_map()
greybus: remove status from all responses
greybus: drop a now-empty structure
greybus: fix a timeout race
greybus: complete overflow responses
greybus: have greybus allocate its own buffers
greybus: rename message buffer fields
greybus: dynamically allocate requests and responses
greybus: embed message buffer into message structure
greybus: define greybus_data_sent()
greybus: rename greybus_cport_in()
greybus: use errno for operation result
greybus: abandon incoming requests for now
greybus: handle data send errors in workqueue
greybus: add a reference to pending operations
greybus: minor tweak in gb_connection_recv_response()
greybus: cancel operation on timeout
greybus: cancel whole operation on interrupt
greybus: kill gb_operation_wait()
greybus: rework synchronous operation completion
greybus: encapsulate operation result access
greybus: first operation error prevails
greybus: use special operation result valus
greybus: fix some error codes
greybus: enforce receive buffer size
greybus: update operation result atomically
greybus: ignore a null cookie when canceling buffer
greybus: protect cookie with a mutex
greybus: use outgoing flag when creating operation
greybus: enforce max representable message size
greybus: define -EILSEQ to mean implementation error
greybus: renumber operation result values
greybus: drop gfp_mask from gb_message_send()
greybus: always drop reference in gb_operation_work()
greybus: move copy of incoming request data
greybus: short message is OK for errors
greybus: pass result in gb_connection_recv_response()
greybus: enforce non-zero operation type requirement
greybus: use operation type 0 to signal incoming data
greybus: introduce gb_operation_message_init()
greybus: enforce a buffer headroom maximum size
greybus: create a slab cache for simple messages
greybus: set result in gb_operation_response_send()
greybus: activate incoming request handling
greybus: introduce gb_operation_errno_map()
greybus: send operation response messages
greybus: use little-endian in PWM requests
greybus: fix a bug in gb_operation_sync()
greybus: define the invalid operation type symbolically
greybus: don't use 0 as an operation id
greybus: get rid of pending operations list
greybus: make op_cycle atomic (again)
greybus: introduce gb_operation_request_send_sync()
greybus: fix an error message
greybus: set up connection->private properly
greybus: don't let i2c code assume non-null payload pointer
greybus: only record message payload size
greybus: use null pointer for empty payload
greybus: record type in operation structure
greybus: define GB_OP_NONEXISTENT
greybus: ENODEV can be an expected error too
greybus: switch cport id used for sends
greybus: add Linaro copyrights
greybus: clean up some small messes
greybus: get rid of {conceal,reveal}_urb()
greybus: manifest: use size_t for a size variable
greybus: es1: test apb1_log_task safely
greybus: es2: test apb1_log_task safely
greybus: reduce the ranting
greybus: bundle: use kstrdup() for state file
greybus: battery: free struct on error in caller
greybus: battery: use feature tag rather than kernel version
greybus: eliminate extra response flag definitions
greybus: loopback: fix the type attribute check
greybus: loopback: return the right error value
greybus: loopback: fix an incorrect comment
greybus: loopback: symbolically define max wait time
greybus: loopback: define loopback functions symbolically
greybus: loopback: support module-initiated requests
greybus: endo: rename gb_svc
greybus: endo: pass endo_id to gb_endo_create()
greybus: core: return error code when creating endo
greybus: core: return error code when creating host device
greybus: include "gpbridge.h" from "greybus.h"
greybus: rename "gpbridge.h"
greybus: endo: encapsulate computing the max interface id
greybus: endo: rework some attributes
greybus: endo: record AP interface id
greybus: core: don't set up endo until host device is initialized
greybus: add copyright statements
greybus: update copyrights
greybus: introduce SVC protocol
greybus: greybus_protocols: fix guard tag
greybus: add documentation for Endo sysfs files
greybus: update sysfs documentation files
greybus: endo: drop redundant prefixes from sysfs basenames
greybus: endo: delete "0xXXXX" portion in sysfs "endo" directory
greybus: svc: driver is basic to Greybus (not GP Bridge)
greybus: connection: make gb_connection_hd_find() private
greybus: uart: properly interpret receive data size
greybus: core: rename greybus_deregister()
greybus: manifest: clean up a few pr_err() calls
greybus: drop some unnecessary headers
greybus: tag core init and exit functions
greybus: endo: define endo_init() and endo_exit()
greybus: endo: clean up id assignment code
greybus: manifest: really minor cleanups
greybus: manifest: use bundle's embedded interface pointer
greybus: manifest: rework cport parsing
greybus: manifest: rework bundle parsing
greybus: bundle: check for duplicate bundle ids
greybus: connection: check for duplicate cport ids
greybus: connection: remove extra kfree() call
greybus: connection: drop unneeded gb_protocol_put() calls
greybus: connection: un-abstract host cport id allocation
greybus: manifest: clean up properly when parsing cports
greybus: bundle: refactor gb_bundle_find()
greybus: bundle: fix gb_bundle_destroy()
greybus: manifest: clean up properly when parsing bundles
greybus: introduce cport_id_valid()
greybus: esX: encapsulate packing cport id into header
greybus: rename HOST_DEV_CPORT_ID_MAX
greybus: reserve host cport id 0
greybus: esX: use one byte to encode cport ids in header
greybus: interface: declare gb_interface_destroy()
greybus: looback: fix two typos
greybus: loopback: drop unneeded casts for void pointers
greybus: loopback: use U64_MAX for initialization
greybus: loopback: use u32 for stats update
greybus: loopback: record 32-bit min and max
greybus: loopback: use a 32-bit count
greybus: loopback: error is an unsigned attribute
greybus: loopback: all read-only attributes are unsigned
greybus: loopback: use separate attribute macro for average
greybus: loopback: compute average stats on demand only
greybus: loopback: fix connection cleanup paths
greybus: kernel_ver.h: define U32_MAX and U64_MAX
greybus: db3-platform: fix code that fetches reset GPIO
greybus: db3-platform: fix some typos
greybus: db3-platform: get rid of redundant gpio tests
greybus: es2: rename es2 data structures
greybus: es2: move APB log task into the es2_ap_dev struct
greybus: es2: move logging fifo into es2 struct
greybus: es2: move logging dentries into es2 struct
greybus: es2: don't assume just one AP bridge
greybus: connection: verify disabled when destroyed
greybus: add operation traces
greybus: tracing: define events using macros
greybus: tracing: eliminate "location" comments
greybus: tracing: refine comments
greybus: tracing: fix a bad tracepoint
greybus: tracing: fix hd traces
greybus: tracing: add module traces
greybus: tracing: define interface traces
greybus: report right error value
greybus: fix unbalanced mutex
greybus: eliminate unneeded null check
greybus: fix pointless null check
greybus: use PTR_ERR_OR_ZERO()
greybus: drop a bogus semicolon
greybus: tracing: fix "make check" warnings
greybus: define BUNDLE_ID_NONE
greybus: tracing: fix host device num_cports
greybus: tracing: reorder trace definitions
greybus: tracing: fix module num_interfaces
greybus: tracing: assign "parent" id first
greybus: tracing: add interface mode_switch
greybus: tracing: define bundle traces
greybus: tracing: define connection traces
greybus: tracing: add timing traces
greybus: tracing: fix message traces
greybus: don't key on an enumerated constant
greybus: tracing: drop "greybus" prefix
greybus: get rid of a compile warning
greybus: use memdup_user()
Alexandre Bailon (29):
greybus: i2c-gb: fix bad message size in gb_i2c
greybus: protocol.c: fix a kernel panic caused by __gb_protocol_register
greybus: gpio.c: fix a bad irq number
greybus: Export greybus debugfs folder
greybus: Dump log from APB1
greybus: Add loopback protocol
greybus: es1.c: Don't use magic value for USB control request
greybus: es2.c: Don't use magic value for USB control request
greybus: es2.c: create dedicated struct for cport_in and cport_out
greybus: es2.c: Increase the number of bulk endpoints
greybus: es2.c: add a control request for endpoints mapping
greybus: es1/es2: set transfer flag to send a zero-length packet
greybus: Greybus driver: add a new callbacks to driver
greybus: es2: update the bulk_ep_set value accepted by map_to_cpor_ep()
greybus: es2: rename misnamed variables and methods
greybus: es2: change (un)map methods to static
greybus: es2: add some documentation about endpoints mapping
greybus: loopback: fix invalid response size
greybus: gb_loopback: Fix throughput calculations
greybus: loopback: Fix calculations error for ping transfers
greybus: loopback: Fix incoherency in calculations in the case of error
greybus: loopback: Fix throughput calculations
greybus: loopback: Fix averaging
greybus: loopback: Fix warning on 32-bit build
greybus: loopback: round closest the sixth decimal
greybus: loopback: Fix broken synchonous test
greybus: loopback: Fix broken loopback min values
greybus: es2: Add a new bulk in endpoint for APBridgeA RPC
greybus: es2: Implement APBridgeA RPC (ARPC)
Ann Chen (2):
greybus: vibrator: integrate runtime pm
greybus: Add workqueue to handle vibrator timeout
Axel Haslam (24):
greybus: greybus/loopback: remove mask attribute
greybus: greybus/loopback: register a struct device.
greybus: loopback_test: make output to csv file a parameter option
greybus: loopback_test: Decrease the max number of devices
greybus: greybus/loopback: Add reserved fields to transfer request
greybus: Notify user space only when the test finished.
greybus: Loopback_test: use poll instead of inotify
greybus: loopback_test: Use timeout argument
greybus: loopback_test: handle SIGINT signal
greybus: uart: Update line coding settings only when needed
greybus: uart fix missing negation on DTR setting
greybus: Fix loopback app after rename to gpphy
greybus: uart: Handle CRTSCTS flag in termios
greybus: uart: Implement dtr_rts callback.
greybus: uart: Use a fifo to send data to the modules
greybus: uart: Add credits based tracking for transmit path
greybus: uart: Implement flush_buffer
greybus: uart: wait for credits on shutdown
greybus: uart: Add runtime pm support
greybus: gpio: Add runtime_pm suppourt
greybus: pwm: Add runtime_pm support
greybus: spi: Add runtime_pm support
greybus: loopback: add runtime pm support
greybus: gbphy: fix compile error with CONFIG_PM_RUNTIME disabled
Bartosz Golaszewski (4):
greybus: loopback: allocate a response even for a 0-byte request
greybus: legacy: fix a null pointer dereference
greybus: audio_manager: add missing header
greybus: pm: add error handling to bundle activation
Bill Pemberton (3):
greybus: gb-vibrator: remove useless if in timeout_store()
greybus: Add FIXME warnings for possible NULL dereferences
greybus: gpio-gb: remove checks for negative offset variable
Bryan O'Donoghue (132):
greybus: Support building greybus on host PC
greybus: uart: Move UART protocol structs/defines to greybus_protocols.h
greybus: uart: Tidy naming convention to more closely match spec
greybus: uart: Reduce UART count from 255 to 16
greybus: uart: Update uart.c to register tty ports
greybus: uart: send_data should return size or error
greybus: uart: kmalloc for send_data once only
greybus: uart: Add gb_uart_request_recv for receiving async UART data
greybus: uart: Remove magic numbers make struct gb_tty variable names consistent
greybus: uart: Latch modem control signals for tciomget
greybus: greybus/uart: Fix sparse warning
greybus: greybus/uart: Relocate UART parity/overrun/framing/break signals
greybus: greybus/uart: Add support for UART error signals
greybus: greybus/uart: Update UART to reflect field size changes
greybus: greybus/loopback: Move loopback operation definitions
greybus: greybus/loopback: remove magic number in state-machine
greybus: greybus/loopback: remove spurious pr_err in sysfs store
greybus: greybus/loopback: make loopback type input equivalent to protocol type
greybus: greybus/loopback: add sink to loopback protocol
greybus: greybus/loopback: truncate maximum loop data to link size
greybus: greybus/loopback: update throughput metrics to improve granularity
greybus: greybus/loopback: fix broken tabs in greybus_protocols.h
greybus: greybus/loopback: fix 64bit printf format error
greybus: greybus/uart: fix typo in defintion
greybus: greybus/manifest: reserve control connection cport/bundle ids
greybus: greybus/manifest: convert pr_err to dev_err
greybus: greybus/loopback: timestamp seeding should not drop metrics
greybus: greybus/loopback: update loopback operation description comment
greybus: greybus/loopback: run operations a set number of times
greybus: greybus/loopback: add commentary to sysfs variables
greybus: greybus/loopback: rename frequency to requests
greybus: greybus/loopback: convert loopback wake/sleep to a waitqueue
greybus: greybus/loopback: remove redundant timestamping
greybus: greybus/loopback: make loopback code thread safe
greybus: greybus/loopback: provide interface to read all latency data-points
greybus: greybus/loopback: warn user if kfifo cannot log all data
greybus: greybus/connection: fix jump label on device_add failure
greybus: greybus/connection: add a timestamp kfifo to track connection handoff
greybus: greybus/es-drivers: add outbound timestamp to connection
greybus: greybus/loopback: functionally decompose calculation of turn-around times
greybus: greybus/loopback: handle timestamp roll-over
greybus: greybus/interface: change typo replicable => replaceable
greybus: greybus/loopback: add ability to graph greybus latency
greybus: greybus/loopback: convert sample report interface to debugfs
greybus: greybus/loopback: support synchronized tests over multiple cports
greybus: greybus/loopback: add gb_loopback_nsec_to_usec_latency
greybus: greybus/loopback: functionally decompose gb_loopback_calc_latency
greybus: greybus/loopback: graph round-trip time for all threads
greybus: greybus/loopback: add bitmask of connections to include in test
greybus: greybus/loopback: initialized ms_wait negate warning
greybus: greybus/loopback: remove checkpatch error causing macro
greybus: greybus/loopback: add module level sys/debug fs data points
greybus: greybus/loopback: fix typo in comment
greybus: greybus/loopback: make sure to list_del on connection_exit
greybus: greybus/loopback: ensure count decrement happens before sysfs_remove_groups
greybus: greybus/loopback: hold a coarse lock while init/exit run
greybus: greybus/loopback: exit kfree after mutex release
greybus: greybus/loopback: ensure debugfs entires are cleaned up on exit
greybus: greybus/loopback: ensure sysfs entries are cleaned up on exit
greybus: greybus/loopback: convert pr_info to dev_err
greybus: greybus/loopback: add response len to loopback protocol
greybus: greybus/loopback: sort list of connections for masking purposes
greybus: greybus/loopback: add gb_loopback_operation_sync
greybus: greybus/loopback: use dev_name to populate sysfsname
greybus: greybus/tracepoints: add tracepoint definitions
greybus: greybus/operation, core: hook tracepoints into message opertions
greybus: greybus/loopback: drop dependency on internal timestamps
greybus: greybus/tracepoints: add tracepoints for host_device tx/rx
greybus: greybus/es1, es2: hook tracepoints to hardware send/recv operations
greybus: greybus/loopback: move sysfs entries to /sys/bus/greybus/devices/endo0
greybus: greybus/loopback: masked out threads should sleep
greybus: greybus/loopback: drop redundant endo0 string from debugfs entry name
greybus: greybus/loopback: remove module specific identifier from debugfs name
greybus: greybus/loopback: add reserved fields to track firmware latencies
greybus: greybus/es1,es2: add USB vendor command to timestamp
greybus: greybus/connection: add latency tag enable/disable callbacks
greybus: greybus/loopback: send command to APBridge to tag throughput
greybus: greybus/loopback: add tracker variables to hold firmware timestamps
greybus: greybus/loopback: capture and present firmware supplied latencies
greybus: greybus/manifest: fix the placement of arguments to pr_err
greybus: greybus/audio-pcm: fix use of variable unitialized
greybus: greybus/loopback: Relax locking during loopback operations
greybus: greybus/loopback: Move latency_ts initialization to transfer routine
greybus: greybus/loopback: Drop unused timeval variables
greybus: greybus/loopback: drop bus aggregate calculation
greybus: greybus/loopback: Convert cross-thread mutex to spinlock while relaxing connect locks
greybus: greybus/loopback: Add asynchronous bi-directional support
greybus: greybus/loopback: Convert thread delay to microseconds
greybus: greybus/loopback: Ensure we reset stats once and once only
greybus: greybus/loopback: Drop NULL check on container_of pointer
greybus: greybus/loopback: Retrun -ENOMEM if operation allocation fails
greybus: greybus/loopback: Wait for all async operations to complete on exit
greybus: greybus/loopback: Add asynchronous backoff
greybus: svc: Change GB_SVC_TYPE_LINK_CONFIG to 0x10
greybus: greybus/timesync: Add Control and SVC TimeSync command/response data definitions
greybus: greybus/timesync: Add Control and SVC protocol TimeSync operation definitions
greybus: greybus/control: Add TimeSync control commands
greybus: Ensure gb->mutex is held when adding timer
greybus: Fixup __u64, __u32 to __le64, __le32 in timesync declarations
greybus: greybus_trace.h: Fix dodgy indentation
greybus: greybus_protocols.h Add SVC_TIMESYNC_WAKE_PINS_ACQUIRE/RELEASE
greybus: greybus_protocols.h Add SVC_TIMESYNC_PING
greybus: arche-platform: Rework platform/wd-line state transition logic
greybus: svc: Add TimeSync SVC commands
greybus: control: Add TimeSync get-last-event logic
greybus: control: Drop unused parameter from timesync_authoritative
greybus: hd: Add TimeSync APBridge commands
greybus: interface: Extract and store Interface feature byte
greybus: es2.c: Declare local __le64 not u64
greybus: Fix unbalanced irq_enable() backtrace
greybus: timesync: Add timesync core driver
greybus: timesync: Bind TimeSync into Greybus
greybus: tracepoints: Add standard Linux tracepoint for TimeSync event
greybus: timesync: Add gb_timesync_frame_time_to_timespec()
greybus: timesync: Add debugfs entry to display frame-ping in ktime
greybus: uart: Fix minor number leak
greybus: timesync: Do 64 bit divisions in a 32 friendly way
greybus: timesync: Do not hold mutex on cancel_delayed_work_sync
greybus: timesync: Fix transitions to the INACTIVE state
greybus: timesync: Rework timesync removal serialization logic
greybus: timesync: Enforce TimeSync locks as subordinate to Interface locks
greybus: timesync: Initialize the timesync ping fields to zero
greybus: timesync: Make printout consitent with other greybus messages
greybus: timesync/pm: Make synchronous call to restore FrameTime
greybus: greybus_protocols.h/es2: Ensure __le32 is used not u32
greybus: greybus_protocols.h: convert __u32 to __le32
greybus: timesync: Bugfix ping should not result in -EAGAIN
greybus: timesync: reduce initial startup time
greybus: timesync: probe shouldn't complete until FrameTime sync does
greybus: timesync: Implement a retry mechanism
greybus: timesync: Ensure parallel synchronous calls succeed
greybus: timesync: Printout strobe count on sync failure
David Lin (40):
greybus: arche-platform: fix incorrect gpio variable type
greybus: greybus_trace: Fix broken greybus ftrace
greybus: svc: add Interface power measurements support
greybus: arche-platform: Power-off unipro subsystem upon suspend
greybus: svc watchdog: Disable watchdog upon entering suspend
greybus: es2: Fix apb_log null pointer exception
greybus: svc: add AP power measurements debugfs support
greybus: svc: clean up gb_svc struct for pwrmon
greybus: svc: free pwrmon_rails memory upon exit
greybus: operation: fix an inconsistent indent
greybus: legacy: remove legacy driver support
greybus: legacy: remove protocol.o from the makefile
greybus: svc: pwrmon: validate svc protocol op status when getting rail names
greybus: audio: remove the unnecessary return statement
greybus: control: add bundle suspend and resume preparations
greybus: control: add bundle deactivate and activate operation
greybus: control: add interface suspend prepare operation
greybus: control: add interface deactivate prepare operation
greybus: control: add interface hibernate abort operation
greybus: svc: add interface resume operation
greybus: svc: add power mode call for link hibernation
greybus: interface: implement unipro link hibernate call
greybus: control: add connection suspend and resume calls
greybus: interface: send deactivate prepare when interface is disabled
greybus: bundle: add activate and deactivate
greybus: interface: add runtime pm support
greybus: bundle: add runtime pm support
greybus: audio: add runtime pm support
greybus: camera: add runtime pm support
greybus: gbphy: add gbphy runtime pm support
greybus: i2c: add runtime pm support
greybus: hd: arche-platform: implement greybus shutdown
greybus: timesync: do not print frametime by default
greybus: operation: print id when synchronous operation timeout
greybus: svc_watchdog: Add sysfs file to change the behavior of bite
greybus: audio: add runtime pm to enumerated control and DAPM widget
greybus: interface: delete control device upon enable failure
greybus: svc_watchdog: use schedule_delayed_work helper
greybus: interface: fix timesync registration sequencing
greybus: light: fix incorrect led attribute files allocation
Dinko Mironov (1):
greybus: audio: Fix incorrect counting of 'ida'
Eli Sennesh (5):
greybus: firmware and svc: detect the difference between ES2 and ES3 chips
greybus: firmware/bootrom: debug output from bootrom protocol
greybus: operation: rate-limit dev_err printing on the receive path
greybus: update UniPro Set Interface Power Mode operation to match spec
greybus: update UniPro Set Interface Power Mode operation to match spec
Evgeniy Borisov (6):
greybus: camera-gb: Extend the configure streams interface
greybus: camera-gb: Remove hardcode for CSI TX number of lanes
greybus: camera-gb: Add description of interface header
greybus: camera-gb: Extend gb camera module structure
greybus: camera-gb: Implement camera module reference counting as subject.
greybus: camera: Add RAW data format
Fabien Parent (15):
greybus: es2: rename misnamed CPORT_MAX into CPORT_COUNT
greybus: add num_cports field to greybus hd
greybus: es2: dynamically allocate array for cport <-> ep mapping
greybus: es2: get cport count from apb1 usb device
greybus: es{1,2}: remove control endpoint field
greybus: connection: fail to bind if connection init fails
greybus: es{1,2}: remove obselete define
greybus: es2: implement cport reset control request
greybus: connection: destroy connection on failing to bind it
greybus: connection: add api to {en,dis}able unipro fct flow
greybus: apba: add fct flow usb control requests
greybus: es2: implement the fct flow control requests
greybus: connection: {en,dis}able fct flow in connection management
greybus: camera: disable E2EFC on CSI connection
greybus: connection: remove CDSI1 hack
Georgi Dobrev (2):
greybus: Added a sysfs entry to power down the SVC
greybus: greybus-driver: Add intf_oops operation
Gjorgji Rosikopulos (11):
greybus: camera: HACK: Export GB camera interface
greybus: camera: HACK: Register gb camera to the HOST camera
greybus: camera: Fix backword compatibility in configure streams
greybus: camera: Add support for configure streams flag in gb interface
greybus: camera: Update configure stream based on new interface
greybus: camera: add semiplanar and planar formats
greybus: camera: Improve module registration mechanism
greybus: camera: Use pointer for gb camera module ops
greybus: camera: Add metadata format
greybus: camera: Add debug data format
greybus: camera: Rename debug and metadata mbus formats
Greg KH (8):
greybus: battery: update for 4.1 power supply api changes
greybus: gb-audio: fix build warning
greybus: gb-audio: fix build breakage on 4.1-rc1
greybus: es2: comment out unused functions
greybus: audio_codec: Don't be tricky with the driver model
greybus: add bundle class to the bundle uevent
greybus: svc: double the ping delay timeout
greybus: camera: only build module against msm kernel
Greg Kroah-Hartman (376):
greybus: Initial commit
greybus: Import most recent greybus code to new repo.
greybus: README and.gitignore updates
greybus: update README with info on how to build and contact me.
greybus: i2c-gb: actually add the i2c adapter properly...
greybus: greybus.h: tiny coding style cleanups
greybus: Greybus SD/MMC host driver
greybus: add framework for'struct gbuf'
greybus: gpio driver
greybus: gpio-gb.c: it now builds properly
greybus: uart framework added, doesn't build
greybus: uart-gb: more work on tty functions
greybus: more uart work
greybus: uart-gb: now builds, more framework added
greybus: start moving the function types into the greybus core
greybus: static module_init/exit functions
greybus: hook up sdio, gpio, and tty into the greybus core.
greybus: i2c: tie to the proper place on the greybus_device
greybus: i2c: use same naming convention everywhere
greybus: gpio: tie into gb core properly
greybus: sdio: tie into gb core properly
greybus: uart: tie into gb core properly
greybus: initial framework for ES1 usb AP driver
greybus: can't use devm anymore, we aren't tieing into the driver model lifecycle :(
greybus: actually get the devm() change to build...
greybus: first framework for the es1 ap controller
greybus: es1-ap-usb: more init framework added.
greybus: register the bus with the driver core and add framework for debugfs files.
greybus: ap message loop added.
greybus: structures added
greybus: more structure definitions added
greybus: split svc msg out into separate header file
greybus: greybus_desc.h created
greybus: header file s/u8/__u8/g
greybus: greybus.h: tiny movement around
greybus: more changes due to name changes in the greybus document
greybus: s/greybus_device_id/greybus_module_id/g
greybus: get field names right for descriptors
greybus: turn off warnings for es1-ap-usb.c to make it easier to build for now...
greybus: export gb_new_ap_msg so that the es1 module can use it
greybus: start parsing descriptor structures
greybus: start parsing descriptor fields
greybus: sysfs attributes for functions and more driver core integration.
greybus: serial number attribute added
greybus: module id attributes
greybus: greybus_string()
greybus: split sysfs functions out to separate file.
greybus: minor checkpatch cleanups
greybus: add proper packing to all greybus message types
greybus: uart-gb: remove unneeded THIS_MODULE setting
greybus: add es1_ap_desc.c to describe the ES1 USB device descriptors
greybus: host controller additions
greybus: more hd work
greybus: first cut at parsing svc messages sent to the AP
greybus: add battery module
greybus: battery FIXME added
greybus: minor whitespace cleanups to make checkpatch.pl happy
greybus: es1_ap_desc.c: updated ES1 USB device descriptor
greybus: es1: finialized USB device structure
greybus: es1: forgot to free our urb on disconnect
greybus: pass appropriate type to create function
greybus: fix endian issue in sysfs.c
greybus: Fix build errors on older kernels.
greybus: Merge branch'master' of github.com:gregkh/greybus
greybus: AP: move a bunch of svc message handling logic into ap.c
greybus: es1: add the start of cport urb handling.
greybus: es1: allocate cport out urbs properly
greybus: es1: handle cport data in and out
greybus: ap: convert to workqueue from thread
greybus: ap: cleanup of process ap message loop
greybus: Makefile: add 'check' option to run sparse with endian checks enabled
greybus: es1 endpoint descriptor: minor fixes to get the config right
greybus: tty driver fixes to get init working properly
greybus: uart-gb: let the core dynamically allocate the major number
greybus: core: verify major/minor number of greybus protocol
greybus: es1: functionally complete
greybus: devices: endpoint description of device
greybus: gbuf recieve path work, not done, dinner time...
greybus: gbuf: cport in buffer stream logic
greybus: add test_sink driver
greybus: fix hd init sequence of setting up parent and driver pointers properly
greybus: es1: set buffer sizes for messages based on email discussions
greybus: gbuf: implement submission logic
greybus: gbuf: clean up logic of who owns what "part" of the gbuf
greybus: svc_msg.h: add data for hotplug message
greybus: greybus.h: add function prototype for add/remove a module
greybus: core.c: create empty functions to keep linking working for hotplug/remove
greybus: ap: start validating the message better
greybus: ap: validate the rest of the svc message buffer sizes
greybus: core: hook up the hotplug message
greybus: fix up coding style issue I caused with the last patch...
greybus: es1: no BUG_ON() code, report an error and recover.
greybus: operation: fix endian issue in the operation message header size field.
greybus: manifest: some minor sparse warning fixups.
greybus: manifest.c: minor sparse cleanup
greybus: connection: properly lock idr
greybus: greybus.h: remove transfer_flags
greybus: greybus_id.h: checkpatch cleanup
greybus: svc_msg.h: add bsd license to file so that firmware can use it.
greybus: greybus_manifest.h: add BSD license so that firmware can share it.
greybus: greybus_manifest.h: fix up class protocol numbers to match the spec.
greybus: gpio-gb: allow it to build properly for all current kernel versions.
greybus: battery-gb: provide accessors for a few more functions
greybus: battery: some hooking up to the greybus core
greybus: add LED protocol numbers
greybus: battery-gb: Add battery communication with the module
greybus: Merge branch 'gregkh_work' into master
greybus: battery-gb.c: fix memory leak found by Viresh
greybus: battery-gb: Allow kernel values to get out of sync with greybus spec
greybus: module: fix double free of module
greybus: hook up greybus to the driver model
greybus: module: enable all sysfs attributes
greybus: i2c: point to the proper parent device
greybus: module: don't create duplicate module ids
greybus: operation: fix some sparse warnings
greybus: gpio-gb: fix some endian sparse warnings that were real.
greybus: gbuf: implement gbuf_kill_gbuf()
greybus: core: check for valid hcd callbacks
greybus: core: make greybus_kill_gbuf not return a value
greybus: operation: make the timeout a per-operation thing, not per-connection
greybus: uart-gb: convert over to the connection interface
greybus: uart-gb: remove |
raged 50 years ago. But bear with me.”
Keller says a sense that government had forfeited its legitimacy and the liberal establishment had sold out was what animated the 1960s radicals, similar to what he sees now from conservatives.
He compares the “libertarian flank” who were drawn to the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll of the 1960s radical movement to the “political freeloaders drawn by the addictive drugs of power and television attention.”
Keller also compares national televised news and the discussion of previously private issues such as sexuality and women’s rights in the 1960s to cultural disorientation and privacy concerns generated by the Internet and social media.
“Conditions are ripe for the rise of new leaders, some of whom will be demagogues and charlatans,” Keller writes.
[Image via YouTube]I
n 1895, audiences sat down to watch “L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat,” an early film that showed a train pulling into a station. Legend has it that when viewers saw the train barreling toward them they panicked, because they hadn’t experienced the new medium.
Whether the story is true or not, virtual reality filmmakers are recalling it with interest. Less than a year after the release of the first modern VR headsets to the public, filmmakers are in the same position as the film industry was in the late 1900s. The technology is new, as are viewers’ expectations. No one knows what type of content will work best, or even what type of content will be possible a few years down the road.
“In virtual reality we’re right at that beginning stage again,” said Mark Walsh, a Pixar alumnus who leads an interactive VR studio called Motional Entertainment. “It’s not that we need a different kind of film stock or a different kind of camera. We just need more artists to be playing with the medium.”
So filmmakers are borrowing techniques from movies, video games, theater and oral storytelling and seeing what happens. The early results are promising. VR has the potential to wow audiences with intimate access to people and places once contained to a two-dimensional screen, and that’s drawing veterans of Hollywood, animation studios and the gaming industry. Together, they are creating a new reality.
Beware the train
In 1895, audiences panicked when watching “L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat,” thinking the train was coming right at them.
Building intimacy
It’s unclear if VR films should even be called films. On one end of the spectrum, there are traditional movies; you sit in a chair and watch something happening in front of you. On the other end of the spectrum are games that require a high degree of participation.
VR films fall somewhere in the middle and, depending on which one you are experiencing, the expectations for you as the viewer can vary wildly.
“Invasion!” is an early standout film that makes use of one of VR’s most interesting mechanisms: eye contact. The film, which was created by the 15-person team at Baobab Studios, places you in the body of a rabbit.
You don’t need interaction to build empathy.
On a vast frozen lake, you encounter another rabbit who looks straight into your eyes and smiles sweetly. Instead of the jarring feeling of a character breaking the fourth wall, the gesture places you within the story as a central character.
This is the transportative nature of VR. While it’s exhilarating to hack a zombie to pieces with a virtual axe, it’s also powerfully immersive to simply be near a character we care about. Like every medium ever, storytelling is what we humans crave. And now we can take an intimate seat within every story.
The Future of VR Storytelling | 5:27
// VR filmmakers face a bit of an identity crisis here. When people watch a movie, chances are they want to relax. They don’t want intense participation; if they did, they would play a video game instead. You don’t need interaction to build empathy.
Entering a story adds another interesting truth: Once a viewer is a part of the action, they gain a feeling of responsibility.
“There’s this constant struggle between ego and empathizing,” Baobab Studios CEO Maureen Fan said. “Your mind is thinking about yourself and your own ego and the other characters. You may not be thinking about those characters as much as if you weren’t a character in the world.”
In Oculus Story Studio’s “Henry,” a lonely porcupine throws a birthday party for himself. The studio realized early on that Henry can’t make eye contact with the viewer, because that would mean he’s not alone. Instead, the viewer plays observer to Henry’s painful solitude. The tension of being so close but so far is heart-wrenching.
So as novel as it is right now to place the viewer in the story, it doesn’t always make sense. If a viewer is supposed to be building understanding of a Syrian refugee, it can be distracting to make them wonder how they should help within the movie.
A new relationship with viewers
Once you step into a virtual world, it’s natural to want to reach out and touch a character. But most films don’t let you do that. A viewer might not even know if they’re entering a game or a film. In these early days, directors are learning the importance of cueing the viewer on expectations.
“You don’t want to dangle a delicious piece of cake in front of somebody and then not let them eat it,” Walsh said. “If you’re going to put something within their reach, they expect to be able to reach it.”
When a viewer pulls on a VR headset, they gain control of the camera. They become the director. If a filmmaker forgets that, they risk losing the viewer’s attention at the most critical moments. Or they risk overshooting the limits of human attention.
“We can only keep track of two-and-a-half things at a time,” Oculus Story Studio creative director Saschka Unseld said. “Once you can not only look around but you can move around in an experience, that takes over two of those attention things you can keep track of. You have about half left over for a voiceover.”
Basically, don’t make it too complicated. Stick to a story that flows with viewers’ innate expectations. Filmmakers can regain control of their films with suggestions and optical cues. Audio is one of the strongest options; make a noise, and people are sure to look for its source.
In “Invasion!” Baobab’s animators used natural frames like mountain peaks to guide the viewer’s eyes. They also created natural stopping points on the frozen lake’s expansive surface by making certain areas lighter or darker.
More obviously, the viewer can follow the bunny’s eyes. Her ears prick up with curiosity or she cowers low in fear. It draws the viewer’s eyes toward the arrival of an alien ship, which flies into view and then dips behind a patch of trees.
The film’s team found that after a few seconds, viewers start to look around, wondering if they are missing the action. And that means they might not be looking in exactly the right place when the alien ship reemerges. The film forgoes long, drawn-out periods of suspense in favor of keeping the viewer clued in, according to CCO Eric Darnell.
It’s okay to be blunt, too. At the Game Developers Conference in March, I sat down on a virtual beach and met the characters of Motional’s “Gary the Gull.” I couldn’t move my body or touch Gary, but he asked me questions. Then he looked at me expectantly until I realized he wanted me to nod my head yes or no. After a stilted but functional conversation, he tried to steal from my cooler.
But it all comes back to characters. Without curiosity and delight, viewers lose interest and start looking around for something else to do.
Motional’s Mark Walsh, who led animation on Pixar films like Ratatouille and Finding Nemo, designed Gary. While the animation in “Gary the Gull” is somewhat crude, the characters are irresistible. Gary talks in a charming, over-the-top voice that you can’t help but engage with.
“The big trick is creating a personality that people will identify with or be entertained by — that has flaws that make it lovable or likable,” Walsh said. “In virtual reality, we’re meeting these characters. So the way that we approach creating empathy or creating entertainment with a character is for me completely different.”
Gary’s big trait is that he’s a con man. In a film, creating Gary would entail animating a gull conning another character. But in VR, he has to prove it. He has to con you as the viewer to build out his character. It’s a more difficult sell, but it results in a more authentic connection with the character.
Traversing the uncanny valley
VR tricks our brains into believing that what we are seeing is real, which creates some interesting nuances, according to former Jaunt VR CEO Jens Christensen. Actors have to act less like actors and more like real people or else it’s distracting. At GDC, some VR developers argued VR experiences shouldn’t have music at all, opting instead for realistic ambient noises.
One of the most difficult challenges is overcoming the technology itself. Giving viewers the ability to determine the shot means each frame must be rendered almost instantly if a filmmaker is working with animation. VR only looks good at an incredibly high definition, so getting the desired look requires some trade-offs. For example, very few VR films allow the viewer to walk around because it would make it so much more difficult to render.
In “Henry,” the filmmakers decided to apply texture in only the most important parts of the film. The team spent a lot of time making Henry’s quills and fur look just right, but since the viewer only sees one side of him, his back is just empty space. He also has a simplified shape and limbs. Many of the features of his home are hidden in shadow or filled with less detail, because they just don’t matter as much.
Cutting and panning can be problematic in VR because, done wrong, they make viewers queasy.
The obvious challenge of shooting a live-action film for virtual reality is hiding any evidence of the shoot. The director and crew can’t be in the shot, and neither can boom mics or any other type of equipment. The VR film sets I’ve attended took place in small rooms the crew could quickly exit, or involved dashing away to take cover after each scene reset. It’s something that forces even actors to relearn their jobs.
“You have to remember in VR that no matter where you are, you’re in the shot,” Christensen said. “You have to remain in character for much longer than you’re used to.”
Lighting and other specialty equipment must be subtly integrated into the set. Directors seek out natural light or build out existing sources like streetlights or campfires.
Traditional film techniques have to be rethought as well. Cutting and panning can be problematic in VR because, done wrong, they make viewers queasy. Christensen still believes they have their place, but a lot of filmmakers are staying away from them altogether for now.
https://vimeo.com/134754691
New tools emerge
A few years ago, shooting a virtual reality film involved assembling GoPros or DSLR cameras into a ball and then laboriously stitching all the footage together into a spherical film.
Now, there are options. Consumer cameras are hitting the market, but there are also professional-grade cameras like the system built by Jaunt. Editing platforms that ease working with 360 degrees and interactive points are also hitting the market.
Animators usually opt for game developer software, which is better suited to interactivity and a work pipeline that lets multiple teams work on a film at once. But there are also emerging options that let animators work directly within virtual reality. Oculus recently unveiled Quill, which provides a 3D space in which to paint. Unseld described it as a closer representation of an artist’s intentions; it’s not photoreal, but it’s real brushstrokes — a style that works especially well for the right types of stories.
Filmmaking could be the world’s entry point to VR.
One of the most interesting technologies on the horizon is stereoscopic VR, which creates a limited depth of field that mimics the way the human eye sees. This tends to feel even more real than the most common types of VR film, which have everything in view in focus.
Lytro is working on a camera in this style, and NextVR has demoed stereoscopic films. The technology could mimic our eyes even more with the help of VR headsets that track gaze, allowing the film to refocus based on where you’re actually looking.
Filmmakers are also hoping to see lighter headsets become available in the next few years. Films currently tend to max out at around 10 minutes. That’s partially because it’s so labor-intensive to produce a VR film, but also because that’s all viewers can stand.
“It can be uncomfortable to watch a single piece of content for much longer than 10 minutes unless it’s very good,” said Neil Graham, who leads VR production for Europe’s Sky channel. “But this will increase as headsets get lighter, and as stitching and motion improve, which it is doing by the week.
//
Here’s to experimenting
In these early days of VR, it’s tempting to prey on audiences’ emotions, just as “L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat” supposedly did. Attend any VR gathering and you can expect to be terrorized by zombies and shark attacks. The emotions you feel in VR are real and raw. There’s no longer a screen dividing you from the virtual world. You’re there.
But the medium has already drawn storytelling masters who want to move VR beyond viewers’ screams and sweaty palms. There’s a healthy pipeline of new talent on the way, too. They’re applying decades of lessons from film and gaming to create an entirely new mashup. While some of us are gamers, most of us are cinema goers. And that means filmmaking could be the world’s entry point to VR.
“With everything we keep doing, we’re starting to build vocabulary and ideas to in a year or two create something that is so unlike movies that you won’t even compare it with that anymore,” Unseld said.A PARAGLIDER is being hailed "the luckiest woman in the world" after surviving a violent storm that sucked her up higher than the peak of Mt Everest.
Ewa Wisnierska, 35, was catapulted upwards like a leaf at speeds of up to 20 metres per second to a height of almost 10,000m.
The German world champion paraglider then lapsed into unconsciousness as she was pounded by hail, almost struck by lightning, and covered in ice.
She was unconscious inside the storm system for 40 minutes before coming to and being found, still covered in ice, about 60km from where she had taken off in northern NSW.
A Chinese paraglider, 42, who was sucked into the same storm, was found dead on Thursday, a day after disappearing.
The pair were among 200 paragliders who took part in training flights on Wednesday for next week's Paragliding World Championships in Manila.
Wisnierska, ranked number 1 in last year's world championships in Brazil, said yesterday she had been unable to avoid the storm.
"I was just praying, please, please put me somewhere away from the cloud," she said from her hotel room, where she was resting her bruised and frostbitten body.
As she was flung upward, above the height of the 8850m Mt Everest to near the cruising height of jumbo jets, Wisnierska noticed ice forming on her sunglasses and instruments, before losing consciousness.
At that height, temperatures can drop to -40C or 50C.
Eventually Wisnierska, who reached 9946m (30,000 feet), lost consciousness. Doctors told her later that blacking out may have saved her life, because her metabolism had slowed down.
More than 40 minutes later, and still at a height of 6900m, she woke to find herself still stuck in the storm, in darkness and with her gloves frozen.
"It was amazing, because the glider was still flying." she said.
"I don't know how is it possible, because there was hail everywhere, into the glider, into my harness and it was still flying."
Though dazed and confused from a lack of oxygen, Wisnierska turned her attention to getting back to the ground after she escaped the storm clouds.
"I was shaking and everything, but I thought I just need to fly straight and get out of this cloud," Wisnierska said.
"I thought I need to go down just to warm up.
"I thought 'Where could I land?' I couldn't see any road or anything, but then I saw a small farm, and tried to fly towards it, and landed very safe."
Unable to gather her thoughts to call for help, it was several minutes before her crew called by radio.
They found her, about 60km from her launch site, still covered with ice.
Godfrey Wenness, the organiser of the championships, said Wisnierska was the luckiest woman alive.
"This is like winning lotto 10 times in a row. That's how lucky this woman is," Wenness said.
"I would say she is the luckiest woman in the world right now, not exaggerating or being sensational at all. The Chinese man died, she survived.
"There's no logical reason why she got away with it," he said.
Organisers of the World Paragliding Championships have confirmed that He Zhongpin, 42, of the Chinese paragliding team, died after being sucked into the storm.
An exact cause of death was yet to be determined, but it is believed he died from extreme hypothermia and hypoxia, or lack of oxygen to the brain.
Though all pilots were extremely saddened by Mr He's death, the championships would continue as scheduled, organisers said.
Despite frostbite to her ears and legs, Wisnierska still hopes to compete.
"Flying is too fantastic to stop because of an accident," she said. "I don't know who to thank.
"I thanked the angels, but I don't believe in God."
Originally published as Paraglider survives wild flightIFC Renews Scott Aukerman's Podcast Turned Surreal Talk Show 'Comedy Bang! Bang!'
Giving hope to both TV shows inspired by podcasts and the nascent “surreal, deconstructed talk show” genre, IFC has renewed Scott Aukerman’s “Comedy Bang! Bang!” for a second season, the network announced today.
Based on comedian and writer Aukerman’s very successful podcast of the same name, the series premiered in June of last year and is hosted by Aukerman, with Reggie Watts serving as his one-man band leader and a variety of guests, including Zach Galifianakis, Nick Kroll, Thomas Lennon, Will Forte and Michael Cera, appearing either as characters or as themselves.
READ MORE: Scott Aukerman Brings Celebrity Guests and a ‘Bizarro Version’ of Himself to Podcast-Turned-TV Show ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’
IFC hasn’t just given the show a renewal, it’s doubled the order from the original first season — the second season will consist of two 10-episode arcs, with the first 10 scheduled to debut in the third quarter of 2013 and the remaining 10 set for the fourth. Production on the new season’s currently underway in Los Angeles.
“‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ perfectly embodies the type of sharp, smart comedy space IFC inhabits,” said IFC’s SVP of programming Debbie DeMontreux. “Scott and Reggie are comedic geniuses and we couldn’t be happier that their television home is on IFC. The A-list roster of guest stars the show brought to IFC in season one, coupled with the popularity of the series amongst comedy fans makes it a great addition to our ‘slightly off’ line-up.”
IFC did not choose to renew Kurt Braunohler’s mock game show “Bunk,” which premiered alongside “Comedy Bang! Bang!” last summer. The network has another podcast-turned-TV series in the works — a scripted series loosely based on the popular “WTF with Marc Maron.”
Here’s a look at Aukerman and guest Amy Poehler have an engineered “topical” conversation in episode two of the first season:
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.OnePlus Pauses OxygenOS 3.2.0 Update Rollout for OnePlus 3; Users Also Find IMEI Issues in OTA Check
OnePlus had initiated the rollout of OxygenOS 3.2.0 to the OnePlus 3, much to the rejoice of users as the update fixed a lot of issues that early adopters were facing. But as it currently stands, the update has been paused.
As OnePlus states in their forum post:
Due to some reports of issues while upgrading, we are temporarily stopping the rollout to investigate. We will start back up as soon as possible.
The update was meant to reach 100% rollout in 48 hours, but has been paused after about 26 hours. It is unknown what the issue is, how many users received the update and how many of these have had “the issue”. The update is promised to be back up “as soon as possible”, but if you wish to manually flash the update, you can still find a few mirrors. Do note, that flashing this particular update may involve risks (as we assume the pause in the rollout to be because of critical reasons), so make sure to have backups just in case.
Seemingly unrelated, but on a tangent nonetheless, an issue was found with how OnePlus orchestrates update checks for OTAs. As users found out on the OnePlus forums, IMEI on the OnePlus 3 was being sent in plain text over HTTP whenever user attempted a check for OTA. Everytime you press the “Check Update” button, a request is made to OnePlus servers which contains your IMEI in a header plainly called “imei”, and in the user agent as well. Since this request is made over HTTP and not HTTPS, it is easy for anyone to snoop over your IMEI in a MITM attack. You can read up more about this on the xda forum post as well.
This is a glaring loophole which needs more attention from OnePlus and needs to be fixed with absolute haste. There is no confirmed correlation between the update rollout being paused and the issue being brought to light, but we hope that OnePlus does fix this issue with highest of priorities.
What are your thoughts on the issues? Are they related by causation, or are they just a (not-so) happy coincidence? Let us know in the comments below!Clark Kent/Superman: What's your position on the bat vigilante in Gotham?
Bruce Wayne/Batman: Daily Planet, wait, do I own this one, or is that the other guy?
Clark Kent/Superman: Civil Liberties are being trampled on in your city, good people living in fear.
Bruce Wayne/Batman: Don't believe everything you hear, son.
Clark Kent/Superman: I've seen it, Mr Wayne, he thinks he's above the law.
Bruce Wayne/Batman: The Daily Planet criticizing those who think they're above the law is a little hypocritical, wouldn't you say? Considering every time your hero saves a cat out of a tree, you write a buff piece editorial about an alien who if he wanted to can burn the place down, and there wouldn't be a damn thing we can about it.
Clark Kent/Superman: Most of the world doesn't share your opinion, Mr Wayne.So here we have Maud as a Breezie. What was Purple Smart thinking? This doesn't make moving rocks around any easier.
This was made because I liked the idea of a Maud Pie Breezie carrying Boulder and I wanted a nice desktop background of it. Apparently that's not something that you could just find with a simple search. Everything was cobbled together with Inkscape, and yes that includes the rock farm background which I then just heavily blurred. (I think looks much better blurry though) I'm also not really happy with the wings and I fudged the size of Boulder so it looks slightly better... and don't even ask how she gets that delightful frock on/off with those wings. I may upload the craggy un-blurred version if people want to use it for something.
I don't really like Breezies, but I do love Maud Pie.
My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic, Maud Pie, Boulder, Purple Smart, Breezies, and possibly even Rock Farm are all part of DHX/Hasbro's complete breakfast.The boy who sacrificed his dignity to save his shoes.
Sichuan flood reports and photos continue to roll in despite what appears to be a patch of sunshine in Chengdu today.
The floods have killed seven in the province and left five missing, according to Xinhua's latest update. Over 27,000 people have evacuated, and 29,000 households in Wangcong county have been without power since Monday.
Among the fatalities was a giant panda who drowned after being swept into the Min River in Yingxiu. The male panda lived in the wild and was about 10 years old.
Wenchuan's Yingxing Town was hit particularly hard with landslides. In another part of the same county, a bridge snapped in two places, trapping dozens. They were eventually brought to safety by firefighters and rescue personnel.
In Bazhong, flash floods left residents of about 20 households trapped in their flooding homes, including an elderly woman who had to be carried out of her home on her bed by rescue workers.
Amid the tragedy are stories of citizen heroism, like "Compassionate Specs Brother," who became an instant Internet celebrity after photos of him carrying his neighbors through the thigh-high water surfaced online. Chen Minglu was spotted near Yiguanmiao shirtless, with his shorts rolled up, wading through the water with passengers on his back. Observers said he carried children, elderly people, and even a pregnant woman across the water-logged street for two hours. When the water receded, he disappeared quietly.
And then there are the not-so-heroic, such as this fellow, who was caught on camera being piggybacked by his girlfriend through ankle-high water. Netizens surmised she was carrying him so that his new shoes wouldn't get wet.
The photo was posted to Sina's microblogging service Weibo and received over 2,000 comments and nearly 10,000 clicks within hours of appearing. The person who took and posted the photo reported that spectators at the scene applauded the girlfriend until the boyfriend's face turned red.I love protesting to restore love and compassion. We ain't called the "hurryin' hoosiers" for no reason. Doing damage control for our beloved state that used to be sweet and is gonna return to that kindness, after a few misguided careerist politicos get voted outta office (even some who have been near and dear and are now full of bullsh*t).We need more Democrats TODAY! PEACE...IT CAN BE WONDERFUL...FOR ALL SENTIENT BEINGS...INDIANA WILDLIFE AND FARM ANIMALS INCLUDED....ALL SPECIES AND ALL PERSONS DO MATTER AND DO COUNT FOR SOMETHING! What is in our drinking water? In addition to all the lagoons of pig/farm animal parts and blood and guts and poop and urine wafting over all Hoosiers? Too many mean and ambitious country-clubbing/red-neck Republican legislators on their own fast tracks in spite of all the damage they are doing to humans and to other species. We are doomed if we cannot stop the power-hungry clowns now!Try to remember exactly WHO made us this week's national laughing stock and generated hashtag "boycott Indiana" posts from people of every persuasion and many of the famous among us...and send those bigoted legislative folks back home to just sit on their porches and reflect for the rest of their natural lives, no matter how they got into office (some through mysterious caucusing -- you know who they are).We have been used by people out for only themselves and their own advancement...they just revealed who they are for all the world to see.THE GOOD PEOPLE STOOD UP FOR THE FREEDOMS AND RIGHTS OF ALL OF US THIS PAST WEEKEND in Fort Wayne and Indianapolis and elsewhere. We stood together with like-minded human beings in Allen County on Clinton Street. By the way, SB 101 not at all what Bill Clinton legislated.Present were every color, every gender, every age, the curved and the straight, the sexy and the asexual - humans of every variety, from kids to elderly. Marble vestal virgins seated on either side of the following quote (on the side of the Allen County Courthouse): "Justice -- the hope of all who suffer, the dread of all who wrong."Wonderful Terry Doran noted, "We thought nothing could be worse than Governor Mitch... now we have Governor Mike."(I wanted to use words like lout and thug…but I am touting love…so use your discretion!)Be on the alert for devious spins from our pretend GOVERNOR who enjoys the support of the ULTRA-WEALTHY CONTROLLING KOCH BROTHERS. Be on the alert for Hoosier neo-cons who are jumping through all of the tea party hoops and dupes.If you love INDIANA, HONK...and wow, as we stood with our signs, the honkers were beautiful and too numerous to count! HOOSIERS WHO ARE REAL CARE ABOUT ALL HOOSIERS...don't draw a pay-check from us tax-payers telling us any different. Be gone, all sneaky petes with your hateful, exclusionary tactics.Re-learn how to truly care about somebody besides yourselves. YAY FOR INDIANA on this week-end before Easter Sunday. "LOVE ONE ANOTHER"...the only Bible verse needed right this moment!"Great things are accomplished by talented people who believe they will accomplish them..." ~ Warren G. Bennis(And those talented people are never, well hardly ever, self-serving politicians who would rather take tax-payer money in their pay-checks than work for a living. Case in point? Those clowns hurrying through nasty laws in Indianapolis. They must be stopped...the inmates are running the asylum - use YOUR talents to get them out of office!)Oh, let us recall most of these legislators down in Indianapolis. We can get started locally IF they come out of hiding. Tired of their hoop-jumping for personal gain. They care neither about people or animals...just themselves.Let us not forget it, no matter who we may be or what dogmas we may believe. We are all the same...blessings on us all...all of us.________________________Read about movies and nostalgia, animal issues and sociopolitical concerns all discussed in my book Secrets of an Old Typewriter and its follow-up Misunderstood Gargoyles and Overrated Angels - print and ebook versions of both are available on Amazon (click the title).The books are also carried by these fine retailers: Ann Arbor's Bookbound and Common Language ; Columbia City's North Side Grille and Whitley County Historical Museum ; and Fort Wayne's The Bookmark And you can download from iTunes Meet other like-minded souls at my facebook fan page Visit my author website at www.susieduncansexton.com Join a great group of animal advocates Squawk Back: Helping animals when others can't... Or Won'tUnsurprisingly, most would rather have head-choppy sharia law.
HOROWITZ: Do you feel more comfortable living under American law or do you feel more comfortable living under sharia law? SOMALI MAN: Uh, sharia. ANOTHER SOMALI: I’m a Muslim. I prefer sharia law. A THIRD SOMALI: Sharia law, yes. HOROWITZ: Do you prefer Sharia law over American law? A FOURTH SOMALI: Of course, yes. HOROWITZ: Do you find most of your friends feel the same way? FOURTH SOMALI: Yeah, of course, if you’re a Muslim, yeah.
Why not offer them a free one-way ticket to Somalia in return for them rejecting their American citizenship or green cards?
Then they could go full jihad in the dear homeland with al Shabaab. They can stone and behead to their heart’s content. Win, win.
And stop importing them. Muslim immigration welcomes historic enemies of Western civilization and must stop.How about this for a debate format?
The RNC should get the press out of the debates altogether. Having them there puts the candidates in the position of "reporting" to the press like children having to account for themselves. It gives the press the role of allegedly representing the public. But it doesn't. It is the propaganda arm of the Liberals. For the next debate, have several topics agreed on, and have Alex Trebek as moderator.
Eight candidates, 2 minutes per question, making 16 minutes total. Let's round that off to 20 minutes. That is three questions per hour. A total of six questions. Some suggestions: "Foreign policy: What do you think is the most important foreign policy issue, and how would you deal with it? If you wish, you may comment on positions taken by your colleagues." "The budget: The budget is out of balance. We have doubled the national debt by in the last seven years to $18 trillion. What is the most significant issue about the budget, and how would you deal with it? If you wish, you may also comment on positions taken by your colleagues." "Race relations: An urban legend grew out of Ferguson that the police are occupying inner-city communities and are shooting young black men for sport. The movement Black Lives Matter grew out of this narrative. How do you see the state of race relations in America, and what would you do about them? If you wish, you may also comment on positions taken by your colleagues." "Trade: There has been bipartisan support for a broad new trade agreement known as the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership). What is your view of TPP and of our trade in general? If you wish, you may also comment on positions taken by your colleagues." "Immigration: There has been a surge of illegal immigration in recent years, and now, in addition, we are planning to resettle a large number of Muslim migrants in the U.S. What is you opinion on illegal immigration, and what would you do about it? If you wish, you may also comment on positions taken by your colleagues." "Closing statements. Each of you has two minutes. If you wish, you may also comment on positions taken by your colleagues." Like that. I am sure readers will have their own questions. Maybe Obamacare should be in there, but it is difficult to actually say something about it, given that there are so many moving parts. And there will be several additional debates.As part of an ongoing species reintroduction effort, scientists at Auburn University, along with numerous state and national partners, released 26 threatened Eastern indigo snakes into Conecuh National Forest on Friday.
The release is part of an on-going project, coordinated by the Auburn University Museum of Natural History's Alabama Natural Heritage Program, to reestablish the Eastern indigo snake in its native, longleaf pine forest habitat in south Alabama.
The Eastern indigo snake is the longest native snake in North America, and may reach a size of 8.5 feet and a weight of 11 pounds for males, and 6.5 feet and 6.5 pounds for females. A non-venomous, docile snake, the Eastern indigo gets its name from its lustrous, glossy, iridescent blue-black coloring of the head and body.
Prior to the reintroduction effort that began in 2010, there had been no confirmed sightings of the Eastern indigo in the wild in Alabama since the mid-1950s. Listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, the Eastern indigo is a non-game protected species in Alabama.
The snake disappeared from the state due to a variety of factors, including loss and degradation of their natural habitat, over collection associated with the pet trade, excessive mortality from automobiles, and gassing of their winter refuges to catch rattlesnakes.
Auburn University's James Godwin hold an Eastern indigo snake, which is the longest native snake in North America, reaching as much as 8.5 feet long and 11 pounds.
Eastern indigos like to eat other snakes, especially copperheads, a venomous snake that is responsible for more snake bites in the Southeastern U.S. than any other snake. As the Eastern indigo has disappeared from the south Alabama landscape, sightings of copperheads have skyrocketed, and researchers are currently monitoring how populations of copperheads change as Eastern indigos are reintroduced.
"The morning after the first release in 2010, the first snake that was located was found eating a copperhead," said James Godwin, zoologist with the Auburn University Museum of Natural History's Alabama Natural Heritage Program, who has coordinated the project from the start.
Since the reintroduction effort began, approximately 130 Eastern indigos have been released into Conecuh National Forest. All of the snakes have been implanted with a Passive Integrated Transponder, or PIT tag, for permanent identification.
"Can we call the reintroduction project a success thus far? Yes," said Godwin. "Does Conecuh National Forest have an abundance of Eastern indigo snakes? Probably not. Our studies show that only about half the snakes we release will actually survive into the next year. But we do have evidence that they are breeding in the wild and quickly growing in size, and a snake was seen and photographed in the wild a couple of weeks ago."
Early monitoring efforts were conducted by Jimmy and Sierra Stiles as part of their master's thesis projects in biological sciences at Auburn University. The first release in 2010 involved 17 snakes that, in addition to PIT tags, were implanted with radio transmitters for tracking purposes.
50 snakes you might come across in Alabama What they look like, where they live, what they eat.
"We wanted to know if these snakes that were raised in Tupperware would know what to do once they were released into the wild, and they did!" said Sierra Stiles. "They instinctively knew to use the gopher tortoise burrows for shelter, they knew how to find food, and they were mating."
In Alabama, the Eastern indigo is closely associated with the gopher tortoise because the snakes use gopher tortoise burrows for shelter. As such, many of the release sites in Conecuh National Forest have been located near gopher tortoise burrows.
"We used radio telemetry to track the snakes for three years," said Jimmy Stiles. "Now we conduct surveys of gopher tort |
are sympathetic to the protesters' demands for wider democracy said the police were not doing enough to protect the demonstrators. But others complained that the protests were disruptive and hurting their livelihoods.
"It affected my company, a perfume business, to deliver goods in the area," said Ken Lai in the bustling Causeway Bay neighbourhood. "I really dislike the fact that they occupied so many areas, all scattered around the city. I'm a Hong Konger too. The occupiers don't represent all of us."For going on three years, the former grocery store in downtown Schaumburg has been shuttered.
The Dominick's name is barely visible now, the windows are coated with a fine layer of grime and a chunk of the facade appears to be missing, exposing wooden beams.
Last July, Tony's Finer Foods bought the shopping center with plans to open a store in the vacant Dominick's. But before the deal closed, Jewel-Osco's parent company, Albertsons, extended its lease on the store for another five years, through May 2021.
Now Tony's is Albertsons landlord, and neither has immediate plans to open a grocery store there.
When Dominick's went out of business in December 2013, it left 72 empty stores in Chicago. The best locations were snatched up by chains, but at least 18 suburbs are still trying to turn the lights back on in the darkened stores.
"It upset a lot of our residents, as well as business owners. It was extremely frustrating," said Matt Frank, Schaumburg's economic development manager, of the plot twist.
When Dominick's went out of business in December 2013, it added 72 empty stores to the Chicago area's retail landscape. The most desirable ones were snatched up by chains like Jewel-Osco, Mariano's and Whole Foods Market. Last year, Albertsons acquired Safeway, Dominick's parent company, giving it control of most remaining Dominick's leases and property in the area.
At least 18 suburbs are still trying to turn the lights back on in the darkened stores. As time drags on, the prolonged vacancies create pockets of blight in once-thriving retail areas, hurting town coffers, hindering other businesses and inconveniencing residents. Some officials blame Albertsons, saying the company is paying rent on dark buildings to block out Jewel-Osco competitors.
Mike Withers, Jewel-Osco president, adamantly denies the company is keeping the stores vacant to thwart competition.
"Absolutely not," Withers said. "Our goal is to get someone in these boxes. We don't want dark stores.... It's extremely important to us that we keep communities vibrant."
While Albertsons' corporate real estate team makes decisions on the vacant stores, Withers has input, and in some cases he has tried to quell the rising angst in some suburbs, say some suburban officials.
Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune A sign advertises that a building which used to house a Dominick's grocery store is for lease on Sept. 12, 2016, in Glen Ellyn. A sign advertises that a building which used to house a Dominick's grocery store is for lease on Sept. 12, 2016, in Glen Ellyn. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)
Withers declined to discuss dealings with specific stores in detail but said the lease extension in Schaumburg was a show of interest. "Yes, we had interest in doing something there and continue to like that real estate. From my perspective, it does have value," Withers said.
But current economic pressures in the grocery industry, particularly in Chicago's hypercompetitive market, make it difficult to open more locations in the vacant stores at this point, Withers added. So for now, Albertsons is listing the 66,000-square-foot Schaumburg store for sublease.
Schaumburg officials still would like to see a grocery store in the Town Square Shopping Center, which sits between a park and the bustling Schaumburg Township District Library.
"The challenge is trying to get the two parties together to find the right user for the space," Frank said.
State Farm, which makes real estate investments in addition to selling insurance, sold the shopping center to Tony's but wasn't aware Albertsons exercised the option to extend the lease until after the deal closed, said Missy Dundov, a State Farm spokeswoman.
A Tony's Finer Foods representative did not return requests for comment.
Dominick's, which was started in 1925 as a corner market on the West Side, grew into Chicago's second largest grocery chain behind Jewel with 72 stores. Safeway bought Dominick's for $1.2 billion in 1998, incorporating it into the nation's second-largest chain. Dominick's notified the state Oct. 30 that it would close all of its Chicago-area stores by Dec. 28, affecting a total of 5,633 workers. Jewel-Osco has plans for four stores and Roundy's, the parent of Mariano's Fresh Market, announced it will acquire 11.
A similar situation is unfolding in west suburban Geneva, where Albertsons recently extended its lease for another five years on an empty former Dominick's in the busy Randall Road corridor, said Geneva Mayor Kevin Burns.
"Despite our best efforts at negotiating a mutually beneficial deal, Albertsons continues to pay in excess of $1 million a year to keep the store dark," Burns said.
Burns wants to see the space filled by a grocery retailer, both to meet the need for that part of town and to generate sales tax revenue. But while there's been "strong" interest from other chains in the 72,000-square-foot store, Albertsons' lease includes language that prohibits potential competitors from coming into the space, Burns said.
"Despite our frustrations and deep disappointment, we don't hold the cards in that location. Albertsons holds all the aces and all the kings," he said.
Mary Frances Trucco, Jewel-Osco spokeswoman, wouldn't say whether the company's lease in Geneva prevented other grocery stores from operating there. Geneva was also not included on a list of 18 vacant former Dominick's stores leased by Albertsons that Jewel-Osco provided to the Tribune. Trucco wouldn't say why not.
"The Albertsons corporate real estate team is working with the landlord in Geneva," Trucco said in an emailed statement.
Albertsons has been "extending dark store leases" to keep out competition, a tactic that's "objectionable, but not unusual" in the Chicago area's extremely competitive grocery industry, said Andrew Witherell, a commercial real estate broker who consulted with Mariano's on its expansion into 11 former Dominick's stores.
"It's clear that some retailers have been turned away as a result of (Albertsons) exercising its options," Witherell said.
One point that both Witherell and Jewel-Osco's Withers agree upon: The best former Dominick's locations already have been taken. "The stores remaining are at lesser value. We went after the best of them," Withers said.
As examples, Jewel-Osco recently opened a store in an empty former Dominick's in Bensenville and expects to open its second Mundelein store in November.
Withers said Albertsons is willing to sublease to other grocery chains but emphasized that retailers have to be "creditworthy."
Some arrangements haven't worked out. In Northbrook, Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village, Albertsons subleased the vacant stores to Joe Caputo & Sons, a family-owned grocer, after it acquired those leases in the Safeway acquisition. Caputo & Sons closed those stores after falling deep into debt to a produce wholesaler, so they're once again empty.
Elk Grove Village Mayor Craig Johnson had grown frustrated after hearing from a "half dozen" grocery retailers in the spring who said they were interested in the empty space but were being ignored by Albertsons.
More recently, Johnson said he's talked with Withers and is more optimistic about the dialogue moving forward.
"To his credit, (Withers) wants to work with Elk Grove Village, the owner of the property and any potential grocery store retailers," Johnson said.
The mayor added: "We just don't want to be held hostage."If you had 19 March in the “When will someone respond to Jeremy Clarkson’s latest controversy by turning his head into a 3D-printable part for Hungry Hippos?” sweepstakes, this is very much your lucky day.
3D printing firm CEL has found one of the more inventive ways to capitalise on the TV presenter’s suspension from Top Gear for marketing purposes, releasing a 3D-printable version of Clarkson’s head.
The part can then be printed in multiple colours and used to replace the hippo heads in the classic children’s game.
CEL has made the design available on 3D printing community My Mini Factory to promote its Robox printer. It’s a free download, which is frankly sensible given the likelihood of lawyers for Clarkson and/or the BBC coming calling.
Robox inventor hopes 3D printing will help everybody become a maker Read more
“Now the whole family can feed Jeremy by playing Hungry, Hungry Clarksons,” the company said.
Note, the design will take about 3 hours 40 minutes to print using a (reasonably priced) 3D printer. Its release comes as Clarkson remains suspended from Top Gear following a “fracas” involving an assistant producer on the programme.
Clarkson joins Paul McCartney and Katy Perry’s left shark in the increasingly-starry gallery of 3D-printable celebrities in 2015.
While McCartney released the file needed to print his figurine through his own website, Perry’s lawyers chose to send a cease-and-desist letter to a Florida man who was selling left-shark figurines, after her Super Bowl backing dancer became a meme in February.Moscow: Islamic State has issued a video showing the beheading of what it described as a Russian intelligence officer captured in Syria, the US-based SITE monitoring website reported on Tuesday.
The Russian Defence Ministry and the FSB security service were not immediately available for comment.
The 12-minute Russian-language video, released on the day Russia celebrates the anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany with military parades, showed the man dressed in a black jump suit kneeling in a desert scene and urging other Russian agents to surrender.
"This idiot believed the promises of his state not to abandon him if he was captured," a narrator says in the recording, before a bearded man beheaded him with a knife.
The authenticity of the recording and the identity of the man could not immediately be verified, nor was it clear when the killing occurred.
The Russian defence ministry says about 30 Russian servicemen have been killed since the start of the Kremlin's operation there in September 2015.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.SASKATOON – Jay Jorgensen feels he’s been betrayed by the Department of National Defence after finding out his estimated pension amount was nearly half what he expected it to be.
Jorgensen worked for the Canadian military for 17 years, serving in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Arctic.
Impressed by Saskatoon’s economic boom, he decided he had a chance at a new life.
“I’m young enough now that I can start another career and not be penalized too heavily in the public sector for starting again at my age,” he said.
And that’s why, when given the option to cash half of his veteran’s pension, he took it, comfortable with the amount that was estimated to him.
When he got the cheque, he was devastated.
“To see a 41 per cent reduction with no explanation on the cash-out value of how that changed, is very difficult to comprehend,” he explained.
Jorgensen lost close to $50,000, and he’s not alone.
Veteran Sean Walton says he received a payout of more than 50 per cent less than estimated.
“Much the same as Jay, I made future decisions based on the financial information I was given. They had originally given me an estimate, which I understood was an estimate.”
Both vets have spent hours on the phone trying to get answers. Both have been told the shocking drops are due to market fluctuations.
Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP Lawyer Jana Steele deals with pensions on a daily basis. She said such a drop is unusual.
“In our experience, in a short period of time after the estimate, there usually would not be a significant fluctuation generally speaking, but subject to any other actuarial considerations that may be at play here.”
Global News reached out to the Department of National Defence, and after several days and dozens of emails back and forth, by late Tuesday afternoon, the department had this to say:
“We will continue to do our due diligence and investigate this matter internally to ensure the members are provided the support they require.”
The veterans plan to continue fighting the government for answers, so future service members don’t face the same losses.The latest anime adaptation of Dr. Yoshiki Tanaka’s The Heroic Legend of Arslan is to get the Dynasty Warriors treatment later this year.
Set for a release on both PS3 and PS4, the game is being developed by long-term Dynasty Warriors studio Omega Force. Based on the currently airing anime, it shares much of its new and somewhat simpler art style (as shown above).
For those that are a bit confused, this is indeed the second anime adaptation of Arslan. The first occurring back in the 90s and that was also released commercially in the West. While the original anime was a straight to video OVA series, this new show is being released on TV in Japan (with a trailer for that shown below).
The novels are an interesting work though, as they are loosely inspired by the Persian epic Amir Arsalan though with a fantasy twist. They also featured artwork by the acclaimed Yoshitaka Amano and much of his visual design inspiration also made it into the original anime series. Sadly, the same cannot be said for this new TV series.
Personally I am a big fan of Tanaka’s repertoire, with the Legend of Galactic Heroes being my favorite in particular. As an author he is able to create a huge amount of narrative intricacy and intrigue, often coupled with a dizzying number of characters to keep track of. The anime version of Legend of Galactic Heroes also took over ten years to animate its 110 episodes, so that should help to give a scale of his world building.
Arslan is also one of his earlier works and is, as yet, unfinished. While the manga version was given a conclusion to the narrative, the original novels are still ongoing. So it’s more likely this new TV series may take the more finite manga route.
Set in the land of Pars, the prince Arslan sees his forces destroyed by the neighboring army of Lusitania as commanded by the enigmatic Silver Mask. Invading and conquering his homeland, Arslan is forced to raise an army to retake his kingdom.
It’s pretty classic sword and sorcery fiction really and it’s definitely a good for for the Dynasty Warriors approach, where singular mighty heroes battle armies of enemies at once.
While there’s no word of a specific release date as yet, it’s clear that the game will be out this year. Like many publishers in Japan though, Koei Tecmo are wary of making the next-gen jump to consoles like PS4 without some form of backup, so that helps to explain the concurrent PS3 release.
The current anime series is also available to watch via Funimation's streaming service.
Follow me on Twitter and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii.
Read my Forbes blog here.Qantas boss Alan Joyce has laughed off getting a pie shoved in his face while speaking at a business breakfast in Perth, saying his biggest issue is finding a decent drycleaner.
Mr Joyce was the keynote speaker at a West Business Leadership Matters event at the Hyatt Regency on Tuesday morning when a man appeared on stage with a pie.
The man then grabbed the Qantas CEO before shoving the pie in his face and casually walking off stage.
Late on Tuesday afternoon police released a statement to say the 67-year-old man from Willetton would face court via summons over the incident on a charge of giving false details to police.
Alan Joyce had a pie thrust in his face. Photo: Lucas Jarvis
"The incident occurred at approximately 8:15am this morning when the victim was struck to the face with a pie while speaking at a conference," police said.
Inquiries are continuing into the matter.
Mr Joyce, who later in the morning was at Perth Airport for the launch of Qantas' multi-million-dollar international wing for Terminal 3 and 4, which will allow non-stop flights from Perth to London, shrugged of the pie-throwing incident.
"I have been CEO of Qantas now for close to nine years and it was a new experience and I haven't experienced that before," he told reporters.
"Obviously we were there for a serious event to talk about the Perth to London operation.
"I think when you have been a CEO of an airline for nine years there is a lot that has happened over that time.
This is different but it is not unusual...it is an unusual event certainly but things like this have happened in the past."
The Irish-born Australian businessman said he did not know what the pie-thrower's motive was.
"Obviously the police are investigating and I think that should be subject to that investigation," he said.
The 50-year-old joked he could not identify the flavour of the pie.
"I have absolutely no idea - I'm not a big pie eater," he said.
"I didn't have a chance to test it, it was mostly on my glasses.
"I think my issue is I need a new drycleaner before I leave Perth, so if you have one could you please recommend it to me."
The West Australian business editor Ben Harvey told Gareth Parker's Mornings program the incident caught everyone by surprise.
"It was a very bizarre situation... it appeared to be a lemon meringue pie," he said on Radio 6PR.
"It seems to be he was making some sort of political statement but we don't know what that statement is.
"He (Joyce) dealt with it very very well. For a man that's cool under pressure he proved that very much today.
"He looked at everyone and very calmly said 'well, I'm not sure what that's all about, but I'm going to have to get cleaned up'.
"He walked off stage and then returned a few minutes later to a warm applause and continued his speech."
Mr Harvey said the the pie attacker was in his late 60s or early 70s and was now being interviewed by police in relation to the incident.
Police confirmed they had been "called to a hotel on Adelaide Terrace, East Perth in relation to an assault incident."
And that they currently had one person in custody.By Ian Rose
Working Lunch
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. The news agenda is filled with stories of a global credit crunch. Banks are hard up for money and customers are finding it more difficult to get credit. In the Sussex town of Lewes they're devising a plan which could change all of that. They want to print their own local money. Inspired by the Devon town of Totnes which launched its own currency last year, Lewes locals are at the start of the process of re-launching their own cash. The town did have its own pound before but it was last in circulation in 1895. Shop near where you live The group behind the schemes in both Totnes and Lewes are part of the "Transition" movement which is concerned with the impact of rising oil prices and consumption. They hope that the new money will encourage shops and customers to buy local produce and reduce their fuel consumption. It's also hoped the scheme will encourage a greater sense of community. Adrienne Campbell, one of the people behind the plan, says: "We're a group of people who want to re-localise and strengthen the local economy - grow our food locally, have more businesses locally and generate our own energy locally as well." Bill Collison who runs the local greengrocer and café says that he's backing the scheme even though it could mean more paperwork. He says it's another coin to count, and then you have to figure out a way of changing your takings back to regular currency at the end of the process. Local scepticism Some other locals aren't as keen. They say that life's confusing enough and they want to spend their money where they want. But shopkeepers are keen, with many of the owners of local businesses backing the move. Whether it's popular or not, the very question of a town issuing its own currency does stimulate a debate about how money actually works. It is after all simply paper, which only works because we all agree it has a special value. The team in Lewes may have a job convincing some of the locals to agree that their pieces of paper carry the same value. But they are taking their time, and they're hoping to be ready for a launch by September. What do you think of having your town having its own local currency? Would you use it? Email us at Working Lunch or drop us a line at working.lunch@bbc.co.uk YOUR EMAILS Following on from the fantastic efforts of the people in Lewes, we are trying to get Eastbourne launched as a Transition Town. Nationally and globally we are all faced with the prospect of declining fossil fuels availability and climate change. I think its great that these people are working so hard to get systems put in place that will make their communities stronger and more resilient. I am sure that if more people had the time to think of how life is going to look without the availability of cheap oil and gas they would be more behind the idea of a local currency. Things are going to change whether we like it or not so this kind of preparation is essential. Neil Robinson. Great idea. We're also looking at doing the same thing in Stroud. People need to realise that oil and food prices will continue to rise, and that we need to change the way we live our lives in order to be more sustainable, both environmentally and financially sustainable. Jamie Baldwin It is a great idea for promoting local goods and services. But is it legal? Can a city or town issue currency notes? Is it not against the law? If the legal issues can be overcome then I think others should also think on the same lines. It will be good for everybody the locals as well as lead to wellbeing of the nation by reducing demand for fuel for transporation, better employment opportunities for people in their own localities, etc. Balakrishna S.Pai After reading the article about the local currency, I am forced to think about several issues and wonder exactly how they plan to implement this plan and once in force, how does that effect the towns position within the UK government system? I wonder how the money will be issued? When you hand over a Queen's pound in the cafe, will you be given Lewes currency in return? What if you don't want a Lewes penny... maybe you don't live there and are just passing through, do you now have to go to the Lewes "bank" and get your money converted? Will the Queen be a feature of this currency, it is after all is said and done, her country. Not that the knights of the round table will come swashbuckling into Town and defend Queen and Country.... but what legal value does this currency have and how devaluing will it be to UK sterling? And of course, there is the question of taxes? Will the residents be asked to pay Lewes taxes in Lewes currency, or will they exempt themselves from Government Taxes, being as they are exempting themselves from government money? I am all about buying locally, growing my own, recycling, supporting local farms, buying from local stores rather than supermarkets, but I wonder if the headache of two currencies in one country is really viable or practical. Europe had separate currencies for each country not too many years ago. Driving into France from Spain, or Italy from France was always so time consuming when I had to change the currencies and work out the exchange rates. I can't imagine what it would be like if every town in the UK started such a scheme. Tanya Hannington
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StumbleUpon What are these?from IPython.display import Image import prettyplotlib as ppl from prettyplotlib import plt import numpy as np import scipy as sp import seaborn as sns sns. set_context ( 'talk' ) from matplotlib import rc rc ( 'font', ** { 'family' :'sans-serif','sans-serif' :[ 'Helvetica' ],'size' : 22 }) rc ( 'xtick', labelsize = 12 ) rc ( 'ytick', labelsize = 12 ) ## for Palatino and other serif fonts use: #rc('font',**{'family':'serif','serif':['Palatino']}) rc ( 'text', usetex = True ) % matplotlib inline from IPython.html import widgets # Widget definitions from IPython.display import display # Used to display widgets in the notebook from IPython.html.widgets import interact, interactive from IPython.display import clear_output, display, HTML def gen_plot ( success = ( 0, 100 ), failure = ( 0, 100 )): alpha = 5 + success beta = 5 + failure fig = plt. figure ( figsize = ( 8, 6 )) x = np. linspace ( 0, 1, 100 ) ax = fig. add_subplot ( 111, xlabel = 'Chance of success (beating the market)', ylabel = 'Probability of hypothesis', title = r'Posterior probability distribution of $\theta$' ) ax. plot ( x, sp. stats. beta ( alpha, beta ). pdf ( x ), linewidth = 3. ) ax. set_xticklabels ([ '0\%', '20\%', '40\%', '60\%', '80\%', '100\%' ]);"Real Housewives of Orange County" star Vicki Gunvalson is defending herself against co-star Tamra Judge's accusations that she started the gay rumors swirling around husband Eddie Judge and that she and fellow Bravo castmates are "homophobic bullies."
"She's taking it and twisting it, which is what she does," Gunvalson told TooFab in our studio. "Gay is not less than. If you are married to a woman and you are a man and you have had a past... deal with it. She's taking this and twisting it to make her feel like a victim."
Of the rumors that Tamra's husband may have had a romantic past with men, Gunvalson said: "Eddie is a great man. I don't really give a crap what his past is... When you're married in a male-female relationship, and if you've had a past being with the same sex, I would think that would be a conversation you'd have with your wife. The point is — you're married to a woman — why is it such a bad thing that you had a past in that? Own it! Just say, 'I have been with men in the past and Tamra's cool with it,' and move on."
The bitter feud between the "RHOC" stars was reignited last month after Judge accused Gunvalson of staging a scene on the show during her birthday party in which Eddie's sexuality was questioned again. During the scene featuring Gunvalson, Gretchen Rossi, Kelly Dodd and Lizzie Rovsek, party guest Ricky Santana told the ladies he witnessed Eddie making out with a guy after Rossi asked, "Do you know if Eddie's gay or not?"
After the episode aired, Judge ripped her co-stars on Instagram: "How orchestrated and wrong was that? The worst acting I've ever seen. They are nothing but homophobic bullies that think it's okay to try and Out a straight man hoping to humiliate him," she wrote.
Gunvalson -- "The O.G. of the O.C." - sat down with TooFab's managing editor Joseph Kapsch to tell her side of the story of how all this drama began over Eddie's sexuality, respond to Judge's charges during her "Watch What Happens Live" appearance and address backlash from the LGBTQ community.
Watch Gunvalson's interview with TooFab below and then read the entire Q&A after the videos:
On Eddie's Sexual Past and Who Staged 'RHOC' Scene About Eddie Kissing a Man
On Eddie's Sexuality And Why Gay Rumor Scene Caused Backlash
Gunvalson Addresses LGBTQ Fans Upset Over Show Scene About Eddie's Sexuality
On Tamra's "Watch What Happens Live" Appearance Discussing Eddie Gay Rumors
Read Gunvalson's entire TooFab interview here:
TooFab: When did all of this begin?
Vicki Gunvalson: We have to go back to a year ago. We were in Ireland and were all getting along really nicely. I was in a good place and my ex stuff was behind me and everyone was moving forward. We were all good. Then it was 3:00 a.m. in the morning and everyone had been drinking. Kelly was kind of out of it that night because the girls didn't want her drinking. I went down to keep the peace with everyone and I ended up making the wrong decision. I should have probably stayed in my room and Kelly felt like I wasn't defending her. Then we got on the bus and we were all light drunk.
TooFab: What were you drinking? Vodka, tequila?
Gunvalson: I mean it was everything. We were in Ireland and it was 3 in the morning. We knew we had to fly for another 14 hours so whatever right? And some of the girls get nervous when they fly and so we might have been over-served for a little bit. So we get on the bus and it's pitch black out. I got my hat on and everyone has their earphones in and then Tamra goes up to Kelly in the midst of other things prior to that happening on the bus, and the cameras were off, down under the bus. No cameras were up. Tamra says, "Has Vicki ever told you that Eddie is gay?" Now, why in the middle of the night would Tamra ask that of Kelly? Kelly shook her head because we have talked about that rumor privately but never on camera.
TooFab: You and Kelly talked about it or you and all the girls?
Gunvalson: This started in 2011 when Tamra was dating him. So this isn't anything new Tamra just started to bring up.
TooFab: So this thing about Eddie's sexuality.. when Tamra started dating him and this rumor started to go around, did any of you go directly to Tamra and actually address it?
Gunvalson: She did with me. She said, "Could you believe there's a rumor out there that he's gay? I sure hope it's not true because I love him and he loves me." I'm like, "Whatever, if he loves you.." What I want everyone to know is that I don't care either way. I like Eddie. I'm glad she found Eddie, they seem extremely happy. She's the one who has made this a bigger deal than it needs to be. Because I don't care.
TooFab: Why do you think Tamra thinks you orchestrated this scene?
Gunvalson: Tamra can't ever look at herself and address it. Her and Eddie should say, you know what.. There’s a rumor out there and it's not true.. XYZ and be done with it. Now how can I orchestrate a rumor when I was as much in shock as Gretchen, Lydia and Kelly? Look at our faces, we had no idea that her friend Ricky was going to reveal this at my birthday party. It was my birthday party, it wasn’t about Gretchen or Eddie.
TooFab: So it was Ricky... but wasn’t it Gretchen who started the conversation?
Gunvalson: I think Kelly said... Again you're going to have to replay the tape. But something of the fact that... Do you know this rumor? We only know Ricky because Tamra and Eddie introduced him to us. And I became friends with Ricky through knowing Tamra and Eddie and I was in their wedding. Ricky and Tamra went sideways. Tamra and I went sideways. Things have happened through these years. She's got to stop blaming me for something that has been already out there. She's always blaming me.
TooFab: So hypothetically, pretend Eddie had a past with men. Why would this be something any of the girls would feel that they should bring up? Because what it's positioning the group of women here... which I’ve seen the show and see that you do have gay friends, and gay stylists and it's Cali in 2017. So why would it be something that would be addressed on camera because what it sort of feels like is that Eddie is collateral damage. So do you see how its become a big issue with the LGBTQ community? Its bigger than just the Real House Wives of the OC.
Gunvalson: Let's talk about all of that. Our past is our past and we cannot change our past. So if Eddie had a past of being with another man then that was his choice. He's at a place now where he's married. So if you're married and you have a past that you don't want to talk about or that you don't want your wife's friends to talk about, then that means there's something more to it. He's on a reality TV show. If I sneeze, they're going to question it. It's not because I want to talk about it, she's actually the one that kept bringing it up and then Ricky brought it up at my party. I didn't.
TooFab: And Ricky's relation to Eddie is just tangential? He's not actually a friend?
Gunvalson: Their relationship was this — from what I recall — Ricky's partner, his name is Diego, his husband, they have 2 children. Diego worked for Eddie's father's law firm when Eddie worked there. So they were very close and they are not anymore. Ricky is not friends with him anymore. I know Ricky socially and so Ricky, a couple of days before my birthday, reached out to me and asked if he can take me out for a drink and I said I'm actually having a party. Invitations are already out but I'll send you one if you want to come. There was a rumor that I didn't invite Ricky but I did. If I didn't, he wouldn't have been able to get in. I have nothing against Ricky. Ricky and Tamra used to be friends but it also validated me that I didn’t start this rumor.
TooFab: So you're saying to Tamra, to the viewers, to everyone, that you didn't orchestrate it, you didn't start the rumor... Do you think the other girls did? Did the producers?
Gunvalson: No, the Producers had nothing to do with this. We were sitting at a table and we were talking like old times. It was not orchestrated, there was no script. We don't have a script. I'm not the first person to talk about this. Go to WeHo right now and see if people are talking about it. It's talked about. Have you ever heard about it?
TooFab: Of course. I'm a gay man. Surprise. [laughs]
Gunvalson: So are you wrong by saying that you've heard that Eddie's been with men?
TooFab: I don't want to pass judgement because it's personal. Hypothetically, put your son or former boyfriend in this situation. Pretend you dated a man on the show and you knew he had a past and you accepted it, what if your son had a past and he was exposed? Eddie isn't a reality star.
Gunvalson: He married a reality star. He knew what he was getting himself into.
TooFab: He didn't sign up for his life to be.. he's in it as a guest star.
Gunvalson: I didn't sign up for every piece of me to be exposed.
TooFab: So you feel like stuff has come out that you wanted to keep personal?
Gunvalson: I didn't want this to come out. The cameras were off. This wasn’t suppose to air. I had a private conversation with Kelly in her bedroom. With no cameras. When I said that to Kelly, she said all of Cali has heard about that. She said, "Why is it ok that Tamra keeps ticketing you and talking about you and hurting you when she doesn’t want anybody to talk about her?"
TooFab: But why does she have to own it? Why is someone's sexuality anyone's business? Why is that fodder?
Gunvalson: I guess because she's the one that started it. I didn't bring it up on camera. If I did, I would have been mic'd up and I would have said, "Hey Kelly, have you heard that Eddie's gay or had a past?" I never did.
TooFab: So what if Tamra, for instance, is aware of the past or that he considers himself even bisexual now. Where do you go from here with this? What do you want Tamra to say?
Gunvalson: I want to move on because I don't care!
TooFab: Are we looking for an admission here? Do we need Tamra and Eddie to say, "Okay yeah"?
Gunvalson: Listen, as God as my witness. I have reached out to them, I have tried to have a conversation with them, I want to apologize to Eddie and state: "You know what? This never meant to get to this place. I don't really care what your past is, I don't care what your current situation is, I don't care if you guys are swingers, I don't care. But you're on a reality TV show and you're wife has been targeting me as a con woman and all these other things I'm not."
TooFab: Did you watch her appearance on "Watch What Happens Live?"
Gunvalson: No. I can't. I can't handle watching her right now. I'm really upset with her.
TooFab: It was pretty profound because the way she handled it was that it was less about Eddie personally and more just about the whole situation... more positioning that by what you ladies were saying about Eddie is basically saying that gay is less than, gay is a negative. Do you see where she's coming from with that?
Gunvalson: No, she's taking it and twisting it which is what she does. Gay is not less than. If you are married to a woman and you are a man and you have had a past... deal with it! No, I don't dislike gays, I don't dislike lesbians. My best friend's daughter is a lesbian, she just got married. I don't care. She's taking this and twisting it to |
student or how long the federal government would retain it. (Who cares when there’s Michelle O cash to be had??)
Similar fingerprint and tracking initiatives have been hit with stiff resistance from parents — when they knew about them.
Massachusetts’ North Adams Public Schools deployed a lunch payment program using scanners.
“It’s definitely going to streamline the system and make the transactions more accurate,” Nicholas says, iBerkshires.com reports. “Those that participate are able to see all those little transactions … we want to make sure those transactions are as transparent as possible.”
There’s no indication parents would be the only ones with access to the data and that has several irate.
“No child should have to have a body part scanned to get a meal! There was no problems with those swipe cards that we were never made aware of,” wrote one parent on Facebook, who said she’d send her child with bag lunch before allowing a fingerprint scan, according to the news site.
“Let us not allow our children to allow privacy to become a thing of the past. Our duty is to educate and protect them, not to catalog them like merchandise,” parent Cara Roberts writes in a letter to the mayor and the news site.
“Our duty is to teach them to protect and care for their bodies. What message are we sending when we tell them their body is a means of identification, a tool for others to use to track them?”The “Man in Black” was one of those people born with an unfathomable “aura of greatness.” Over a decade has passed since his death and his legacy and prominence as cultural icon still rise as large as ever did.
Every dedicated Johnny Cash fan knows the ups and downs of the iconic singer’s life: The Folsom Prison phase, the charming love story with his best friend and wife June Carter, his addiction phase.
But it is a fact that the country singer and the cultural legend had led a turbulent life and there are still corners of his life path that are unknown to everyone.
With the outbreak of Korean war, 18-year old Cash did what many young Americans of the time did, he enlisted in the United States Air Force on July 7, 1950.After basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and technical training at Brooks Air Force Base, both in San Antonio, Texas, Cash was assigned to the 12th Radio Squadron Mobile of the U.S. Air Force Security Service at Landsberg, West Germany.
Over his enlistment period “The man in black” or at that time ” The boy in uniform” rose to the rank of Staff Sergent and became a Morse Code operator intercepting Soviet Army transmissions. Cash showed amazing skills at cracking Morse Code so he was put in a leading seat at the Landsberg post to monitor in on Soviet communications. The Air Force period was an important chapter in Johny Cash’s life. It was there he was first inspired to write the iconic lyrics for Folsom Prison Blues after seeing the film Inside The Walls of Folsom Prison. Also, while stationed in Landsberg created his first band, named “The Landsberg Barbarians”
However, the highlight during the three years he served the Air Force, surely wasn’t something related to his future music career, and is something that a few people actually know about.On March 5th, 1953, while working on his post, Cash intercepted a very important communique from the Soviets. At the time, Joseph Stalin, Soviet Premier Leader was in a quite poor health condition, and as the first man of the Soviet empire, his health status was very important to the U.S intelligence community.
While transcribing the Soviet Morse Code chatter, Johnny Cash became the first American to hear the news of the death of the Soviet leader. Sgt.Staff Cash immediately reported the important news to his superiors and the rest is history.
Regarding the nature of his job, Cash was obliged to keep this as top secret and couldn’t tell anyone of his achievement until years later. Cash was honorably discharged as a staff sergeant on July 3, 1954, and returned to Texas.Product brochures from the secretive Gamma Group, a German-based company that makes surveillance equipment for law enforcement, have supposedly been leaked online. The brochures were published anonymously and their authenticity has not been verified, but they appear to explain some of Gamma's cutting-edge spy gear in further detail than was known before.
If real, this is James Bond-level stuff. One of the products is a body-worn device that can capture the unique identifier of a person's cell phone and use that to track the target's whereabouts. Another device, described by Ars Technica, can monitor the target's text messages and even deny service to phones that use the GSM network without alerting the target user. Other devices allow for live monitoring of calls.
This is James Bond-level stuff
The documents also describe Gamma's flagship spyware product, FinFisher, which is basically PRISM-lite for state and local law enforcement (and possibly the Australian Federal Police). Various products in the FinFisher suite can allegedly capture user names and passwords, monitor Skype calls, remotely turn on and record audio from the target computer's microphone, and even watch a target's screen in real time.
Gamma Group, along with its partner Elaman GmbH, is a pioneer in the relatively new market for commercial hacking software. Gamma's products allow law enforcement to hack into targets' computers and cell phones. They use many of the same techniques that sparked outrage in the context of the National Security Agency's PRISM program and in some cases go even further. According to the new documents, the company even offers training courses such as "FinTraining Intensive Basic Hacking Course."
FinFisher and Gamma are getting more scrutiny as the company grows, however. The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab identified FinFisher command and control centers in 11 countries. The software has been criticized for being used to target human rights activists, and the original source for the leaked documents has been pulled down due to the influx of traffic.MILWAUKEE — EARLIER this month, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin and potential Republican presidential candidate, unveiled a proposed budget that would cut $300 million of funds to the University of Wisconsin system and shift power over tuition from the Legislature to a new public authority controlled by appointed regents. The initial draft of Mr. Walker’s budget bill also proposed to rewrite the university’s 110-year-old mission statement, known as the Wisconsin Idea, deleting “the search for truth” and replacing it with language about meeting “the state’s work-force needs.”
This attack, surely meant to impress possible donors to the governor’s potential presidential campaign, squanders the inheritance of all Wisconsinites: an affordable, top-ranked university system that attracts students and scholars from around the world and is a major contributor to the state’s economy. Criticism prompted the governor to restore the Wisconsin Idea’s wording, but the budget cuts remained.
Mr. Walker’s action implies that Wisconsinites no longer share their parents’ and grandparents’ values. He suggests that a university system with a mission to “educate people and improve the human condition” is no longer a priority here. He is wrong.
I teach history, a discipline that is always in the cross hairs of cuts designed to make a public university education more “practical.” But my students have shown me that they find the study of the past very relevant to their lives.With peak submission season for machine learning conferences just behind us, many in our community have peer-review on the mind. One especially hot topic is the arXiv preprint service. Computer scientists often post papers to arXiv in advance of formal publication to share their ideas and hasten their impact.
Despite the arXiv’s popularity, many authors are peeved, pricked, piqued, and provoked by requests from reviewers that they cite papers which are only published on the arXiv preprint.
“Do I really have to cite arXiv papers?”, they whine.
“Come on, they’re not even published!,” they exclaim.
The conversation is especially testy owing to the increased use (read misuse) of the arXiv by naifs. The preprint, like the conferences proper is awash in low-quality papers submitted by band-wagoners. Now that the tooling for deep learning has become so strong, it’s especially easy to clone a repo, run it on a new dataset, molest a few hyper-parameters, and start writing up a draft.
Of particular worry is the practice of flag-planting. That’s when researchers anticipate that an area will get hot. To avoid getting scooped / to be the first scoopers, authors might hastily throw an unfinished work on the arXiv to stake their territory: we were the first to work on X. All that follow must cite us. In a sublimely cantankerous rant on Medium, NLP/ML researcher Yoav Goldberg blasted the rising use of the (mal)practice.
In particular, he excoriated a paper from the prominent MILA research group which purported to have adapted the methods of generative adversarial networks to language. His gripe was that the language generation was laughable and actually far worse than any current technique. The authors, he surmised (and many I’ve spoken with agree), were staking their territory so that regardless of who first succeeds, they would need to be cited as the originators of the idea.
Amid this tumult, some have questioned the very enterprise of citing preprinted articles. So, if the arXiv may be subject to abuse, do I have to cite papers that have only appeared on the arXiv?
Yes, of course. Any time that our work follows, copies, or borrows ideas from other people, and when we can reasonably be expected to be aware of this, we ought to cite the related work.
A large number of seminal works have never been published. The greatest mathematics paper of our lifetimes remains unpublished. Not every paper on the arXiv warrants a bibliographic entry, but many do. The idea that unpublished status would categorically exclude the responsibility of citation is a bit preposterous. It puts far too much faith in the deeply flawed fraternity of conference organizers and the overworked cohort of peer reviewers, roughly 30% of whom typically fail to even comprehend the basic outline of the paper.
If similar work comes to our attention during a proper literature review, we ought to cite it. If we knowingly build on someone else’s work we should cite it. If someone shares a non-obvious idea with us that develops into a paper, we should find some way to credit them. If someone writes a theory down on a napkin shortly before dying and it turns out to open a new subfield of machine learning to scientific inquiry, we should convert the napkin to a pdf, upload it to arXiv, and then cite it.
We should not have to cite nonsense. Many reviewers are abusing the system and asking for ridiculous comparison to recently-posted preprint papers. Bald-faced flag-planting should not be rewarded. And we should not be faulted by reviewers for failing to compare against 2-week old algorithms that may or may not work. But the very idea that arXiv papers would in general not need to be cited puts far too much faith in the fraught process of scientific publication and far too little importance on ideas themselves.Hillary Clinton gave her big economic speech this morning, proposing a whole array of policies that she argues will “build a ‘growth and fairness’ economy.” She wasn’t especially forthcoming on details, which is a shame, but she had some interesting and ideas and made some promises that she should be held to going forward. After listening to the speech, these were the portions that stuck out in my mind as being substantively or politically important.
Paid family leave. One of the best arguments Hillary made in laying out her economic agenda was her pitch on expanding paid family leave. She didn’t get into the details of the policies she has in mind – “we can do this in a way that doesn’t impose unfair burdens on businesses” was all she had to say on how to implement her proposals – but she framed them both as a moral imperative and as smart economic policy.
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“We are in a global competition, as I’m sure you have noticed, and we can’t afford to leave talent on the sidelines, but that’s exactly what we’re doing today,” she said, arguing that the terrible policies we have for sick days and family leave discourage qualified workers from entering the workforce. “Fair pay and fair scheduling, paid family leave and earned sick days, child care are essential to our competitiveness and growth.”
What would those policies look like? Again, Hillary declined to go into detail. But the Center for American Progress put out a big report earlier this year that offered a number of policy recommendations for achieving a greater measure of economic fairness, and it called for “implementing a national paid family and medical leave insurance program” and expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover more workers.
“Enhancing” Social Security. The hot trend for Democratic presidential candidates is to call for an expansion of Social Security to collect more revenue and provide more generous benefits than the system currently pays out. Both Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have endorsed adjustments to the payroll tax structure that will bring a bit more fairness to the system, and they both support legislation to boost wages and legalize undocumented immigrants, which would result in more people paying more into Social Security.
Up to this point, Clinton has been cautious when talking about Social Security, saying only that she would “defend” the program against Republican efforts to cut it. In her speech today, though, Hillary said she would “help families look forward to retirement by defending and enhancing Social Security and making it easier to save for the future.”
What does “enhancing Social Security” mean? Well, she didn’t explain. But it’s different than what she’s been saying previously! I’d imagine Hillary’s vision for “enhancing” Social Security probably shares quite a bit with those of Sanders and O’Malley – she also backs higher wages and comprehensive immigration reform. But the tax question is still unresolved. The last time she ran for president, Hillary was firmly against raising additional payroll taxes, and her overall plan for what to do about the Social Security’s long-term health was to appoint a “commission” that would figure something out. Saying she wants to “enhance” the program is vague and will require much more in the way of detail, but hopefully it means she’s moved beyond the passive, hands-off approach to Social Security she took in 2008.
Taking a swing at Marco Rubio. Hillary name-checked several Republican presidential contenders during her remarks, but I thought it significant that she singled out Marco Rubio for criticism when it came to tax policy:
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CLINTON: Now we hear Republican candidates talk a lot about tax reform. But take a good look at their plans. Senator Rubio’s would cut taxes for households making around $3 million a year by almost $240,000 – which is way more than three times the earnings of a typical family. Well that’s a sure budget-busting give-away to the super-wealthy. And that’s the kind of bad economics you’re likely to get from any of the candidates on the other side.
Rubio’s tax plan – which by any measure is an insane and irresponsible giveaway to the wealthy – is noteworthy in that it represents an effort to bridge the divide between two factions in the Republican tax policy world: the supply-side traditionalists and the “reform” conservatives. The supply siders still place all their faith in rate cuts (especially for the rich) as the pathway to economic growth. The “reform” conservatives want to move the party away from tax-cut mania and focus more on using the tax code to bolster middle-class incomes. Rubio’s plan attempts to do both without making any real compromises, and the result is a wildly expensive proposition that will explode the deficit.
Hillary clearly wants to make Rubio’s plan – with all its unworkable contradictions and obscene price tag – the face of Republican tax policy. Calling it a “budget-busting give-away to the super-wealthy” is less punchy than Martin O’Malley’s way of characterizing Rubio’s economic philosophy, but it achieves largely the same effect.
Prosecuting Wall Street criminals. One of the Obama administration’s great failures has been its unfulfilled promise to prosecute the titans of Wall Street in the aftermath of the financial meltdown that damn near collapsed the economy. There was no shortage of securities fraud to go after and there were enthusiastic and elaborate attempts to cover it all up, but rather than seek criminal prosecutions, the Obama Justice Department instead levied fines against the major banks and allowed them room to deny any explicit wrongdoing.
Hillary obliquely acknowledged this failure in her speech today and promised that under her watch, criminality on Wall Street would be met with prosecution:
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CLINTON: I will appoint and empower regulators who understand that Too Big To Fail is still too big a problem. We’ll ensure that no firm is too complex to manage or oversee. And we will prosecute individuals as well as firms when they commit fraud or other criminal wrongdoing.
It’s amazing that we’re even at the point of seeing a top-tier presidential candidate vowing to get tough on white-collar crime, but here we are. The question, of course, is whether Hillary would prove more successful on this score than the Obama administration.
One of the chief liberal complaints against Clinton is that she’s too close to Wall Street and too sympathetic to the agenda laid out by the masters of the financial universe. Vowing to prosecute criminals on Wall Street might seem like a good way to head off those complaints, but really she’s just promising to enforce and uphold the law – something we should expect her (or any president) to do anyway. But the relationship between Wall Street and DC has become so thoroughly corrupt that I guess this is what now counts as reform.
Diversity of broadband providers. It got only one line in the speech, but Hillary touched on one of the more significant economic policy battles happening right now: the fight to improve broadband access and the need to regulate the broadband marketplace. “Let’s build those faster broadband networks,” she said, “and make sure there’s a greater diversity of providers so consumers have more choice.”
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Earlier this year, the Obama administration released an aggressive set of net neutrality rules, including reclassification of broadband internet service so that it becomes subject to “common carrier” regulations. Hillary, shortly after those rules were announced, offered her full support to the administration and indicated that she would like to go even further. “It's a foot in the door,” she said, “but it's not the end of the discussion.”
It would be nice to hear more from Hillary along these lines, but for now it’s good just to hear a major party candidate talking about the need to reform the broadband industry to boost competition and improve network speeds, even if only in passing. It doesn’t get nearly enough attention given how critically important broadband access is to the economy, and how irredeemably abusive and awful the existing cartel of broadband providers has grown in the absence of real competition.Fun to watch, if you like unhinged diatribes from Jesus-loving cops:
The spittle-spewing gentleman is Dan Page of the St. Louis County Police Department, addressing a gathering of Oath Keepers — and yes, you heard him just fine. In talking about his apparently beleaguered religious liberty, he alleges
There’s a couple out there in New Mexico right now that are being prosecuted and put out of business and were arrested because they refused to take pictures of sodomites. What about my freedom of religion from that?
That’s a reference to the wedding photographer who declined to take a female same-sex couple as clients. Here are the facts of the case. Surprise: the photographer in question was neither arrested nor prosecuted.
Page also has a problem with women in the military:
You got women trying to be — by the way, and I deeply resent this, we’ve had our first female Green Beret… we have our first female ranger. What happened here? Something’s wrong.
Page again:
You have persecution, prosecution … the final phase is execution.
Now he’s rambling about Muslims (all of whom, he says, are itching to cut your head off) and how their end-times arrival was foreshadowed by the biblical tale of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. One of those supernatural cowboys is said to ride a pale horse that Page assumes is actually green. Guess what? Green is the color of Islam. Uncanny!
Obama is allowing hundreds of thousands of them to come in every week.
Muslims, not Horsemen. So that would be more than 10 million Muslim immigrants a year at a minimum; at least 80 million over the course of the President’s two terms. Who knew? (The most plausible number of Muslims in the United States is around three million, but I concede that there could be at least another 80 million of them — equal to one quarter of the known U.S. population — who are being trained in secret FEMA camps, probably by African death squads under the control of Obama’s Kenyan relatives.)
In a longer cut of the video, at 2:37, Page can also be heard to unabashedly offer this statement:
I personally believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior. But I’m also a killer. I’ve killed a lot. And if I need to, I’ll kill a whole bunch more. If you don’t want to get killed, don’t show up in front of me.
Oath Keepers, by the way, claim to be
… a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, reserves, National Guard, veterans, Peace Officers, and Fire Fighters who will fulfill the Oath we swore, with the support of like minded citizens who take an Oath to stand with us, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God. Our Oath is to the Constitution.
If you’re a woman, a Muslim, or gay, do you reckon that when officer Page encounters you, he’ll defend your constitutional rights?
The St. Louis police department is not sure about that either, and, on the basis of his out-to-lunch speech, has suspended Page pending the outcome of an investigation that will likely include a psychiatric evaluation and a good deal of scrutiny by Internal Affairs.Tim Wu presents his widely acclaimed new book THE MASTER SWITCH: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. "A Masterpiece" - Lawrence Lessig. "A ripping yarn" - The Atlantic
About Tim
Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and author of The Master Switch. He is a professor at Columbia Law School, the chairman of media reform organization Free Press. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine.
Tim Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he has also written about copyright, international trade, and the study of law-breaking. He previously worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School.
Wu has written for the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Forbes, Slate magazine, and others. He can sometimes be found at Waterfront Bicycles, and he once worked at Hoo's Dumplings.
via Amazon.com
From Booklist:
*Starred Review* A veteran of Silicon Valley and professor at Columbia University, Wu is an author and policy advocate best known for coining the term net neutrality. Although the Internet has created a world of openness and access unprecedented in human history, Wu is quick to point out that the early phases of telephony, film, and radio offered similar opportunities for the hobbyist, inventor, and creative individual, only to be centralized and controlled by corporate interests, monopolized, broken into smaller entities, and then reconsolidated. Wu calls this the Cycle, and nowhere is it more exemplary than in the telecommunications industry. The question Wu raises is whether the Internet is different, or whether we are merely in the early open phase of a technology that is to be usurped and controlled by profiteering interests. Central in the power struggle is the difference between the way Apple Computer and Google treat content, with Apple attempting to control the user experience with slick products while Google endeavors to democratize content, giving the user choice and openness. This is an essential look at the directions that personal computing could be headed depending on which policies and worldviews come to dominate control over the Internet. --David Siegfried
Download media from this event here."Whiskey glass" redirects here. For glass made by Glencairn, see Glencairn whisky glass
An Old Fashioned glass, traditionally used for serving spirits
The Old Fashioned glass, rocks glass, lowball glass[1][2] (or simply lowball), is a short tumbler used for serving spirits, such as whisky, with ice cubes ("on the rocks"). It is also normally used to serve certain cocktails, such as the Old Fashioned, from which it receives its name.
Old Fashioned glasses typically have a wide brim and a thick base, so that the non-liquid ingredients of a cocktail can be mashed using a muddler before the main liquid ingredients are added.
Old Fashioned glasses usually contain 180–300 ml (6–10 US fl oz).[3][4] A double Old Fashioned glass (sometimes referred to by retailers as a DOF glass) contains 350–470 ml (12–16 US fl oz).[4][5]
References [ edit ]
The dictionary definition of tumbler at WiktionaryWas Hillary Clinton a stand up comic in another life? She told an Arizona radio station in an interview that our southwest border was "secure" because "net illegal immigration" had been cut to zero.
In an interview with KTAR radio in Phoenix, Mrs. Clinton said improvements under President George W. Bush and President Obama, including several hundred miles of fencing, have cut net illegal immigration from Mexico to zero. “Now I think it’s time to turn our attention to comprehensive immigration reform,” she said, using the term immigrant rights advocates use for legislation to legalize the 11 million illegal immigrants now in the country. Her evaluation of the border stands in stark contrast to Republican presidential candidates who say the border is not secure, pointing to increasing seizures of drugs and to the renewed surge of Central American illegal immigrants. But Mrs. Clinton said they’re ignoring how bad it used to be during her husband’s administration. “I think we’ve done a really good job securing the border and I think those that say we haven’t are not paying attention to everything that was done for the last 15 years under both President Bush and President Obama,” she told KTAR. “We have increased dramatically the number of border security officers, we have added physical obstructions like fences in many places, and in fact the immigration from Mexico has dropped considerably. It’s just not happening any more.”
Looking over the last 20 years of illegal immigration from Mexico, Clinton may have a point. Apprehensions at the border are way up and net immigration from Mexico has fallen.
But that's hardly the entire picture:
But the number of Central Americans attempting the illegal crossing has surged over the last three years, leading some experts to say the border problems have shifted, not gone away. Border Patrol agents say the new illegal immigrants are drawn by the chance to take advantage of lax enforcement of immigration laws within the U.S., which gives them the opportunity to disappear into the shadows with the 11 million other illegal immigrants already here. Mrs. Clinton, who will face voters in the Democratic primary in Arizona next week, has come under fire from some Hispanic activists for having voted as a senator for the Secure Fence Act, which called for building 700 miles of double-tier fencing along the southwest border.
The first line of defense of our borders has a much different view of the matter. Border agents are supporting Donald Trump for his strong stand against illegal immigration:
The largest U.S. Border Patrol union local is praising Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for being the "only candidate" to support their tough mission, an almost endorsement that is the latest boost for the front runner's campaign. "Mr. Trump is the only candidate that has publicly expressed his support of our mission and our agents. He has been an outspoken candidate on the need for a Secure Border and for this we are grateful," said a statement from Art Del Cueto, president of Local 2544 of the National Border Patrol Council, the representative of 18,000 agents.
Perhaps before the next time Hillary Clinton makes a fool of herself spouting immigration nonsense, she should consult the people who know the situation best; those charged with defending our borders from illegal aliens.What I – a Pacifist – Would say to Obama About the Crisis In Syria
Over the last week many of you have written ReKnew asking me to weigh in on the crisis in Syria. Does being a pacifist mean that I am opposed to America violently intervening to keep Assad from using chemical weapons against his own people? And if so, what would I say if Obama asked for my opinion on how America should respond to this crisis?
The first thing I’ll say is that I don’t believe that being a kingdom pacifist (viz. on who swears off violence out of obedience to Jesus) means that one must embrace the conviction that governments are supposed to embrace pacifism. Many people assume this, and I’ve found that the implausibility of this position is one of the main reasons some people reject pacifism. After giving talks about the kingdom call to unconditional non-violence, I’ve frequently received responses like: “Are you telling me our government should just love the terrorists and ‘turn the other cheek’?” Actually, I’m not saying this. I don’t believe Jesus’ and Paul’s teaching on the need for disciples to adopt an enemy-loving, non-violent lifestyle was ever intended to serve as a mandate for how governments are supposed to respond to evil.
To the contrary, in Romans 12 and 13, Paul explicitly contrasts the call of disciples to swear off violence as they love and serve enemies with the way God uses governments. He tells disciples to “bless those who persecute you” (12:14), to never “repay anyone evil for evil” (v.17), and to never “take revenge (ekdikeō).” Instead, we are to “leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written, ‘Vengeance’ (ekdikēsis) is mine says the Lord’ (v.19).” Rather than retaliating, disciple must rather feed our enemy when they’re hungry and give them something to drink when they’re thirsty, thereby overcoming evil with good rather than allowing evil to overcome good (vss.20-21). Immediately following this Paul says that God “establishes” or “files” (tassō) all governments as he sees fit (13:1), which is why their “rulers do not bear the sword for no reason” (vs. 4). God uses these sword-wielding authorities “to bring punishment” or “vengeance” (ekdikos ) on the wrongdoer” (vs.4).
The important point for us to see is that Paul forbids disciples to ever engage in the very activity he says God uses governments to accomplish – namely, taking vengeance (ekdikēsis). We are to leave “all vengeance to God,” in other words, and one of the ways God takes “vengeance” is by using sword-wielding governments. This doesn’t mean that God wants governments to be violent. It just means that, since the governments of this fallen world are going to be violent, God is willing to get involved in them by “ordering” (tassō) their violence to bring about as much good as possible. And the good he works to bring about is keeping evil in check by punishing wrongdoers.
I believe this teaching implies that there are “sword-wielding” offices in government that disciples simply can’t hold. But I think it’s a complete misunderstanding to think that kingdom pacifism entails that disciples should try to get their government to adopt a pacifist position. This is treating the government as if it were the church!
So what do I think America should do in response to the Syrian crisis? The most important thing I would say in response to this question is this: whatever my opinion on this matter might be, I couldn’t consider it a distinctly kingdom opinion. Being a citizen of the peaceable kingdom of God does not give us any special insight into how and when the sword-wielding governments of this world should and should not use the sword. These governments operate by an entirely different set of rules than the kingdom we belong to and are called to advance. They defend their self-interest, while we die to ours. They are focused on doing what is practical while we are concerned only with being faithful. And they trust the power of force, while our only confidence is in the power of self-sacrificial love.
In this light, it’s apparent that pledging our allegiance to the non-violent Messiah may make us less “street smart” about the “right” use of the sword, but it certainly doesn’t give us any advantage on this matter. This is one of the reasons I think that disciples who think they are engaging in a kingdom activity when they publically protest wars are misguided. While followers of Jesus may have opinions about what our government, or any other government, should do in response to the Syrian (or any other) crisis, we must remember that there is nothing uniquely kingdom about this opinion.
So, with that proviso, what would I say if Obama called me up on the phone and solicited my opinion about how the US should respond to the Syrian crisis? (Of course, if he read the first part of this blog and understood what I said, I’d probably be the last person he’d solicit advice from – and I wouldn’t blame him!) Since our government has (almost) always been committed to the just-war principle that violence should be used only as a last resort, I’d first press him on the question of whether or not we are absolutely certain Assad is guilty of having engaged in the atrocity he is being accused of. I’d remind him of the enormous price the US and others paid because the US acted on “false intelligence” when we decided to bomb Iraq. If our information were indeed certain, I would encourage Obama to take the time to bring other countries on board so the US doesn’t have to act alone. Yes, slowing down poses the risk that Assad may kill more innocent people, but isn’t this risk outweighed by the many more innocent lives that will be lost if we once again act incautiously?
Moreover, I’d encourage Obama to seriously take a careful look at what the long-term fallout of a violent intervention will be. While violence always looks like a solution in the short run, it turns out to only lead to an escalation of violence in the long run. How will a unilateral US intervention on another largely Arab country harden more Muslims against the US and be used to recruit more terrorists in the future? I’d encourage him to seriously consider just how little (if anything) has been accomplished in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years, and at such an enormous price. And if the Assad regime collapses, are we reasonably sure the regime that replaces him will be any better?
Finally, if Obama solicited my advice, I’d inquire if all other avenues of resolving this crisis have really been exhausted. Have we exhausted all attempts to achieve a diplomatic solution with Assad? Have we exhausted all attempts to dialogue with him and/or with his allies? I know the media is now painting this leader out to be a Hitler-like madman who can’t be reasoned with (and his mustache doesn’t help this image), but it wasn’t long ago when this western educated leader was a considered a reasonable, and even humble, ally of the US. What happened? Are we to believe that this former dentist just lost his mind and soul? Does he have a legitimate grievance with the US that we might be able to rectify? Is there anything we can do to open the door to dialogue and move toward a non-violent resolution of this conflict.
And if Obama answered “yes” to all these questions, I’d ask him if he’d allow me to ask one further, slightly more personal, question: “Brother Obama, as a professing follower of Jesus, how do you reconcile your position as Commander in Chief with your allegiance to Christ?”
I’d end by promising to pray for him – and Assad – and the US – and the Syrian people. For at the end of the day, I have far more confidence that prayers like this will accomplish more in the long run than bombing ever will."The Hip" redirects here. For the shopping center commonly referred to as "The HIP", see Harlem Irving Plaza
The Tragically Hip, often referred to simply as The Hip, were a Canadian rock band from Kingston, Ontario, consisting of lead front man Gord Downie, guitarist Paul Langlois, guitarist Rob Baker (known as Bobby Baker until 1994), bassist Gord Sinclair, and drummer Johnny Fay. They released 13 studio albums, two live albums, one EP, and 54 singles over a 33-year career. Nine of their albums have reached No. 1 on the Canadian charts. They have received numerous Canadian music awards, including 16 Juno Awards.
Following lead singer Gord Downie's diagnosis with terminal brain cancer in 2015, the band undertook a tour of Canada in support of their thirteenth album Man Machine Poem.[1] The tour's final concert, which would ultimately be the band's last show, was held at the Rogers K-Rock Centre in Kingston on August 20, 2016, and broadcast globally by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a cross-platform television, radio and internet streaming special.[2]
Downie died on October 17, 2017.[3] In July 2018, the band announced they were no longer active as a performing or recording entity following Downie's death.[4]
History [ edit ]
Early history (1984–1991) [ edit ]
The Tragically Hip formed in 1984 in Kingston, Ontario. Gord Sinclair and Rob Baker were students at Kingston Collegiate and had performed together at the KCVI Variety Show as the Rodents. Baker and Sinclair joined with Downie and Fay in 1984 and began playing gigs around Kingston with some memorable stints at Clark Hall Pub and Alfie's, student bars on Queen's University campus. Guitarist Paul Langlois joined in 1986; saxophonist Davis Manning left that same year. They took their name from a skit in the Michael Nesmith movie Elephant Parts.[5]
By the mid-1980s they performed in small music venues across Ontario until being seen by then-MCA Vice-President Bruce Dickinson at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto.[6] They were then signed to a long-term record deal with MCA, and recorded the self-titled EP The Tragically Hip. The album produced two singles, "Small Town Bring-Down" and "Highway Girl".
They followed up with 1989's Up |
side to appoint an umpire and if the umpires could not agree they appointed a referee whose decision was final. Whatever anyone else thought about it, the two sides in the wager both agreed that the measurement of distance and time were right.
The fact that they could measure distance and time accurately does not mean that they always did. Both sides might have agreed that a few yards' error or a few seconds here or there mattered little. But if we take one runner's performances at different times and in different places, and over different distances, and compare them with what is known today about athletic ability and the physiological characteristics of distance runners, we find that whatever errors the two parties were willing to overlook must have been very small.
Take, for example, a Geordie runner by the name of Pinwire (or Pinwherie), who was said to have won 102 races between 1729 and 1733. Only two of his results have survived. One was 10 miles in 52min 03sec in 1733, and another was 12 miles in 64min in 1738.
With what we know today about the athletic and physiological characteristics of runners, we can see that his 12-mile time is entirely consistent with his earlier 10-mile time. If Pinwire's 10-mile time was contaminated by an error in measuring the distance or the time or both, there must have been another error in measuring time or distance or both that almost exactly 'balanced' it several years later when he ran his 12-mile time. The statistical chances of this happening are small.
For the athletes for whom we have three consistent performances, the chances of the results containing such perfectly balanced errors is even smaller, and there are several athletes for whom many more results than this exist. One athlete has 20 performances, all of which are athletically and physiologically consistent. The chances that these are consistent because of errors that cancel each other out are almost nil. In this way it is possible to rehabilitate a whole century of previously overlooked athletes and radically change our view of the quality of athletes from the past.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that athletes who lived before the internal combustion engine were physically fit and capable of great feats. Racehorses of 250 years ago are believed to have run as fast as they do today. Why not the athletes, particularly when they were motivated by large sums of money and took it seriously?
On the balance of the evidence, the report of Parrott's run should be accepted rather than rejected, but it still comes as something of a surprise. Part of the problem is that we have grown up with the idea that since Victorian times records have risen phenomenally, and that performances before that were poor to the point of being derisory.
The Victorians, who first codified and controlled the new sport of athletics, rowing and other sports, were ideologically driven to exclude large sections of society. It was the political correctness of the age to exclude anyone who wasn't an 'amateur', and so all those who ran or rowed for money out of necessity or choice were instantly eliminated.
Before the Amateur Athletic Association became the controlling force of athletics in 1880, men and women of all social classes ran for money on the streets and on the moors and greens of England. Later, the sport was policed to eliminate the undesirables who ran for money, or whose jobs tainted them and rendered them 'professionals'. They also excluded women.
The new political correctness also caused writers to airbrush out the professionals of the past and to start a new page of athletics. For them the sport began in Exeter College, Oxford in 1850, untainted by the runners who had run for money for at least 200 years previously. For a while, two sets of records were kept and these can still be seen and compared in the 1888 work British Rural Sports by JH Walsh, who wrote under the pseudonym Stonehenge. They confirm that one of the motivating forces behind the new amateur athletics was that there were many middle-class men who wanted to take part in sport but who were 'far from being good enough to hold their own in professional company'. If you can't beat them, exclude them.
The new amateur records were almost always poorer than the professional equivalents, but soon the professionals' records were not listed at all. Half a century later they had been forgotten and one historian of amateur athletics dismissed all pre-Victorian performances as 'clearly nonsense'.
This move to keep athletics pure and free from the contamination of money had a big effect on the history of the four-minute mile. Any runner who wanted to take the time to train and run seriously and needed money to do it, was systematically removed from the scene.
The greatest British miler of the late-Victorian age, Walter George, was forced out this way. Between the wars the Frenchman Jules Ladoumègue (the first man to beat 3min 50sec for the 1500 metres) and the Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi, the greatest runner of his age, were also disqualified for not complying strictly with amateur rules. In 1945, two great Swedes, Gunder Hägg and Arne Anderson, had brought the mile record to within 1.4sec and 1.6sec respectively of the four-minute barrier. But these, too, were disqualified by zealous officials still on the lookout for violations of the amateur code. Had these great runners been permitted to continue in their sport, as athletes of an earlier and later age had, the course of modern athletics history would almost certainly have been different
By the time the above athletes had been excluded from their sport, the amateur officials had also decreed that records would be recognised only if completed on a track measuring 400 metres or 440 yards in length and, with the restrictions on venue and money, it is little wonder that athletes from a freer age were totally overlooked.
Parrott, Powell and Weller ran on roads and parkland that may not always have been level. And so on 6 May 1954, almost exactly 184 years after James Parrott's first four-minute mile, Roger Bannister became the first amateur to run a mile in four minutes on a flat, level 440-yard track. It was an immense achievement, particularly when all the restrictions imposed on him by the officials who policed the amateur sport, are considered. It should not, however, overshadow the achievements of those pioneers who went before, men who dreamed of, and may well have achieved, the four-minute mile more than 150 years earlier, but who did it for money.
Peter Radford is professor of Sports Science at Brunel University, a double Olympic medallist and author of 'The Celebrated Captain Barclay'. He was chairman of the British Athletic Federation for six yearsHaving trouble hiring skilled technology workers? What would you say if you knew there was a huge untapped pool of workers who were readily available but overlooked?
That underutilized group? It’s the blind.
You might assume that visually impaired people, particularly in this day and age of touchscreens and mobile phones, couldn’t manage computers. But adaptive technologies such as Google Glass, screen readers that enable the blind to use touchscreens, the Internet of Things, and Braille smartwatches are making it easier than ever for the blind to navigate the everyday world—and the work world.
This was supposed to have been helped by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Intended to make it easier for the disabled to manage independently, it celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year. But more work is needed.
Because the ADA was written before the popularization of the Internet, it can’t be used to help promote online inclusion for the blind, writes Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind. “Blind people can access computer software, websites, and mobile applications using technologies such as text-to-speech engines and electronic Braille displays,” he writes. “But these tools only work well when electronic information and technology are designed to be compatible with them. Every day, most blind people, and many others with disabilities, encounter barriers to performing otherwise routine tasks, such as paying bills or booking a flight. At best, these barriers are merely frustrating—at worst, they can lead to loss of productivity, educational opportunity, or employment.”
For example, a recent study by Jonathan Lazar, professor of computer and information sciences at Towson University, found that only 28 percent of blind applicants were able to complete online job applications because many of the sites in the study didn’t use standards of accessible Web design, writes Tori Ekstrand in Slate. Social media sites are also among the offenders.
This lack of support also becomes a demographic issue with the aging population. According to the American Federation for the Blind, by 2030, rates of vision loss is expected to double along with the country’s aging population. In fact, according to the National Council on Disability, about 25 percent of people will acquire a disability at some point in their lives, Ekstrand writes
The Justice Department has been expected to advance rulemaking on Web accessibility for all websites under the ADA, Ekstrand writes. “The DOJ has publicly stated that it views the Internet as a ‘place of public accommodation,’” he notes, adding that in the past year and a half, the DOJ has filed statements of interest in accessibility lawsuits regarding private websites. On the other hand, since 1990, appeals courts have been divided as to whether the ADA applies to the Internet, he writes.
Currently, accessibility standards are only in place for government-run and government-funded sites under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, Ekstrand writes, noting that revised standards are set to take effect later this year.
The White House is also working on extending the ADA to the Internet, writes Alex Howard in the Huffington Post—a development any organization with user-facing websites should be aware of. “When it does, watch out,” he warns. “There are a breathtaking number of websites and Web services that could be deemed to provide ‘public accommodation’ under the ADA.” That said, adding accessibility to a website adds only 2 percent to the cost, if it’s done from the outset, Ekstrand notes.
Once the ADA is applied to private websites, penalties for violation can be heavy—up to $75,000 for a first violation and $150,000 for subsequent violations. Moreover, each noncompliant page could be considered a separate violation.
Some progress is being made elsewhere. In Oklahoma, for example, the Electronic Information Technology Accessibility (EITA) Act, a state law enacted in 2005, is intended to ensure that digital services for state agencies are built and developed for people with disabilities.
But aside from the financial penalty, support for the blind, and disabled in general, is simply the right thing to do.
“The Internet is increasingly about essential life needs, especially when it comes to access to employment, government services, health care, and education,” Ekstrand writes. “Try applying for a job or enrolling at a local college or university without a broadband connection, and you’ll run into trouble. As access becomes more integral to the essentials of everyday American life, the gap between those who have access to the Internet and to its content—and those who don’t—grows.”
We hope this opens your eyes to the problem of website accessibility.In this age of instant news, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc., we mostly hear about bad news because bad news attracts more eyeballs than good news.
That’s why when a police officer shoots a dog the entire world knows about it within minutes, but when an officer helps a dog, the public may not hear about it for days, if at all.
That’s probably why I didn’t know until yesterday that over a week ago, a deputy in the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office kept his promise to foster a dog for a woman that needed his help.
On May 28th, Deputy John Duggan responded to a welfare check and found a woman “laying alongside the roadway.”
Deputy Duggan knew from previous encounters with the woman that she had substance abuse problems. Concerned for her safety, he convinced her to accept a courtesy ride for her and her dog.
He offered to get her some assistance with her problem but she refused because “she was afraid of what would happen to her dog.” But Deputy Duggan was able convince her to accept help after he assured her that he would make sure her dog was “safe and taken care of.”
When he couldn’t find any shelters that would take the dog he honored his promise by taking the dog to his home to stay until the woman was able to take them back.
Thank you to Deputy Duggan for keeping his promise to the woman by taking care of her dog himself. Please share this story so more people will know about his selfless act.Just letting you all know, this blog is going to be run Monday-Saturday. As Mr. Dursley famously declared in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,
I’m only posting this today so that you’re all aware of this policy. From now on, if something is posted on a Sunday, I wrote it ahead of time and scheduled it to auto-post.
Thank you all so much for an incredible first week of ZNN! It’s only been up since Thursday, and already we’re almost at 4,500 Pageviews! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Oh, and before I forget, there’s one piece of news that’s too awesome to wait. Zootopia is, as of today, the #1 Highest Grossing movie of 2016! How awesome is that!?
Here’s to another wonderful week of Trying Everything!
-Andy J. Lagopus, Blog AuthorChristopher Dorner's mother was reportedly one of the many viewers glued to a screen Tuesday afternoon as the drama in Big Bear, Calif. unfolded live on national television broadcasts.
Nancy Dorner was thought to be spotted at La Capilla Mexican Restaurant in La Palma, Calif. at around 3:30 p.m. drinking white wine and eating chips and salsa as helicopter cameras captured a standoff between police and someone authorities believed to be her son, Christopher Dorner.
CBS2/KCAL9’s Michele Gile told her station that she spoke to someone matching Nancy Dorner's description, asking her and a female friend if they knew the fugitive. They said no, and Gile informed them that Christopher Dorner's mother lived somewhere nearby.
Joseph Munoz, the bartender, later told CBS2/KCAL9 that when Gile left, the woman believed to be Nancy Dorner asked him a lot of nervous questions.
"She started asking me questions, like if I knew (Dorner)…what I know about him…stuff like that. She was watching the TV, but she wasn’t really concerned about it," said Munoz. "She was busy talking to her friend, like it was just an everyday thing."
Gile later went to Nancy Dorner's home and saw the woman she spoke to at the bar pull into the driveway and enter the house. Neighbors identified the woman as Nancy Dorner, reports CBS2/KCAL9.
Nancy Dorner owns her home in La Palma and lives there with her daughter, according to property records. She also owns a vacant lot in Arrowbear, part of San Bernardino County. She and her daughter have been cooperating with authorities in the investigation against Christopher Dorner, reports the Los Angeles Daily News.
Police confirmed Wednesday that they found charred human remains inside the burned out cabin in Big Bear, but authorities have not positively identified the body, reports AP. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Department lifted the tactical alert and resumed normal patrol operations. Only about one dozen officers are still standing watch over the officers and families directly named in Christopher Dorner's alleged manifesto, down from 50.
Photos of the hunt for Christopher Dorner:
PHOTO GALLERY Christopher Dorner Manhunt
WATCH:Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
A British town has rejected calls to fly the rainbow flag, with the council there banning it from being flown.
A proposal to fly the rainbow flag in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, was defeated by the town council.
The council voted 7 to 6 not to fly the rainbow flag at next year’s Oxford Pride on 3 June 2017.
It had been proposed that the internationally recognised symbol of the LGBT+ community would be flown for next year’s Pride events.
Oxford Pride organisers have said they are “extremely disappointed” by the decision, and are currently trying to figure out why there is opposition to flying the flag.
According to comments on the Facebook page for Oxford Pride, one of the town councillors was heard saying: “What kind of message would it be sending to town”.
Commenter on the page branded the decision “disgusting” and “disgraceful”.
An Oxford Pride spokesperson said: “It’s important to show the community that their town supports them regardless of sexuality and gender, unfortunately some of Abingdon Town Council don’t agree!”
“For the Town Council to refuse this emblem of inclusion and acceptance, indicates that there are some still in control who do not wish such virtues to be part of an English town.”
A petition for the council to reconsider its decision has been started, and has almost 500 signatures.
Meanwhile in Scotland, the Queen was greeted with a rainbow flag as she arrived for the state opening of the Scottish Parliament.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan raised the rainbow flag from City Hall to mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT) in May.
The rainbow flag was also flown from the UK’s Houses of Parliament for the first time, ahead of Pride in London last month.
The Pride flag has been flown in the past from a number of government department, includingthe Cabinet Office and the Department for Education.Last Updated: 28 Feb 2014
It is often said that in the free world the workplace represents something of an aberration. For it is there that we voluntarily submit to the kind of command and control structure more normally associated with dictatorships. True, we do have the freedom to leave, but in practical terms this means finding work at another, usually similarly run, company.
It's true that companies do have shareholders to call the tune - and that often these shareholders include employees. But it is also the norm that the employee shareholding is not significant: any voice you might have is diluted many thousandfold by huge pension funds and other institutions.
Companies do also on occasion listen to their employees (and often to great effect). But the point is that they don't have to, and can stop whenever they choose. The result is often lip service rather than real engagement.
So the issue remains - most people work in a place where they have little real say in the decisions that affect them. The best they can hope for is that their goals align with the firm's and that the dictator (or CEO) is an enlightened and benevolent one.
Of course, there are other, more democratic models. In the UK, the best known is the John Lewis Partnership, which is owned by a trust on behalf of those who work there. There are also mutuals such as the Nationwide Building Society, which is owned by its members (who may include employees).
Other, more recent examples of non-traditional corporate structures include Brazil's Semco, where Ricardo Semler's radical vision resulted in a company that was more or less entirely run by its employees, and Mondragon, which is a federation of worker-owned cooperatives employing over 80,000 in Spain's Basque region.
US business Morning Star has a management structure flatter than the squashed tomatoes it processes. It has no supervisory management at all, and yet it is the world's largest company in its field.
Most of those who run and work for such overtly democratic (some might say anarchic) workplaces are highly enthusiastic about the experience.
Miranda Ash, chief community evangelist at WorldBlu, which exists to recognise and promote 'workplace freedom', says: 'Our research shows that democratic workplaces give better ROI, they're more flexible when change happens, and staff are happier at work, enjoy better health and lower rates of employee absenteeism.'
What's more, she adds, they have lower recruitment costs because people tend to stick around.
So why isn't there more democracy at work? One reason is that people are programmed from an early age to accept hierarchy, says Ash. 'Schools work in a command and control way, so one of the reasons businesses tend to resist democracy is because hierarchy is so deeply ingrained.' Another slightly more sinister reason is the increasingly well documented tendency for many businesses to promote those with undesirable traits - the last thing 'psychopaths in suits' want to do is cede power to those they control.
A third reason is inertia. It's tempting to say: 'Well, if we'd started democratic that would be fine, but we can't change now.' Yet it's worth remembering here that Semco was a conventional company before it became a crucible of workplace radicalism.
Similarly, Indian IT firm HCL - named one of the world's most democratic places to work - began life in 1976 with a more conventional structure. And in the US there is the remarkable Fortune 500 healthcare company DaVita, where employees refer to themselves as community citizens and 'boss' Kent J Thiry, a leading light in the industrial democracy movement, prefers to call himself the mayor of the village, rather than the CEO.
Ash notes that allied to inertia is the power of conventional wisdom and peer pressure. US tech entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, founder of online shoe store Zappos, was famously told by other board members that he needed to grow up and abandon the company's progressive culture if he wanted to hit the big time. Turns out they were wrong - he sold the business to Amazon four years ago for $1.2bn.
However, for all its upsides, it's important to note that workplace democracy remains the exception rather than the rule. 'You can point to businesses that are democratic and very successful,' says Ian Gooden, CEO of HR consultancy Chiumento.
'But you can also find very successful examples of autocratic entrepreneurs.' And, you might add, many of those are also loved by their staff, despite (or perhaps because of) their autocratic nature.
This allows workplace democracy to remain sufficiently outside the mainstream, so that even its most successful exemplars can be held up as exceptions that prove the rule.
Tom Nixon, co-founder of Nixon McInnes (see right), says: 'There's not much literature on it. People still refer back to Semler's Maverick! (which was published in 1993).'
However, there are good reasons to suspect that the future may belong increasingly to the democrats. Nixon says: 'Generations X and Y don't expect hierarchies. They don't like asking for permission - and organisations need to catch up.'
Added to this is a belief that, post crash, capitalism as practised by its Anglo-American proponents serves the few, not the many - and that large companies have not really learned any of the lessons of 2007 or changed their ways.
Moreover, there is a growing recognition that accountability has lagged several decades behind corporate power; if companies are going to be as powerful as governments, they need to be answerable to more people.
Many companies are indeed becoming more democratic - at least in part. Although it's tough to find a business that fulfils all WorldBlu's 10 principles (which include 'transparency', 'accountability' and 'choice'), it's increasingly easy to find huge organisations that conform to at least some of them. As Happy's Henry Stewart (see opposite) says: 'Even Google is quite democratic in terms of trust and freedom.'
Even so, the widespread adoption of workplace democracy will require a huge cultural change. As the great Semler himself once said: 'The main problem afflicting all these companies is autocracy. America, Britain and Brazil are very proud of their democratic values in civic life, but I have yet to see a democratic workplace.' This remains broadly true today.
CASE STUDIES
Nixon McInnes
'A democratic organisation needs a very clear reason to exist,' says Tom Nixon (above) of Brighton-based Nixon McInnes, which describes itself as a social media and digital transformation consultancy. 'It needs to be very transparent and open.' What this means in practice, Nixon says, is: 'Open-book accounting. There are no secrets and this means people don't fear things that may or may not be happening.'
Pay is transparent. 'Everyone's salary, even the directors', is available to everyone. We have an elected rewards team who scrutinise all pay decisions, including mine. They can reverse decisions - although this rarely happens as peer review means that people put in sensible salary requests.'
The 17-strong company has long had 'open seats' on the board, so any employee can join in, and it even holds full-company board meetings. Involving people makes for better decisions, says Nixon. 'You don't need to get people on board with decisions because they helped make them.' There is also a lot of decentralisation: 'People can make things happen. Clients say this makes us very responsive.'
Nixon says the commitment to democracy has been there since the start, when he and his co-founder discovered Maverick!. 'It made sense to us and was very empowering.'
In future, he adds: 'One objective is to be democratically owned. Right now, there's a small number of private shareholders but I want the company to be majority-owned by a trust with a market in shares so people can buy and sell them.'
Nixon admits that there's one area where democracy doesn't really work: 'You have to retain control of the purpose of the company. The mission needs to be controlled by the leader.' He adds: 'The best democratic leaders are strong ones who have a mission.'
Perhaps the firm's most unusual institution is its 'Church of fail'. Nixon explains: 'We set it up as a mocked-up church. Then, one at a time, people step up front and tell the team something at work they've failed at. Once you've done your fail, you get a huge round of applause - and you can't sit down until it stops. Being able to confess is very powerful - and it helps you see that it's OK to fail.'
Happy
A quick glance at computer training company Happy's website reveals that it's an out-of-the-ordinary company. It's not so much that it has a philosophy and talks about its values. Rather it's that these are detailed in a very concise, concrete way that's free of the usual corporate boilerplate. Hey, you find yourself thinking, perhaps these guys really mean this.
Indeed they do. Happy is regularly lauded as a company that lives up to its name - and one of the main reasons for this is its commitment to workplace democracy.
'One of our beliefs is that people work best when they're trusted and given freedom, so managers get out of the way,' explains Henry Stewart (above), co-founder of Happy. 'We pre-approve projects so if you want to do something, you go ahead and do it.' If you allow people to do what they want, he explains, they take responsibility for themselves - because they can't avoid it.
Like many democratic workplaces, Happy practises salary transparency. But one of its more unusual initiatives is letting its 25 employees choose their boss.
'Managers can be full, but within reason you can have the manager you want,' explains Stewart. 'People change managers for all sorts of reasons. It might be because they want a different experience, or even because they're too close to their manager.'
Workplace democracy, Stewart says, is not the same as electoral democracy. 'You want people to be well informed about what the business is doing, but they don't want to be involved in everything. Rather, they want a say on things that affect them. For instance, when we moved office we had a couple of choices. We took everyone to both offices and we had a vote. We actually came to the decision we wanted anyway, but everyone was bought in.'
Stewart says he started out as a 'typical, stressed small-business owner'. Then, when he employed only three people, he turned his back on command and control for ever. 'The following year, I had a month off with pneumonia and when I came back I only had to deal with two phone calls.'
Gripple
If you expect democratic businesses to be small, in sectors like the web and consultancy and based in the south-east, Gripple is a breath of fresh air.
It's in Sheffield, makes wire joiners and tensioners, has 1,300 staff and significant international operations. Yet it is radically democratic - to the point where it has established Glide (growth-led, innovation-driven employee company limited), a kind of company within a company, with an elected board to represent the interests of its employee-owners.
'All employees own shares in the business,' explains Andy Davies, a Gripple director and the chairman of Glide. 'They have to buy a minimum of 1,000 shares and retain them for the time they work for the business. These pay dividends and enjoy capital appreciation and can be purchased once a year.'
The idea, he says, is for people to have a stake in the company and be committed to it. 'If you leave to go to another job we'll buy the shares back, although if you retire you can hang on to them.'
Each employee-shareholder has one vote and 'people are elected from the various associate companies in the group to the Glide board. When we chose a new MD recently, the executive board had a say but Glide also had a say. In the end, the new MD was interviewed by 30 people representing the business.'
The company's founder, Methodist minister's son Hugh Facey (above), is gradually handing over his shares in the business so that Glide will eventually be the majority shareholder. To prevent takeover, both Glide and the family of the founder own golden shares, and no one individual can have more than 10% of the shareholding.
As with many other democratic businesses, the idea is that by giving your people representation, you get them involved and allow them to make decisions.
Employees, Davies says, are free to take initiatives and should a business in the group want to embark on a project, 'Glide can fund match new ideas'. Finances are transparent and 'every business period, we tell everyone everything'.On Thursday, Ukraine struck a restructuring agreement on some $18 billion in Eurobonds with a group of creditors headed by Franklin Templeton. The deal calls for a 20% writedown and a reprofiling that includes a maturity extension of four years and an across-the-board 7.75% coupon. All told, Kiev should save around, let’s just call it $4 billion once everything is said and done (there are some miscellaneous loans and bonds that still have to be worked out).
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that Ukraine also owes $3 billion to Vladimir Putin.
Now obviously, owing Vladimir Putin $3 billion is not a situation one ever wants to find themselves in, but this particular case is exacerbated by the fact that Putin did not loan the money to Ukraine as we know it now, he loaned the money to a Ukraine that was governed by Russian-backed Viktor Yanukovych. Of course Yanukovych was run out of the country last year following a wave of John McCain-attended protests.
Well, one thing led to another and here we are 18 months later with a festering civil war and a sovereign default and on Thursday, Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko offered the same restructuring terms to Russia that it offered to Franklin Templeton and T. Rowe. In effect, Jaresko was attempting to tell Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would allow him to take a 20% upfront loss on the $3 billion he loaned to Yanukovych who was overthrown by the current Ukrainian government with whom Moscow is effectively at war. As you might imagine, Putin was not at all interested.
So what happens now?
Well, it’s very simple actually. Someone owes Vladimir Putin $3 billion which he intends to collect in full and he could care less if Franklin Templeton and T. Rowe Price are willing to take a 20% hit.
Who’s going to pay him, you ask? Probably the US taxpayer. Here’s BofAML:
The $3bn Russian bond is included in debt restructuring, but Russia will not participate in debt restructuring and will either be paid $3bn from reserves in December or there will be a political decision to agree on an extension, likely without haircuts. We believe the $3bn bond is likely to be classified as sovereign debt and the IMF would likely be forced to pay it (as a holdout) in order to continue the program in December.
Got that? The IMF (so, the US with the tacit support of the taxpayer) is going to pay Vladimir Putin his $3 billion which he loaned to Viktor Yanukovych who the US effectively helped to overthrow.
And if that isn’t hilarious enough for you, consider that the rationale behind paying Putin 100 cents on the dollar is that the IMF needs to be able to justify the continual flow of IMF bailout funds to Kiev, some of which must be used to pay Gazprom which immediately remits the funds to Putin’s personal money vault.
So in a nutshell, the US is going to pay Putin in order to ensure that it can continue to pay Putin.
* * *
Bonus: Ukraine restructuring decision treeNEW YORK
Being that they are halfway to a second consecutive berth in the Eastern Conference final, it may be time to start taking the Tampa Bay Lightning a touch more seriously again.
With all the hype and love being heaped on Sidney Crosby vs. Alex Ovechkin (and the occasional mention of their Penguins and Capitals teammates, too), there has been a tendency to dismiss the Lightning these playoffs.
Of the eight remaining teams in the post season, only Nashville had fewer regular-season points (97 to 96) and even in their home state of Florida, the Bolts were being overshadowed.
Then there was the rash of late-season injuries, most notably to defenceman Anton Stralman and captain Steven Stamkos that figured to conspire against them.
But as the Lightning showed on Tuesday night here — three times coming back from a one-goal deficit, scoring in the last minute of regulation, then winning 5-4 in overtime — they’re playoff clutch right now.
“We always like to say we never quit,” Lightning centre Tyler Johnson said. “We learned a lot last year. We’ve been in a lot of different situations we know we can come back from.”
Those lessons were gathered throughout that lengthy playoff run in 2015, starting with an opening-round series against Detroit. Trailing two games to one and playing Game 4 in the Motor City, the Wings had a two-goal lead late in the third and seemingly a series stranglehold.
But after two goals in a span of just over a minute, the Bolts forced overtime, won the game and eventually prevailed over the Wings in seven.
Feel free to draw similarities to Tuesday’s contest at Barclays Center. It was a game that New York Islanders coach Jack Capuano described as his team’s best of the season. A last-minute goal — Brian Boyle’s controversial play after he nearly KOed Thomas Hickey with a hard hit moments earlier — was the clincher.
The fact that the Lightning have a share of the best record these playoffs at 6-2 (tied with San Jose and Pittsburgh prior to the Pens game on Wednesday) is a continuation of some of those lessons learned last year. The Bolts lost the Stanley Cup final to the Chicago Blackhawks in six games last spring, but the series was a tight one, a confidence and experience builder to take forward.
Sure, they may have got lucky with a first-round draw against Detroit again this year, but the Lightning didn’t waste any time, disposing of them in five games.
And now, after dropping the opener of the second-round series against the Isles, they have momentum and could take a stifling 3-1 lead in Game 4 on Friday. They’re getting strong play from Ben Bishop in net, outstanding work on the blueline from Victor Hedman, who had his second goal in as many games on Tuesday and an upstart performance from Jonathan Drouin, who was all but concussed in the second period before coming back in the third to set up the equalizer in the final minute of regulation.
With another two-day break between games thanks to Canadian pop star Justin Beiber taking over the Brooklyn rink, neither team practised on Wednesday. Which leads to our next and potentially most crucial point in building a case for the Lightning: the longer this series drags out, odds increase that Stralman (broken foot) and Stamkos (recovery from surgery to remove a blood clot) may return to the lineup.
The Lightning are mostly playing down the possibility, but Stralman skated in full gear on Tuesday, indicating he is at least nearing a return.
Stamkos, meanwhile, is here with the team and is basically waiting for medical clearance to ditch his blood-thinning medication and getting back in action. Wednesday marked a month since his surgery and doctors predicted he would be sidelined 4-6 weeks.
“We can’t really worry about it right now, to be honest with you,” Capuano said of the possible infusion of that pair into the Tampa lineup. “We’re preparing our guys for what we think is going to be their lineup. If they do get in there, we think we have seen Tampa enough over the last few years to know what Stralman and Stamkos can bring to the table.
“They’re a different element. They’re good players, we’re just going to have to play them hard. But we know their tendencies. We’ve seen them enough.”
But can they stop both of them? A fresh Stamkos and the welcome boost of Stralman on the blueline could be enough to continue the Lightning playoff prowess.
“It’s kind of the staple of how this team has come together the last couple of years,” Lightning head coach Jon Cooper said of the confidence it has regardless of situation. “Come playoff time, it’s amazing. There is a quiet calm about the team.”
And with all the noise being made in the other Eastern confidence series, a quiet confidence that another long spring run awaits.
ISLES COACH LIKES OVERALL PLAY
Other than the final result and a few plays here and there, New York Islanders head coach Jack Capuano doesn’t want his team to do anything different on Friday night.
Capuano believes his team has the right mix of grit and emotion to battle the Tampa Bay Lightning and that they showed it in Tuesday’s 5-4 overtime loss in Game 3 of the best-of-seven series.
“That’s probably one of the best games we played all year,” Capuano said Wednesday after having a night and morning to digest the thriller at Barclays Center. “There’s a lot of positives we can take. We had chances to put the game away, but (Tampa goaltender) Ben Bishop stood tall, especially in the first period.
“That was Islanders hockey. We played to our identity. That’s the way we’re going to have to play if we’re going to have success in this series.”
Meanwhile, despite Capuano’s |
course, support for Israel. In essence, it wants to make loyalty to AEPi synonymous with loyalty to one’s Jewish identity.
You might call it “Jewish peoplehood on campus.”
I call it a sense of eternal belonging. Yes, you can belong to your country, your college, your synagogue, your community and your family, but let’s face it, there’s something a little special about belonging to a 4,000-year-old people.
AEPi promotes Jewish continuity by promoting the identity of belonging.
I belong, therefore I am.
David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.For a long time now, people have argued over which Fallout game is better: Fallout 3 or New Vegas. While there’s tons of arguments from tons of different aspects of each of the games, I want to look at the openings of each of the games, and how in my opinion, how Fallout 3 does it better. A key aspect of any Bethesda game, let alone Fallout, is the ability to choose any playstyle you want and have it be completely viable. Fallout 3’s opening really works with this idea by having it begin from your literal birth. Because you play through your characters entire early life, the fact that you’re shaping what you want your character to be makes sense, and as soon as you leave the opening area of the game, you’re introduced into an area where every skill you chose to develop can be useful. Compare this to New Vegas’ opening, where you begin with being shot in the head as an adult and then thrown into a town in the middle of nowhere where you now pick your skills, and I think that Fallout 3 has the better opening. Not only does New Vegas’ opening not function as well with the design of playstyle choice, but its introduction area only rewards skills that have to do with combat, further hindering meaningful player choice. An opening for a game should do its best to introduce not just the story of game, but how the game wants to be played, and in a game about freedom of choice in a wasteland, Fallout: New Vegas’ opening falls short.A young German man has been sentenced to three years and nine months in prison for having joined the self-proclaimed Islamic State organisation in Syria.
It came after the first such trial of a home-grown jihadi in Germany.
The 20-year-old – whose full identity has not been revealed – was given a juvenile sentence, as authorised by the law in certain circumstances.
Kreshnik B, who was born in Germany of parents from Kosovo, admitted joining ISIL and receiving weapons training.
The court noted that he had returned to Europe after realising that opponents of President al-Assad’s regime were fighting among themselves.
Also on Friday two British men who joined Islamist fighters in Syria were jailed for 12 years and eight months each after admitting terrorism charges.
Nahin Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, both 22 years old and from Birmingham, were described by the judge as “fundamentalist who became interested in and deeply committed to violent extremism”.
The family of one of the men, pointing out that they had helped police with the investigation, complained that the sentence was too long and would deter others from coming forward.
In a separate trial a third man, Mashudur Choudhury, was jailed for four years for preparing for acts of terrorism in Syria.
The judge said his case did not merit a longer sentence as he was unlikely to remain dangerous.
In several European countries there’s concern over the potential threat from jihadis returning home from Iraq and Syria.
In Britain, where the terror threat level has been raised to severe, a bill has gone before parliament including powers to exclude temporarily suspected British fighters from returning to the UK.But he has kept money given to him individually by salon owners. Campaign finance records show that at least $17,000 in contributions that appear to be from the July fund-raiser came from salon owners, including present and past leaders of the Korean nail salon association. The donations that have come in since then are not yet publicly available. In an interview, Mr. Kim said he did not know the affiliations of the industry donors, even though several donations in July were from salons themselves, and labeled in records, in one example, as “Think Pink Nails I Inc.” In response to questions, Mr. Kim said that his staff would be looking into whether more money should be returned.
On the same day Mr. Kim returned the Chinese and Korean trade associations’ donations, the organizations hired the Parkside Group, a lobbying firm where Mr. Kim worked in 2012. The move was made at the assemblyman’s recommendation, according to Donald Yu, the director of the Korean nail salon association: “He said that in order to do the lawsuit, you also need to hire a P.R. firm to do press conferences and to get the articles into newspapers and radio and TV.”
In an interview, the assemblyman said hiring Parkside was just one of a number of recommendations he had made to the owners’ group, and that he frequently makes recommendations to constituents.
As the nail salon groups have ramped up their campaign against the new regulations, the organizations’ stature has grown, too. The Korean nail association had previously relied mainly upon modest dues, but now, almost every day, checks are arriving at its battered upper-story office in Flushing, adding tens of thousands of dollars to its war chest, its leaders said.
At least two other groups of nail salon owners have coalesced, organizing largely through WeChat, a popular messaging app. One, calling itself U.S. Nail Salons Management Center Inc., urged Chinese-owned shops around the city to close in protest of the new regulations on Aug. 25.
Joseph Lin, a real estate agent and community activist who is not affiliated with the industry, joined that group, and rallied another spinoff group. He said he was inspired to join the fray after walking past a nail salon that had shut in protest over Labor Day weekend and seeing a flier on its window.
Mr. Lin said he saw a chance for Chinese immigrants in the city to find their political voice. He helped lead nail salon protests in September at City Hall and several demonstrations in front of the New York Times Building. He has also been using the protests as a vehicle to encourage Chinese-Americans, in the nail salon industry and outside it, to register to vote. In an interview, Mr. Lin pointed to the fact that in a recent protest, which drew several hundred participants, many were not involved in the nail salon industry at all. The fight, he said, is now about so much more than nail salons.the dutch have been exceptional for quite a long time (see here, here, and here), and new york city (new amsterdam) inherited their exceptionalism. here’s colin woodard on “new york values” [kindle locations 144-150]:
“While short-lived, the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland had a lasting impact on the continent’s development by laying down the cultural DNA for what is now Greater New York City. Modeled on its Dutch namesake, New Amsterdam was from the start a global commercial trading society: multi-ethnic, multi-religious, speculative, materialistic, mercantile, and free trading, a raucous, not entirely democratic city-state where no one ethnic or religious group has ever truly been in charge. New Netherland also nurtured two Dutch innovations considered subversive by most other European states at the time: a profound tolerance of diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry. Forced on the other nations at the Constitutional Convention, these ideals have been passed down to us as the Bill of Rights.”
the dutch are located nearby, even half in, the heart of “core europe” — known as austrasia back in the day — the region in northwest europe where outbreeding (i.e. the avoidance of close cousin marriage), nuclear (not just residential nuclear) families, and manorialism all appeared earliest in the early medieval period (and maybe southeast england, too). here’s a map of the frankish kingdoms, including austrasia, with the location today’s netherlands (very sloppily) indicated (by me):
as you can see, the frisians are a bit of an exception — they were not a part of austrasia or the frankish kingdom until the 700s. i discussed the frisians in a previous post. apart from them, however, the dutch have been members of core europe since day one. why though do they seem to be not just core europeans but exemplary core europeans, what with their individualism and tolerance for diversity and their own northern renaissance and golden age? they’re really over the top core europeans. more core european in many ways than even the northern french who should, according to my outbreeding/manorialism theory, be super core europeans.
i really started to wonder about this when i read the other night that the netherlands was “very sparsely populated before 1500, and manorialism was of little importance.” huh?! i knew the frisians (like the ditmarsians) were never manorialized — that’s why they’re all a bit “wild” (i think) — but that wouldn’t make sense for the rest of the dutch. well, i think i’ve got it. and it turns out that the (evolutionary) history of the dutch is very interesting indeed!
to refresh everyone’s memory: manorialism — in particular bipartite manorialism — originated with the franks in austrasia probably in the 600s. here from michael mitterauer’s Why Europe? (which, if you haven’t read it by now, i might just have to ban you…) [pgs. 38-39 – this is mitterauer quoting another researcher]:
“‘I have introduced the concept of an early medieval ‘Frankish agrarian revolution’ that is implictly linked with the thesis that the…manorial village, field, and technical agrarian structures associated with this concept did not develop in Thuringia but were introduced as innovations — in a kind of ‘innovation package’ — from the western heartland of the Austrasian part of the empire…. I should like to reformulate my hypothesis thus: this type of agricultural reform was first put in motion in Austrasia around the middle of the seventh century, or somewhat earlier, under the Pippins, the majordomos of the Merovingians…. This innovation then caught on with nobles close to the king who in turn applied it to their own manorial estates. It would be most compelling to assume that the new model of the hide system — with its *Hufengewannfluren* and its large blocks of land (*territoria*) that were farmed in long strips (*rega*) — was also put into practice in the new settlements that were laid out by and for the kingdom (at the discretion of the majordomos) along the lines of a ‘Frankish state colonization.'”
mitterauer concurs and goes on to present much historic evidence showing how the frankish manor system was spread by the franks right across central europe over the course of a few hundred years (see also here). since “every society selects for something” — and since bipartite manorialism was a HUGE part of medieval northwest european society for something like six hundred years (depending on the region) — i’ve been trying to think through what selection pressures this manor system might have exerted on northwest “core” european populations (along with the outbreeding and the small family sizes — yes, there were undoubtedly other selection pressures, too). my working hypothesis right now: that, among other things, the manor system resulted in the domestication (self-domestication) of core europeans. more on that another day.
i’ve also been trying to work out which populations were manorialized when and for how long (along with how long they were outbreeding/focused their attentions on their nuclear families). for example, if you missed it, see here for what i found out about eastern (and other) germans.
now i’ve found out the story for the dutch. as i said above, the frisians were never manorialized. never, ever. which might account for why they’re, even to this day, a bit on the rambunctious, rebellious side. and up until the other evening, i thought the rest of the netherlands had been manorialized early on because it had been part of austrasia. but then i read that the netherlands was “very sparsely populated before 1500, and manorialism was of little importance.” *gulp!*
yes. well, what happened was: the netherlands was very sparsely populated before 1500, and there was, indeed, very little manorialism, but beginning in the 1000s, vast areas of peatlands in the netherlands (especially south hollad) were drained as part of large reclamation projects financed by various lords, etc. the labor was carried out by men who were then rewarded with farms in the reclaimed areas. much of this workforce was drawn from existing manors elsewhere in austrasia (in areas nearer to frisia, it would’ve been frisians doing the work/settling on the new farms). so inland netherlands, which was sparsely populated and where manorialism was not really present, was in large part settled by people from an already manorialized population. parts of austrasia had had manors since the 600s, and the reclamation projects began in the 1000s — and continued for a few hundred years — so that’s potentially 400+ years or so of manorialism that the settlers’ source population had experienced. thirteen generations or more, if we calculate a generation at a very conservative thirty years. some selection could’ve happened by then.
here from jessica dijkman’s Shaping Medieval Markets: The Organisation of Commodity Markets in Holland, C. 1200 – C. 1450 [pg. 12]:
“…the 11th to 13th centuries, when the reclamation of the extensive central peat district took place. The idea that the reclamations must have had a profound impact on the structure of society is based not only on the magnitude of the undertaking, but also on the way it was organised. Each reclamation project began with an agreement between a group of colonists and the count of Holland, or one of the noblemen who had purchased tracts of wilderness from the count for the purposed of selling it on. This agreement defined the rights and duties of both parties. The colonists each received a holding, large enough to maintain a family. In addition to personal freedom, they acquired full property rights to their land: they could use it and dispose of it as they saw fit. At the same time, the new settler community was incorporated into the fabric of the emerging state: the settlers accepted the count’s supreme authority, paid taxes, and performed military services if called upon….
“Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude have suggested that in the absence of both obligations to a manorial lord and restrictions imposed by collective farming practices, a society developed characterised by ‘freedom, individualism and market orientation’. In their view this is part of the explanation for the rise of the Dutch Republic (with Holland as its leading province) to an economic world power in the early modern period. The argument seems intuitively correct, but the exact nature of the link between the ‘absence of a truly feudal past’ and marked economic performance at this much later stage is implied rather than explained.”
i’ll tell ya the nature of the link (prolly): biological — the natural selection for certain behavioral traits in the dutch population in this new social environment.
according to curtis and campopiano (2012), the reclamations and settlements in south holland were made “almost entirely on a ‘blank canvas’.” they also say that the reclamation projects [pg. 6]:
“…led to the emergence of a highly free and relatively equitable society…. In fact, the reclamation context led Holland to become one of the most egalitarian societies within medieval Western Europe…. In the Low Countries, territorial lords such as the Bishop of Utrecht or the Count of Flanders managed to usurp complete regalian rights over vast expanses of wasteland after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the tenth century. Rather than reclaiming these waste lands to economically exploit them directly, territorial lords looked to colonise these new lands in order to broaden their territorial area, thereby expanding their tax base.
“The consequences of this process were significant for large parts of Holland from the tenth century onwards. Both the Bishop of Utrecht and the Count of Holland lured colonists to the scarcely-inhabited marshes by offering concessions such as personal freedoms from serfdom and full peasant property rights to the land. The rural people that reclaimed the Holland peat lands between the tenth and fourteenth centuris never knew of the manor or signorial dues. In fact, many of the colonists in the Holland peat-lands originated from heavily manorialised societies and were looking to escape the constrictions of serfdom, further inland….”
i need to double-check, but i’m pretty certain that this is a quite different picture from what happened during the ostseidlung. while colonists to the east received their own farms, they still had signorial obligations (owed either labor or rents to the lord of the manor) — i.e. they were tied to manors for as long as the manor system lasted. that’s a different sort of society with different sorts of selection pressures for behavioral traits.
so the dutch — at least the dutch in holland (they *are* the dutch, aren’t they?!) — are descended from a population that spent 400+ years or so in a manor system, some of whom (self-sorting!) then jumped right in to a system where they were free and independent peasants working on their own and trading their wares in markets (another crucial part of the story…for another day). and they’ve been doing the latter for nearly one thousand years. well no wonder they invented capitalism (according to daniel hannan anyway)!
i still think that the combination of frisians+dutch/franks might’ve been the winning one leading to the enormous success of the tiny netherlands as i said in my previous post on the dutch. now, though, i would add manorialized/non-manorialized to that paragraph as well:
“the combination of two not wholly dissimilar groups (franks+frisians, for instance), with one of the groups being very outbred (the franks) and the other being an in-betweener group (the frisians), seems perhaps to be a winning one. the outbred group might provide enough open, trusting, trustworthy, cooperative, commonweal-oriented members to the union, while the in-betweener group might provide a good dose of hamilton’s ‘self-sacrificial daring’ that he reckoned might contribute to renaissances.”
previously: going dutch and trees and frisians and eastern germany, medieval manorialism, and (yes) the hajnal line and big summary post on the hajnal line and medieval manorialism’s selection pressures
(note: comments do not require an email. some hollanders.)
AdvertisementsCountless activists, researchers and enthusiasts let out a collective whimper when the Drug Enforcement Administration upheld a 46-year-old policy of classifying marijuana as a Schedule I narcotic with no medicinal properties.
But then, federal officials did something utterly unexpected and loosened restrictions on the cultivation of marijuana for research purposes. While that might sound counterintuitive, it sends a signal that perhaps the government is looking for a reason to eventually reschedule cannabis as a less offensive drug than, say, heroin.
Until that day comes, marijuana researchers across California can finally enjoy better access to their most prized possession. Thanks to the DEA’s recent decision, the University of Mississippi will no longer be the sole legal distributor of cannabis for scientific purposes.
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The implications of this are twofold. Licensing additional growers means scientists might not have to wait as long to get their product. But more important, adding new growers to the mix means researchers will finally have access to different strains of pot, which could impact what kind of research scientists will conduct moving forward.
EXPAND Dr. Igor Grant has been studying medical marijuana since 2000 at the University of California at San Diego. Courtesy the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research
“It may spur the development of different plants, which may, for example, have more CBD than THC or the other way around,” says Dr. Igor Grant, director of the University of California at San Diego’s Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.
The difference between CBD, cannabidiol and THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, is key to how researchers and the government study, prescribe and ultimately classify marijuana. CBD does not get you high, whereas THC does. In theory, it would be easier to pass legislation making CBD treatment legal because no one can get stoned from it. THC, on the other hand, has the dubious honor of being both recreationally awesome and medically potent.
Currently, THC is licensed by the Food and Drug Administration as a drug called Marinol or Dronabinol and is used to treat nausea and vomiting in cancer patients, or to increase appetite and weight gain in people with AIDS. It also reportedly is helpful in the treatment of certain kinds of neuropathic pain, for example alleviating muscle spasms in multiple sclerosis patients.
While CBD lacks the psychoactive properties that get people high, it has been shown to have anti-epileptic and anti-inflammatory effects. Yet researchers don’t have the same kind of access to CBD that they do to THC. The University of Mississippi has just one strain available, and accessing this secret stash is no small feat. It could take anywhere from six to 18 months to procure the rare ingredient that would help scientists determine if there really are valid uses for marijuana other than getting high.
“The important thing [these new regulations] will do is improve the availability of cannabis and hopefully the type of cannabis available for research so we can answer more of these questions,” Grant says.
Of course, the problem with the DEA’s new and improved guidelines is that no one knows how long they will take to implement. It could be weeks or years before new growers are licensed to distribute to research facilities. In the meantime, it’s business as usual for the few federally approved centers around the country.
The cumbersome process of acquiring marijuana for studies requires first being approved by the FDA and then by the DEA. It's a step up from how things were originally done when the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research was founded in 2000. Back then, and until about a year or so ago, a third level of approval was required from the Department of Health and Human Services.
California has spent approximately $8.7 million in the 16 years since establishing Grant’s center. At the time, UCSD was the only researcher in the field and the university largely paved the way for more streamlined protocols to acquiring and studying marijuana. Grant’s center has been at the vanguard of cannabis research from the beginning, and scientists there remain confident pot’s medicinal future could be bright if only the federal government would continue to ease up on regulations.
“I’m really hoping that with some of these gradual changes, both at the federal level and more rapid changes at the state level, research on medical cannabis will accelerate,” Grant says.
“What we really need is much larger-scale studies and, in particular, we need studies that are longer going — something that works for a few weeks or a month might not be safe for a year or two.”
Next month, Grant’s team will kick off two new studies. One, which is federally funded, will examine the different ways of administering pot to patients experiencing neuropathic pain. Some test subjects will ingest THC in a pill and others will inhale vaporized cannabis to see which is more effective.
The second, and state-sanctioned, study will look at the effects of marijuana on driving. Volunteers will receive various levels of pot potency to study impairment and how to better measure intoxication on the side of the road.WEATHERLY, Pa.—Mitt Romney is telling evangelical Christians that he'll do "the opposite" of what President Obama has done in dealing with Israel.
Romney on Saturday told the Faith and Freedom Coalition he believes the president is more concerned about Israel attacking Iran than he is about Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. His hawkish speech was the first time he's discussed policy toward Israel at length since becoming the likely Republican presidential nominee.
Obama's campaign accused Romney of distorting the president's record on Israel. Spokesman Ben LaBolt says Obama has given Israel more security assistance than any other administration and has stood with Israel at the United Nations.
Romney addressed the group via video uplink from outside his campaign bus as he campaigned in Pennsylvania.
© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.Orthopedic surgery has some of the longest waiting lists in medicine, with patients — often in debilitating pain — queuing for months or years to get their procedure.
But a select group of Canadians is enjoying service that could hardly be speedier: an operation within 10 days, sometimes guided by a personal “surgical co-ordinator.”
Remarkably, the provider is not a rogue private clinic on the legal fringes of health care, but a group of public hospitals in Ontario that run a semi-private system within the public system, earning them and their surgeons a healthy premium.
Altum Health — part of Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) — and three other public hospitals are doing the work for Ontario’s workers’ compensation system, which pays to get injured employees rapid treatment.
The Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Alberta compensation boards have also made similar arrangements with both private and public facilities, though the surgery their clients receive is not quite so expedited.
Regardless, as a high-profile British Columbian court case debates whether patients should be allowed to buy faster service in private clinics, some Canadians are already enjoying dramatically expedited treatment in otherwise taxpayer-funded facilities.
It’s medical tourism, right within our own system
“It’s medical tourism, right within our own system,” said Dr. Shawn Whatley, an Ontario-based emergency physician and author of the book, No More Lethal Waits. “It’s absolutely nonsense that it’s happening. … I just can’t see how it’s justifiable.”
In contrast to Altum’s 10-day guarantee, it takes an average of about six months to get all orthopedic patients their surgery in the regular public system, according to Ontario health ministry data, not including months-long waits just for an appointment with the surgeon.
That discrepancy makes no sense, argues Doris Grinspun, head of the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario. Why should someone enjoy fast service in a public hospital just because they were hurt on the job, while a worker or retired person with a non-employment-related injury has to wait, she asks.
“It should be based on need,” Grinspun said. “This is really providing preferential treatment.”
But Altum’s managing director, Dr. Nizar Mahomed, says UHN is simply using surplus operating-room and surgeon capacity, without affecting any regular patients’ treatment. The network’s hospitals already provide all the medicare operations they can with the money the province offers, he said.
And “the access to that (Altum) care is available to any Ontarian who’s been injured at the workplace,” said Mahomed. “It’s very different than queue-jumping for selective populations; it’s anyone who got hurt at work.”
But is it right that even that group gets enhanced service?
“That is what our Canadian health-care system is at this point in time,” said Mahomed.
No Canadian is supposed to get preferential access to government-insured health services.
But the Canada Health Act, medicare’s governing law, makes an exception for workers’ compensation schemes, allowing the employer-funded boards to negotiate unique arrangements for their clients, the principle being that everyone gains by getting people back to work sooner.
In such provinces as B.C. and Saskatchewan, boards have made deals for surgery chiefly with private clinics.
Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board works with two private clinics. But it also has contracts with Altum Health, Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, Mississauga’s Trillium Health and Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, all public facilities.
Surgeons earn $600 on top of the standard fee if they can do the operation within 10 days, said Mahomed.
Altum promises what many Canadians would consider dream health care, furnishing a surgical-care co-ordinator who oversees the patient’s treatment from start to finish. The group’s results are “dramatically better” than the standard outcomes outlined in medical literature, it says.
In Alberta, most of the surgical work from the workers’ compensation board is contracted out to private clinics. But some is also purchased from the public Leduc Hospital.
The board pays surgeons an extra $548 if the procedure is performed in 15 days or less, says spokesman Ben Dille.
Nova Scotia’s board contracted with the former Annapolis Valley Health Authority — recently subsumed into a province-wide agency — to provide “timely” surgical care. The authority has said it would take advantage of “unused capacity” and the work would not affect public services.
Manitoba’s board contracts for surgery with some private clinics, but also the publicly run Pan Am Clinic, with doctors paid bonuses if they provide expedited care, said board spokesman Warren Preece.
• Email: tblackwell@nationalpost.com | Twitter: TomblackwellNPTerry Jones, the Florida pastor who has publicly condemned Islam, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Dearborn, Mich., claiming the city is violating his constitutional right to free speech.
Jones gained notoriety for his anti-Islam platform when he burned a Quran last year at his church in Gainesville, Fla., inciting protests and deadly riots in Afghanistan.
Dearborn has a large Arab-American and Muslim population, and Jones is planning a protest for Saturday at Dearborn's Islamic Center of America, the country's largest mosque.
According to the Detroit Free Press, the Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor and Jones sued Dearborn in advance of the event. The suit alleges Dearborn is asking Jones to sign a legal document that would require him to "forfeit all legal rights from anything that might happen at the rally."
City officials did not immediately return request for comment Tuesday. Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly told Patch last year that Jones is an antagonist. "His goal is to start trouble," O'Reilly said.
Jones previously came to in Dearborn in April 2011, and planned to protest at the Islamic Center of America. But he was thwarted when the city denied his request for safety and space reasons, so he spoke against Sharia Law in front of City Hall instead. Jones drew hundreds of counter-protesters.
A Dearborn jury then found Jones and his partner, Wayne Sapp, "likely to breach the peace," and Dearborn Chief Judge Mark Somers ordered the two men to pay a $1 peace bond and stay away from the Islamic Center of America for three years. When they refused to pay the bond, they were briefly jailed.
In November, however, a Wayne County Circuit Court judge overturned the case on a technicality, according to Michigan Radio, allowing Jones to go forward with his protest this week.
According to Jones's website, Saturday's protest will attack what he calls Muslims' "special privileges," citing allowances made in school cafeterias for halal dietary restrictions.The giant deep-sea octopus (Haliphron atlanticus) is an enigmatic critter. Few marine biologists have ever spotted the cephalopod—scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, for instance, have only recorded three sightings in the last 27 years. So researchers were surprised when they recently caught a glimpse of one of these creatures. But what stunned them even more was what it was eating: a large, squishy jellyfish.
As George Dvorsky explains for Gizmodo, some scientists have argued that jellyfish are low in nutritional value, so do not play a significant role in the marine food chain. But the recent study of the Haliphron’s dietary preferences, published this week in Scientific Reports, suggests that the importance of gelatinous sea creatures as prey has been underestimated.
Most of what scientists know about the Haliphron—also called the “seven-armed octopus” because males keep their eighth tentacle tucked in a sack under the eye—comes from studies done on specimens that have been scooped up from the ocean by fishing nets. Though the males are relatively small, growing to about 12 inches long, the females are huge, stretching up to 13 feet in length and weighing up to 165 pounds. Prior to the new study, however, researchers weren’t sure what the octopus ate to maintain its impressive size.
Hoping to observe the Haliphron in its natural habitat, marine biologists from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Germany and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute set out on an expedition off the coast of California in 2013, Jane J. Lee reports for Nature. They used a “deep-diving robot” to search for the elusive octopus, and found one clutching a large, egg-yolk jelly.
In a video by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, marine biologist Steven Haddock explains that the Haliphron had eaten through most of the tissue hanging down from the bell of the jellyfish. The octopus had pierced the bell with its beak, leaving the ring of the tentacles intact.
Incredibly, the Haliphron continued to hold onto its prey even after it had finished chowing down. “It looked as though Haliphron had not only made a meal of the jelly, but was hanging onto it, perhaps for a defense, or for help in catching more prey,” Haddock says.
To confirm that this wasn’t a one-off occurrence, researchers checked archived footage of the Haliphron and noticed that at least one other creature appeared to be holding a gelatinous creature. Gizmodo’s Dvorsky writes that the team also analyzed the stomach contents of five Haliphrons that had been caught in fishing nets. All of their stomachs contained traces of gelatinous zooplankton, and three had bellies full of jellyfish.
These findings add to a growing body of research that suggests jellies play a more important role in the marine food chain than previously believed. Recent studies have shown that gelatinous animals feature prominently in the diets of spearfish and two different types of tuna. Penguins and lobsters have been known to munch on jellies too. And according to Lee, other species of octopus use jellies in complex ways. Some cephalopods have been observed wielding the tentacles of jellies, possibly to help catch more prey—just like the Haliphron seemed to be doing when it held onto the remains of its meal.
The authors of the study note that the Haliphron can afford to feast on low-calorie jellies because it has “a very low mass-specific metabolic rates” and doesn’t require much energy to maintain its metabolism. Or as Haddock says in the video, the octopus displays an “interesting adaptation to life in the open ocean: live slow, grow big.”No, the Athletics are not done. Their next move could be the signing of a Cuban infielder, but it’s more likely to be Hector Olivera, 29, than Yoan Moncada, 19.
To get Olivera, who has not yet been cleared to sign, the A’s only would need to make him the highest offer. Moncada, on the other hand, will be subject to international bonus pool limits as an amateur free agent.
The way the system works, any team that signs Moncada will pay a 100 percent tax on his contract. A $30 million deal would turn into a $60 million outlay, and that would be a problem for a low-revenue team such as the A’s.
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The penalty would be due in a lump-sum payment sometime after the sides agreed upon a contract, and the A’s lack the flexibility to write that big a check, major-league sources said.
The situation is not unlike what the A’s experienced after the 2010 season when they won the rights to right-hander Hisashi Iwakuma with a $19.1 million posting fee.
The A’s reportedly offered Iwakuma a four-year, $15.25 million free-agent contract, far less than what he wanted. He stayed in Japan and signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with the Mariners the following off-season.
Given Moncada’s expected price, other low-revenue teams could back off Moncada for the same reason as the Athletics, leaving high-revenue clubs such as the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers in a stronger position.
Olivera, meanwhile, will hold his first open showcase at the Giants’ academy in the Dominican Republic on Jan. 21-22. He left Cuba in September, but still has not been declared a free agent by baseball or cleared by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
The Athletics are among the clubs expected to attend Olivera’s workout. If they signed him, they could play him at second base, Marcus Semien at shortstop and Ben Zobrist in the outfield.It’s getting close to that time of year again —- beautiful, sun kissed masses of eager young people congregate in Indio, CA to see “omg like their favorite band ever”. Though it’s evident that a growing percentage of Coachella festival-goers are only there to see and be seen, there is still a hugely loyal base of fans that have been attending the festival for years because of one un-deniable truth: Coachella is really, really fun.
Yes that’s right. After arguing about which weekend to attend, after coughing up an arm and leg for a ticket, after battling with now ex-friends about camping or condo (camping, always), after buying enough bottled water to supply a small country, Coachella is an unforgettable experience. Haters gonna hate on every festival lineup released ever, but this being my fifth year attending Coachella and knowing that there are plenty of things to hate on, this lineup is definitely not one of them.
Coachella often serves as a platform for smaller-name artists to jump from. As one of the first major festivals of the year, the performances in Indio often set a precedent for the reason of the season. Here’s our run down of who we think everybody will be talking about after their blissful weekend in the desert.
10. Flume
This Aussie producer has an incredibly unique style that fuses jazz, hip-hop and electronic elements in complicated, diverse ways. His recent work with Chet Faker on their Lockjaw EP is mesmerizing. His live show is |
Lou Schuler, Marie Spano, and Mark Nutting) were top-notch. All of them delivered theoretical and practical gems of knowledge, and I can’t express enough how high the quality of education is. A large debt of gratitude is owed to Jeff Volek for agreeing to share the stage and lock horns with me. Huge thanks & kudos are due to the tireless administrators of the NSCA (special shout-outs to Peter Melanson & David Barr) for making this an event to remember.
References
Phinney SD, Bistrian BR, Evans WJ, Gervino E, Blackburn GL. The human metabolic response to chronic ketosis without caloric restriction: preservation of submaximal exercise capability with reduced carbohydrate oxidation. Metabolism. 1983 Aug;32(8):769-76. [PubMed] Quann, EE. Carbohydrate restricted diets and resistance training: a powerful combination to enhance body composition and improve health. ACSM’s Certified News. Oct-Dec, 18(4), 2008. Hu T, Mills KT, Yao L, Demanelis K, Eloustaz M, Yancy WS Jr, Kelly TN, He J, Bazzano LA. Effects of low-carbohydrate diets versus low-fat diets on metabolic risk factors: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials. Am J Epidemiol. 2012 Oct 1;176 Suppl 7:S44-54. [ PubMed Johnston CS, Tjonn SL, Swan PD, White A, Hutchins H, Sears B. Ketogenic low-carbohydrate diets have no metabolic advantage over nonketogenic low-carbohydrate diets. Am J Clin Nutr. 2006 May;83(5):1055-61. [ PubMed Phinney SD. Ketogenic diets and physical performance. Nutr Metab (Lond). 2004 Aug 17;1(1):2.Phinney SD. Ketogenic diets and physical performance. Nutr Metab (Lond). 2004 Aug 17;1(1):2. [ PubMed Beis LY, Willkomm L, Ross R, Bekele Z, Wolde B, Fudge B, Pitsiladis YP. Food and macronutrient intake of elite Ethiopian distance runners. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2011 May 19;8:7. doi: 10.1186/1550-2783-8-7. [PubMed] Onywera VO, Kiplamai FK, Boit MK, Pitsiladis YP. Food and macronutrient intake of elite kenyan distance runners. Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab. 2004 Dec;14(6):709-19. [PubMed]
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_________________________________________________________________________No Future In Queens
I wasted money on a cab again, but the Museum of the Moving Image is all the way in Astoria and I woke up too late and hungover to navigate the buses and trains to Queens. It’s one of those white, sterile modern buildings, both inside and out, very iOs—“futurist” in that way that’s always doomed to feel dated when people remember that the promise of technology doesn’t preclude the use of color. Even the font on the MoMI logo—custom-made for the museum by Icelandic-German-NYC firm Karlssonwilker, no less—was created to fit the retro-futurist theme. In the designers’ own words:
“Once inside you are enveloped in angular whiteness and digital projections, the whole thing reminiscent of a cartoon imperial destroyer.”
That’s a 40-year-old reference to Star Wars, folks. And why is our vision of the future hopelessly démodé these days? My guess is that the realities of climate change make it difficult to imagine anything beyond either dystopia or nostalgia. At best we can slap a little vintage sci-fi lacquer over austere, “clean” interiors, pinning the little cartoon robots of our parents’ childhood onto Helvetica hairshirts. The stagnation in design aesthetics reminded me of the Gramsci line:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
In the midst of a splitting headache, I managed to mentally pat myself on the back for remembering a relevant text, and being the self-congratulatory millennial asshole that I am, I literally bought myself a cookie at the museum gift shop as a reward. As if to corroborate my dime-store design analysis, the cookie was shaped like Pac-Man (1980). It was dry and tasteless.
Theorizing the Web is now in its seventh year, its fifth in New York since moving from the University of Maryland. It’s billed as an “inter- and non-disciplinary annual conference that brings together scholars, journalists, artists, activists, and technology practitioners to think conceptually and critically about the interrelationships between the Web and society.” I couldn’t draw much of a bead on the target audience from such a generic cattle call. I had anticipated a crowd of bloodless, unerotic Silicon Valley expats, disruption in their eyes and Soylent pumping through their veins, but the quiet, shuffling flock of conference-goers exuded a distinctly MFA vibe. Lots of sprezzatura, “effortless” frayed denim and chunky heeled mules—you know the look, this season’s Gallery Girl uniform. And of course there was the timeless art school sea of monochrome black. Repetitive fashions aside, attendance was more diverse than I anticipated with regards to gender, age and race. Really, it looked as if the only underrepresented demographic was The Homely.
Style observations aside, the young, NYC-centric coterie of New Media Theory isn’t merely a generational subculture; they represent a distinct ideological schism from their libertarian counterparts in techno-optimist Silicon Valley. Though the politics of an event like Theorizing the Web tend to be fairly meandering and inchoate, gone is the Occupy-era techno-utopianism of a wild web frontier, and certainly any fantasy of the inherent “democratizing nature” of the internet. Of course, you’d have to be delusional to still believe in Liberation by Internet. Because a record of every injustice, from man-made environmental disasters to police violence, proliferates online to exponential redundancy, no reasonable or observant person can any longer argue that interconnectivity is the key to a Better World. In the wake of this disorienting disappointment, no dominant political ethos yet pervades the Theorizing the Web set, but the academia-borne political culture of Twitter and Tumblr abound.
For example, one panelist began her presentation with a “land acknowledgment,” a concept I was familiar with despite not having heard the exact neologism. After issuing a trigger and content warning (not uncommon at TTW), the speaker prefaced her presentation on surveillance and police violence with the following statement: “I wish to acknowledge the Native land on which we are gathered here today. The state of New York and the area surrounding the Museum of the Moving Image is traditional Iroquois and Six Nations Territory of which is part of 12 nations and tribes of the area, amongst many others which make up the whole of North America, traditionally known as Turtle Island.”
It was a strange little prayer to deliver to this particular crowd, none of whom I would wager were unaware of the indigenous genocides of the Americas. But as is the case with social media, even dating back to its primitive roots on message boards, the language produced by these platforms favor a kind of ritualistic set of grammars that are extremely well-suited to communicating fellowship and shared values, arguably sometimes at the expense of more compelling or challenging dialogue.
At the same time, other panels dealing with seemingly shallower subjects pushed for compelling theoretical work. I didn’t expect to get much out of the discussion on “Selfie Feminism”—I’m just generally skeptical of the political utility of vanity and self-care, as indulgent in both as I may be. One speaker presented her study of an online fashion game, where her results essentially reasserted what Kenneth and Mamie Clark had already illustrated in 1939 with their famous doll experiment: that white hegemony produces a decidedly racist beauty standard. Another woman discussed the self-produced softcore porn of Instagram, but I zoned out slightly, unable to concentrate on the repetitive slides of T and A. It’s not that I find porn monotonous per se, but the surfeit and uniformity of Instagram beauty gets old very quickly. Daisies are lovely, and varied from flower to flower, but when gazing at a field of them they become less of a pageant and more of a texture. I only really got annoyed when talk turned to that insidious spectre of The Male Gaze, which feminists are generally assured they neither need nor want, as if they somehow have a choice in the matter. My head was spinning with the sort of antagonistic questions I was too sick to ask without sounding bitchy: What’s wrong with women performing for male attention? Is not the indignity of performance innate to the social aspect of human sexuality? Is it even possible for sexuality to exist in a state of pure solipsism? And if so, is that a even desirable relationship to the body? Aren’t we all at times just putting on a show so that people will want to fuck us? Why are the lights so bright in here? Does anyone have any aspirin? Is there a bar nearby?
As if to answer my questions (at least the first few), the final speaker led with a refreshing Margaret Atwood quote:
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
What followed was a rousing call to disinvest ourselves from the myopic and individualistic analysis of feminine content, to desist in reading tea leaves from atomized incidences of a larger social phenomenon (as if every selfie contained a secret feminist message to be decoded). She argued viewers should instead focus on the mediums and means by which women actually produce this content, bolstering her argument with some slick Susan Sontag and “Woah Dude” photography theory.
But then came the Q and A, and a woman asked that old, inescapable classic: can I be a feminist and still shave my legs? I went to the bathroom to throw up. “When I am Kommissar,” I thought to myself between heaves, “there will be a ten year moratorium on discussing the feminist implications of epilation.”
Of course, it’s the unfortunate tendency of all intellectuals to overthink the trivial and mistake the symptomatic for the causative, often exposing the boundaries and limitations of their particular school of thought (except for Marxism of course, which is always appropriate and correct). New Media Theory is no different. On one panel, a journalist brilliantly dissected the racist ramifications of the sharing economy; on another, there was a presentation on the political nuance of “race-bending” in online fan fiction (Theorizing the Web is the sort of event where a speaker wouldn’t be expected to spend any time defending the relevance of such a topic, which is… something). One speaker analyzed the implications to the DSM when delusional paranoia is promulgated online, then there was the woman nearly in tears of rage over a gender-neutral chatbot. Thankfully in decline seems to be the toothpaste-and-orange-juice trend of pairing pseudo-populist pop culture with opaque cultural theory—I sniffed out barely any “What would Deleuze and Guattari think of Kylie Jenner” type panels. I’m cautiously optimistic for the death of that particular party-trick-for people-who-go-to-corny-parties. (The New Inquiry is dead, long live The New Inquiry.)
Of course Post-Internet Theory suffers from a lot of the same pomo pop culture pomposity that academia does, and of course it’s mediated heavily by the social atmosphere of woke campus activist politics. And obnoxiously, both of tendencies are replete with tedious jargon, some of which overlaps (like saying “bodies” instead of “people,” for example). The use of this jargon often indicates more about the speaker than it does the subject being spoken of: academic slang is deployed to show that you’re Smart, while activist slang is deployed to show that you’re Good. And whenever either breed of jargon is employed to excess, you can bet it’s there to mask a lack of content. But amidst all the Small Liberal Arts lingo and critical theory pretensions, there are some brilliant and dynamic thinkers who believe it is an intellectual’s job to elucidate a complex world, rather than mire it further in bullshit (either obscurantist or sanctimonious). I mean, I followed that selfie feminist chick on Instagram, and what better endorsement is there, in this day and age?
As with most professional writers, my entire career clings like a barnacle to the unwieldy garbage barge that is the Internet. However, I had the distinct impression I was approaching Theorizing the Web as an outsider, and not only because “tech” and “conference” are two of my least favorite words. I like Evgeny Morozov as much as the next Marxist who only reads one tech theorist, but I’ve always been a late adopter to every technology and platform, and I was even more out of the loop than usual due to a recent exit from social media. Grand speeches on one’s exodus from online are the nadir of media onanism, so I left no note, but my reasons for logging off were fairly banal.
The truth is that my already mercurial attention span was suffering from too much screen time, and as I found it more and more difficult to concentrate, I realized social media wasn’t even really fun or interesting to me anymore. Twitter wasn’t making me laugh the way it used to, and scrolling through one petty non-event after another—usually cynical, careerist media spats masquerading as “the discourse”—left me bored and bleary. I figured if I was watching the timeline out of habit and resignation I might as well deactivate. Facebook was also taxing, and the interaction is more intimate, and therefore more repellent to me. Said goodbye to Zuckerberg after reading yet another status denouncing “someone who shall remain unnamed (but I think you all know who it is).” I have Snapchat, but I spend more time reading about its hyper-inflated stock bubble than I do actually using it. The camera is nice, but the filters are far too twee for my tastes. I’m also too egotistical to spend time on ephemeral media. Why would I create something that disappears as soon as it’s viewed? I want everything I produce to be engraved onto the face of a mountain, preferably one that children are forced to visit on field trips. As a result of my own conceit, I have never actually sent a Snap. That left only my Instagram, which I had set to private for years. Feeling admittedly sort of “disconnected” (from what I cannot say), I actually set it to public for a few months, but then I got sick of people trying to discuss politics with my selfie so I deactivated. I held out the longest on Instagram because it was the least intimate platform; I used it to quietly capture the little moments of my life that I thought I might like to rifle through one day, and (in defiance of doctrinaire selfie feminism) so I could remember that some people think I’m attractive. Now I just wear shorter skirts when I go out.
When I got home from Theorizing the Web, a nice man lay stoned in my bed scrolling through Twitter. He informed me that another online social justice “personality” had recently fallen from public favor, arguably for being an insufferable asshole. The nice man slurred at me dejectedly, as if from rote, “The internet has brought to the fore the most wretched and contemptible aspects of human life, and I fear it, because any form of human progress requires some minimum level of fellowship.” He’s not wrong, but there is no moving backwards now, and I’m strangely heartened that there are people who sit around thinking about this stuff, people who are neither techno-utopian nor Luddite. Neither of those scenarios are real futures; they’re both just nostalgic fantasies. As for being relatively offline myself, I think I will stay here; every experiment needs a control, and in some ways I have an advantage as an outsider. When there is bullshit, I am more apt to declare the Emperor naked. When there is brilliance, I still make a decent observer, like a precocious chimp among a gathering of Jane Goodall’s. It’s not a bad feeling.Following a meeting between Donald Trump and a group of senators on Thursday, a Democrat suggested that Trump was "open to reviewing" a comprehensive immigration bill that includes amnesty for illegal immigrants. CNN et al quickly spun out reports suggesting Trump was specifically "open to reviewing" the Gang of Eight immigration bill he spent so much time thumping Marco Rubio over the head with during the Republican primary.
But, alas, as usual, the splashy claim turned out to have been about as empty as the seats at a Hillary rally in September.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (the sole Democrat who voted to confirm Jeff Sessions as AG), told NBC News shortly after the meeting that Donald Trump told him and his group of colleagues that he was "open to reviewing" a comprehensive immigration bill like the 2013 Gang of Eight bill, which offered a path to citizenship for illegal aliens already in the country.
"[Trump] is open to reviewing the piece of legislation. He says, 'Well, you’ve got to start working on it again.' And I says, 'Absolutely, we will,'" Manchin told NBC News after the meeting Thursday.
The claims quickly made headlines as a potential major reversal by Trump on his most pivotal issue. That is, until reporters bothered to ask the White House about it. Trump, the White House, made clear, remains "totally opposed" to amnesty.
After the fake news story started picking up steam, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday that Trump had specifically condemned the Gang of Eight bill as "amnesty" and had told the group of senators simply that if they offered a bipartisan bill, the president would be "glad to look at it."
"Earlier in the meeting he said specifically at one point the Gang of Eight bill is amnesty," Spicer told a small group of reporters in his West Wing office. "Then he said, if you guys want to work on something, I’m willing to listen."
A senior administration official echoed the sentiment to the Washington Examiner, saying, "I saw [Trump] yesterday and I have no reason to believe he's changed his views on immigration."
Looks like yet another addition to "THIS WEEK IN FAKE NEWS!"
More on illegal immigration from the Daily Wire:
How Many US Immigrants Are Illegal?Henry says Piercy told him he handcuffed 20-year old on suspicion of boating drunk, then put a ski type life jacket on him. He said Piercy described hitting a giant wake that sent Ellingson overboard. The ski jacket popped off since Ellingson did not have his arms in the jacket. We demonstrated in a Fox Files report, how the proper lifejacket might work with someone who cannot use their arms.
Sgt. Henry said the Highway Patrol did not want him to write a report. He said, ‘I knew right then the fix is in.’
Highway Patrol investigators recorded Henry’s concerns, but shut it down after you could hear on the recording, ‘They`re going to want full transparency on this thing so did you ask ourselves, did he use the highest degree of care here?’
I asked Sgt. Henry, ‘Was that a coincidence that the recorder went off at about that time?’
Henry: ‘No, that was deliberate because I also said the word manslaughter.’
It wasn`t the only time he said the patrol tried to silence him. Henry added, ‘My testimony at the first legislative hearing almost didn`t happen.’ He criticized training to legislators after he said his superiors told him to say training was ‘adequate and sufficient.’ Henry said, ‘I told him I`m not going to say that and about that time she comes out and I told her the same thing and she said `you`ll do what you`re told.` I said no I won`t.’WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU MEAN?
WHAT DO YOUTHINK IT MEANS?!
WE'RE STRIKING, BUDDY!
NO MORE, THAT'S IT,UNTIL WE GET WHAT WE WANT!
WHO EXACTLY ARE YOU TOAUTHORIZE THIS STRIKE?
I AM STEPHEN ABOOTMAN,LEADER OF THE W.G.A.
THE W.G.A.?
YES, THE WORLDCANADIAN BUREAU.
WHAT EXACTLYDOES CANADA WANT?
WE WANT MORE MONEY.
YEAH, MORE MONEY.
MORE MONEY FROM WHERE?
JUST MORE MONEY,YOU KNOW?
CANADA DOESN'TGET ENOUGH MONEY!
OTHER COUNTRIES HAVELOTS OF MONEY!
WE WANT-- WE WANTSOME OF THAT MONEY!
HOW ABOUT THE INTERNET?
THE INTERNETMAKES LOTS OF MONEY!
SO GIVE US SOME OFTHAT MONEY!
YEAH, GIVE USINTERNET MONEY!
MR. ABOOTMAN, YOU SEEM TO
NOT UNDERSTAND HOW GLOBALECONOMICS WORKS.
I THINK THAT--
DON'T GIVE ME THATFAT-CAT FANCY LIP-WIGGLING!
ARE YOU GONNA GIVE CANADAMORE MONEY OR NOT?!
I'M AFRAID WE CAN'T.
THEN YOU LEAVECANADA NO CHOICE.
THE STRIKE SHALLCONTINUE!With a flick of his pen, President Obama finally laid to rest Freud's most famous question and iterated one of man's hardest-learned lessons: Women want what women want.
And the wise man sayeth: "Yes, dear."
Thus it came to pass that the president created the White House Council on Women and Girls to ensure that all Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies affect women and families. Presumably, men and boys may expect to benefit from what is helpful to women and girls. We shall see.
There's little profit in criticizing a move to make life better for the fairer sex. Still, one does have to suppress a chortle as we pretend that the First Father's rescue of damsels in distress is not an act of paternalistic magnanimity. Chivalrous, even.
Oh, well, irony is hardly a stranger to gender. Neither are exaggeration and myth. If I may...
First, the statistics Obama cited as rationale for the council weren't quite accurate, though they were, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, truthy. And surely the president can't be ignorant of the fact that boys in this country are in far graver danger than girls in nearly every measurable way.
Where's the White House Council on Men and Boys? Okay, let men fend for themselves. But boys really do need our attention, not only for themselves but also for the girls who will be their wives (we hope) someday. We do still hope that boys and girls grow up to marry, don't we? Preferably before procreating?
Certainly, the Obamas seem to have this hope. A model family, they undoubtedly want their girls to excel and, eventually, to marry equal partners. But boys won't be equal to girls if we don't focus some of our resources on their needs and stop advancing the false notion that girls are a special class of people deserving special treatment.
There isn't space here to fully critique each statistic mentioned by the president, but here's just one: Women still earn 78 cents for every dollar earned by men.
As has often been explained, apparently to deaf ears, this figure is derived by comparing the average median wage of all full-time working men and women without considering multiple variables, including the choices women and men make. A more accurate picture comes from a 2007 report prepared for the Labor Department by CONSAD Research Corp.
Although women do not lead as many Fortune 500 companies (only 3 percent, according to Obama), they account for 51 percent of all workers in the high-paying management, professional and related occupations, the study found. Women outnumber men, for example, as financial managers, human resource managers, education administrators, medical and health services managers, and accountants and auditors.
Otherwise, wage differences can be explained by "observable differences in the attributes of men and women," including, among many, the fact that a greater percentage of women than men take leave for childbirth and child care, which tends to lead to lower wages. Also, women may place more value on "family-friendly" workplace policies and prefer non-wage compensation, such as health insurance or flexibility.A Nigerian argues Obama would be doing Africa a favor by pointing out gay rights will help the continent develop
From 26 June 26 to 3 July, US President Barack Obama will be visiting Africa. The visit takes him to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania.
According a statement released by the White House, Obama will use his visit ‘to reinforce the importance that the United States places on our deep and growing ties with countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including through expanding economic growth, investment, and trade; strengthening democratic institutions; and investing in the next generation of African leaders’.
The statement further said Obama’s trip will ‘underscore the president’s commitment to broadening and deepening cooperation between the United States and the people of sub-Saharan Africa to advance regional and global peace and prosperity’. There was no mention of urgent human rights issues in the region.
Obama’s visit is happening at a difficult and challenging time for gays and lesbians in the region. President Obama will be doing the continent a great service if he could use his visit to condemn the rising wave of homophobia and rally support and solidarity for gay people, who are being persecuted across the region.
Obama is coming to Africa at a time Nigeria’s anti-gay marriage bill is awaiting the approval of President Goodluck Jonathan; at a time a similar bill is being considered by the parliament in Uganda, at a time sub Sahara African is experiencing an upsurge in anti-gay sentiments.
In many African countries, there are moves to tighten the laws against homosexuality. There is a general clamp down on gay people by state and non-state actors. In two – Senegal and Tanzania – of the three countries Obama is visiting, homosexuality is a crime. South Africa is the only country that has embraced gay rights and has legalized gay marriage. But many African countries are reluctant to emulate South Africa. They claim gay rights are un-African and are incompatible with ‘traditional African values’ as they understand them.
Many Africans say homosexuality is a western ‘immoral’ import to corrupt Africa. Obama should use his visit to reiterate his government’s unequivocal support for gay rights and opposition to violence and discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity.
During his visit Obama should send a strong message to Nigeria and Uganda and pressure them to set aside the proposed anti gay law, and instead get them to take measures to decriminalize homosexuality. He should let Africans know there will be no breakdown of ‘traditional African values’ or morality if homosexuality is decriminalized. That instead African countries stand to benefit and become beacons of human rights if homosexuals are treated and respected as human beings and if the rights of gay people are recognized and upheld as human rights.
He should try and disabuse the minds of Africans who think that gay rights are un-African, that gay rights are western, and let them know that some of the gay people are Africans and that gay rights are universal human rights.
Obama should make it clear to African governments it is in their own interest to stop persecuting gays, and state sponsored homophobia is antithetical to African development and progress in this 21st century.
Obama should put it categorically to Africans the continent stands to gain nothing, absolutely nothing from sanctioning violence and discrimination against people with a different sexual orientation, and that a continent of people who suffered most from racial apartheid, should not now become a cauldron of sexual apartheid. He should draw the attention of Christian and Islamic faith leaders in the region who use religion to fuel homophobia in the region to the great disservice they are doing to Africa and to humanity at large.
During his visit to Ghana In 2009, Obama emphasized the importance of Africa’s self-determination. ‘Africa’s future is up to Africans’ he said. President Obama should, this time, let Africans know the way to determine or shape their future is not to kill or prison Africans who are homosexuals; it is not to throw gay rights advocates into jail. It is not to portray traditional African values as if they stand for hatred, intolerance and persecution of sexual minorities, as if any thing African is backward, not forward looking, retrogressive not progressive.
He should ask Africans to pitch their tent with civilization, not barbarism.
Obama should persuade African states to end immediately the gay witch-hunt and the scapegoating of homosexuals. Obama should emphasize the connection between gay rights and the quest for peace in the region.
Africa is currently grappling with many ethnic and sectarian conflicts. Obama should let African leaders know their governments cannot afford to add to the conflict situation on the continent by sanctioning antagonism, oppression, violence and discrimination against gay people.
Leo Igwe is the founder and former executive director of the Nigerian Humanist Association.One of Washington’s worst-kept secrets, the drone program is quietly hailed by counterterrorism officials as a resounding success, eliminating key terrorists and throwing their operations into disarray. But despite close cooperation from Pakistani intelligence, the program has generated public anger in Pakistan, and some counterinsurgency experts wonder whether it does more harm than good.
Assessments of the drone campaign have relied largely on sketchy reports in the Pakistani press, and some have estimated several hundred civilian casualties. Saying that such numbers are wrong, one government official agreed to speak about the program on the condition of anonymity. About 80 missile attacks from drones in less than two years have killed “more than 400” enemy fighters, the official said, offering a number lower than most estimates but in the same range. His account of collateral damage, however, was strikingly lower than many unofficial counts: “We believe the number of civilian casualties is just over 20, and those were people who were either at the side of major terrorists or were at facilities used by terrorists.”
That claim, which the official said reflected the Predators’ ability to loiter over a target feeding video images for hours before and after a strike, is likely to come under scrutiny from human rights advocates. Tom Parker, policy director for counterterrorism at Amnesty International, said he found the estimate “unlikely,” noting that reassessments of strikes in past wars had usually found civilian deaths undercounted. Mr. Parker said his group was uneasy about drone attacks anyway: “Anything that dehumanizes the process makes it easier to pull the trigger.”
Photo
Yet with few other tools to use against Al Qaeda, the drone program has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress and was escalated by the Obama administration in January. More C.I.A. drone attacks have been conducted under President Obama than under President George W. Bush. The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.
In the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, C.I.A. officials were not eager to embrace killing terrorists from afar with video-game controls, said one former intelligence official. “There was also a lot of reluctance at Langley to get into a lethal program like this,” the official said. But officers grew comfortable with the program as they checked off their hit list more than a dozen notorious figures, including Abu Khabab al-Masri, a Qaeda expert on explosives; Rashid Rauf, accused of being the planner of the 2006 trans-Atlantic airliner plot; and Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban.
The drone warfare pioneered by the C.I.A. in Pakistan and the Air Force in Iraq and Afghanistan is the leading edge of a wave of push-button combat that will raise legal, moral and political questions around the world, said P. W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of the book “Wired for War.”
Forty-four countries have unmanned aircraft for surveillance, Mr. Singer said. So far, only the United States and Israel have used the planes for strikes, but that number will grow.
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“We’re talking about a technology that’s not going away,” he said.
There is little doubt that “warheads on foreheads,” in the macho lingo of intelligence officers, have been disruptive to the militants in Pakistan, removing leaders and fighters, slowing movement and sowing dissension as survivors hunt for spies who may be tipping off the Americans. Yet the drones are unpopular with many Pakistanis, who see them as a violation of their country’s sovereignty — one reason the United States refuses to officially acknowledge the attacks. A poll by Gallup Pakistan last summer found only 9 percent of Pakistanis in favor of the attacks and 67 percent against, with a majority ranking the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than its archrival, India, or the Pakistani Taliban.
Interestingly, residents of the tribal areas where the attacks actually occur, who bitterly resent the militants’ brutal rule, are far less critical of the drones, said Farhat Taj, an anthropologist with the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy. A study of 550 professional people living in the tribal areas was conducted late last year by the institute, a Pakistani research group. About half of those interviewed called the drone strikes “accurate,” 6 in 10 said they damaged militant organizations, and almost as many denied they increased anti-Americanism.
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Dr. Taj, who lived at the edge of the tribal areas until 2002, said residents would prefer to be protected by the Pakistani Army. “But they feel powerless toward the militants and they see the drones as their liberator,” she said.
In an interview this week with the German magazine Der Spiegel, the Pakistani prime minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, said the drone strikes “do no good, because they boost anti-American resentment throughout the country.” American officials say that despite such public comments, Pakistan privately supplies crucial intelligence, proposes targets and allows the Predators to take off from a base in Baluchistan.
Pakistan’s public criticism of the drone attacks has muddied the legal status of the strikes, which United States officials say are justified as defensive measures against groups that have vowed to attack Americans. Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for extrajudicial executions and a prominent critic of the program, has said it is impossible to judge whether the program violates international law without knowing whether Pakistan permits the incursions, how targets are selected and what is done to minimize civilian casualties.
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A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, defended the program without quite acknowledging its existence. “While the C.I.A. does not comment on reports of Predator operations, the tools we use in the fight against Al Qaeda and its violent allies are exceptionally accurate, precise and effective,” he said. “Press reports suggesting that hundreds of Pakistani civilians have somehow been killed as a result of alleged or supposed U.S. activities are — to state what should be obvious under any circumstances — flat-out false.”
From 2004 to 2007, the C.I.A. carried out only a handful of strikes. But pressure from the Congressional intelligence committees, greater confidence in the technology and reduced resistance from Pakistan led to a sharp increase starting in the summer of 2008.
Former C.I.A. officials say there is a rigorous protocol for identifying militants, using video from the Predators, intercepted cellphone calls and tips from Pakistani intelligence, often originating with militants’ resentful neighbors. Operators at C.I.A. headquarters can use the drones’ video feed to study a militant’s identity and follow fighters to training areas or weapons caches, officials say. Targeters often can see where wives and children are located in a compound or wait until fighters drive away from a house or village before they are hit.
Mr. Mehsud’s wife and parents-in-law were killed with him, but that was an exceptional decision prompted by the rare chance to attack him, the official said.
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The New America Foundation, a policy group in Washington, studied press reports and estimated that since 2006 at least 500 militants and 250 civilians had been killed in the drone strikes. A separate count, by The Long War Journal, found 885 militants’ deaths and 94 civilians’.
But the government official insisted on the accuracy of his far lower figure of approximately 20 civilian deaths, noting that the Pakistani press rarely reported local protests about civilian deaths, routine occurrences when bombs in Afghanistan have gone astray.
Daniel S. Markey, who studies South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the comments of two anti-Taliban tribal leaders he spoke with on a recent trip to Pakistan seemed to capture the paradox of the drones.
The tribal leaders told him that the strikes were eliminating dangerous militants while causing few civilian deaths. But they pleaded for a halt to the attacks, saying the strikes stirred up anger toward the United States and the Pakistani Army, and “made them look like puppets,” he said.
“It gave the lie,” Mr. Markey said, “to the argument we’ve made for a long time: that this fight is theirs, too.”Lee Hyori and Tiger JK has announced their collaboration performance for the upcoming MBC Gayo Daejun!
On December 24, according to broadcasting sources, Lee Hyori, Tiger JK and Yoon Mi Rae will be putting on a ccollaborative performance on December 31 for the MBC Gayo Daejun. They will be performing a hip-hop version of one |
: Easy
Why it’s magical: The name might throw you off, but Purgatory Trail is actually heavenly winter paradise. Typically used for camping, this hike near Durango follows a beautiful stream and traverses through birch tree groves and thick pines. Known for being a reverse hike, be wary that the trail travels downhill first and requires you to climb back up. After a long day in Purgatory, make sure you also visit downtown Durango, a city that’s voted one of the best Christmas towns in the country.[Query] What is the significance of navadurgaa devis?
1. shailaputrI – Daughter of the Mountain King – himavAn. Even though parAmbA is paramaishvaryashAlinI and jaganmAtA, she accepted to become the daughter of himavanta and the sole reason behind this was her bhaktavAtsalya. By remembering her form as shailaputrI, the intent of the upAsaka is to make himself worthy of the limitless vAtsalya of parAmbA.
2. brahmachAriNI – The one whose contemplation grants brahmasvarUpa is called brahmachAriNI. parAmbA is invoked as brahmachAriNI to attain brahmavidyA. This explanation would especially suit in the context of skandayamaLa which describes brahmachAriNI as the consort of jnAna-shiva.
3. chandraghaNTA – parAmbA is known so on account of holding in her hand a ghaNTA that is bright like the moon. It can also mean the one whose speech puts Chandra to shame in terms of beauty and AhlAda [AhlAdakAriNI devI chandraghaNTeti kIrtitA]. It is also interpreted to refer to parAmbA as the one whose lAvaNya puts Chandra to shame. Invoking ambA in this form grants one manollAsa. The phala of invoking chandraghaNTA is easily understood by observing her mantra.
4. kUShmANDA – The one who swallows the aNDa named samsAra that is filled with trividha santApa is named kUShmANDA. By meditating on this form, one is blessed with bhUmilAbha and duHkhanivrtti.
5. skandamAtA – skanda was originally sanatkumAra the greatest of brahma-jnAnis. Even such a jnAni chose to be born as skanda or ShaNmukha to attain the saubhAgya of having parAmbA as his mother. She, whose glory surpasses every known peak, be it in the realm of jnAna, bhakti or karma, is skandamAtA. This also indicates that only the jnAnis approach parAmbA to attain paripakvata and not the less fortunate.
6. kAtyAyanI – The one who appeared in the hermitage of kAtyAyana and was accepted as his daughter, is known as kAtyAyanI. She is forever kumarI and this form makes two important statements. One is her svAtantrya indicated by the lack of patyadhInatA and the second is indicative of her svarUpa which is beyond shiva and shakti or puruSha and prakRti. We have discussed elsewhere the incorrectness of assuming the equality between shakti of the shAktas and the prakrti of the sAmkhyan thought.
7. kAlarAtrikA – kAla or yama is the destroyer of all beings. At mahApralaya, even he attains laya within the rAtri named kAlarAtri and this indicates her kAlAtItasvarUpa. According to uttara kaula tantras, mahAkAla attains antarbhAva or mahArati within kAlikA during tattva-pralaya and it is kAlikA alone who remains, at which point she is called kAlarAtri or kAlasamkarShiNI. The shakti tattva here is encompassing or transcending the shiva tattva.
8. mahAgaurI – mahAgaurI indicates the transformation of kAlasamkarShiNI to kAmeshvarI or gaurI where she creates a pati for herself by attaining aruNa varNa and accepts patyadhInatA for the sake of samsAra srShTi, assuming gauravarNa.
9. siddhidAtrI – The one grants various kinds of Siddhis including mokSha to upAsakas based on their qualification.
One can refer to commentaries such as guptavatI for other generic interpretations. The navadurgA-s are also samketas for the letters of navArNa mantra, and their significance can also be grasped from the vyaShTi and samaShTi arthas of navArNa mantra discussed in brhadvArAhI tantra. By understanding the tattva conveyed by these nine forms where each form represents a peculiar transformation of parAmbA, one can also gather why praNava is not added before navAkSharI mantra. According to Paramahamsa guptAvatAra Babaji, the chief force behind the Kaula magazine chaNDI, adding any syllables to this mantra results in mantracCheda and alters the effect of the mantra drastically. He also advised upAsakas against modifications involving sampuTa, pallava, pralambana, akSharoddIpana etc. for ShoDashI, chaNDikA and dakShiNA kAlI.
Hare krShNaThe institution of private property is a fundamental aspect of economics and social interactions. It serves the practical purpose of avoiding conflicts over scarce resources so that efforts may be put toward better purposes. Theories concerning the creation, acquisition, trade, inheritance, and defense of private property form much of libertarian philosophy. What has gone largely unexplored in libertarian theory thus far is the role of conquest in the determination of property rights. Almost all inhabited land on Earth has been conquered by one group of people or another at some time in the past, so as long as this remains unexplored, libertarianism will be left open to attacks from all manner of enemies of private property rights. Thus, it is necessary to examine conquest from a libertarian perspective.
Man vs. Nature
The starting point for all of libertarian philosophy is self-ownership; each person has a right to exclusive control of one’s physical body and full responsibility for actions committed with said control. Note that in order to argue against self-ownership, one must exercise exclusive control of one’s physical body for the purpose of communication. This results in a performative contradiction because the content of the argument is at odds with the act of making the argument. By the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction, self-ownership must be true because it must be either true or false, and any argument that self-ownership is false leads to a contradiction.
Because each person has a right to exclusive control of one’s physical body, it is wrong for one person to initiate interference with another person’s exclusive control of their physical body without their consent. This is how the non-aggression principle is derived from self-ownership. Because each person has full responsibility for the actions that one commits with one’s physical body, one may gain property rights in external objects by laboring upon unowned natural resources. This works because one is responsible for the improvements that one has made upon the natural resources, and it is impossible to own the improvements without owning the resources themselves.
In a sense, all property rights are based on conquest, in that property rights are created when man conquers nature by appropriating part of nature for his exclusive control and use. This is a powerful antidote to the contention of many opponents of private property that property titles are somehow invalidated by a history of conquest, of people taking by force what is not rightfully theirs. But we can do even better than this, as the next sections will show.
Man vs. Man
As stated earlier, property rights are useful in practice because they minimize conflicts over scarce resources by establishing who rightfully controls what territory. This results in a significant amount of loss prevention, which allows the people who would have died and the property that would have been damaged in such conflicts to instead survive and prosper.
But what happens when such norms are not respected? Let us consider the simplest possible example and extrapolate from there. For our first case, consider a planet which has only two sentient beings. Let us call them Archer and Bob. Archer has mixed his labor with some land and thus acquired private property rights over that area. Bob wants the land that belongs to Archer. That Archer has a right to defend himself and his property from the aggressions of Bob by any means necessary, and that Archer has the right to retake anything that Bob takes is not disputed by any reputable libertarian theorist. But what if Bob kills Archer? In that case, the property does not rightfully pass from Archer to Bob in theory. But Bob now has exclusive control over the property and there is no other sentient being present to challenge him. Thus, Bob becomes the de facto owner, even though this is illegitimate de jure.
The above case is interesting but trivial because social norms are irrelevant if there is neither a community to observe them nor a mechanism to enforce them. As such, we will spend the rest of this essay adding complexity to the first case to arrive at meaningful results. For our second case, suppose that there were another person present to challenge Bob. Let us call him Calvin. Because libertarian theory is a logical construct, it is subject to logic in the form of rationality and consistency. To violate the rights of another person while claiming the same rights for oneself is not consistent. Hypocrisy of this kind cannot be rationally advanced in argument; it has the same effect at the subjective level that a performative contradiction has at the objective level. In other words, all people do not lose the right to life because someone somewhere somewhen commits a murder, but the murderer does. This means that Bob cannot claim a right to his own life or to the property he occupies because he murdered Archer and stole his property. Thus, there is no moral prohibition on Calvin killing Bob and taking the property from him. With Archer and Bob both dead and Calvin the last sentient being on the planet, Calvin is now the de facto owner of the property. But unlike Bob in the first case, Calvin is also the de jure property owner because he has exerted effort to remove property from the control of a thief and the rightful owner died without an heir.
Another level of complexity may be added by giving Archer a rightful heir, whom we may call Delia. Let our third case proceed as the second case; Bob murders Archer and steals his land, then Calvin kills Bob to eliminate a murderer and take stolen property away from a thief. But with Archer dead, Delia is now the rightful owner of Archer’s land. However, without Calvin’s labor in killing Bob, Bob would still be occupying Delia’s territory. Thus, both Calvin and Delia have legitimate property claims. They may resolve this issue by one of the two methods available to anyone: reason or force. With reason, they may negotiate a fair settlement in which Calvin is compensated for his efforts and Delia reclaims her property minus the compensation. With force, they may fight, which will end in the first case if one kills the other. Short of this, fighting will only alter the particulars of a fair settlement or lead to the fourth case described below.
Family vs. Family
Because the moral limitations of groups are no different from the moral limitations of individuals, we may now extend these results to consider conflicts between small groups. For our fourth case, let us modify the third case by giving spouses to Calvin and Delia. Let there also be other people somewhere who can procreate with the aforementioned people, but do not otherwise involve themselves with the property concerns at hand. Suppose that Calvin and Delia do not resolve their issue, and Calvin continually occupies the property. Calvin and Delia each have offspring, then several generations pass such that Calvin and Delia are long dead. The descendants of Delia wish to reclaim their ancestral homeland from the descendants of Calvin. But do they have the right to do so? Calvin and his descendants have spent generations occupying and laboring upon the land, thus continually demonstrating and renewing their property rights. Delia and her descendants have not. One might argue that an injustice was done to Delia by Calvin, but the responsibility for crimes dies with the people who commit the crimes, and debts do not rightfully pass from one generation to another. This is because the descendants were not involved in the disputes between their ancestors, being as yet unborn. Therefore, they are not responsible for any wrongdoing that may have occurred, being non-actors in the disputes of their ancestors. The answer, then, is that the descendants of Calvin are now the rightful owners and the descendants of Delia have lost through abandonment the claim that Delia once had.
Man vs. Society and Family vs. Society
Next, let us consider issues that may arise when a single person has a property conflict with a large group of people. Though it is not a priori true that a single person will always be overpowered by a group, this is the historical norm, and it has occurred with sufficient frequency to take this as a given for our analysis. For our fifth case, let us reconsider the first case, only now Bob is replaced by a society. Let us call them the Bobarians. The morality of the situation does not change; if the Bobarians physically remove Archer and occupy his land, then the Bobarians who occupy the land are guilty of robbery and possessing stolen property while those who willfully aid them in doing so are accessories to these crimes. If the Bobarians demand that Archer obey their commands and pay them tribute, then they are guilty of extortion. Archer has a right to use any means necessary to reclaim his liberty and property, however unlikely to succeed these efforts may be. If the Bobarians kill Archer either during their conquest or afterward, then those who kill him are guilty of murder and robbery. But if Archer is dead without an heir, and there exists no other group of people capable of holding the Bobarians accountable for their crimes, then the Bobarian conquest of Archer’s property is valid de facto even though it is illegitimate de jure.
For our sixth case, suppose that Archer does have surviving heirs who wish to take back the property which has been stolen from them by the Bobarians. All of these Archerians have been wronged by the Bobarians, and thus have a right to reclaim the stolen property. But just as before, this needs to occur within the lifetimes of the conquerors and their supporters because descendants are not responsible for the crimes of their ancestors. Note if the Archerians had a timeless right to return to their ancestral lands or collect reparations from the Bobarians, it would encourage the Bobarians to finish exterminating them in order to prevent an effort to retake the land in future. A standard which encourages mass murder is questionable, to say the least.
Society vs. Society
The last set of issues to consider concern conflicts between societies. For our seventh case, let us consider what role might be played by another group who wish to hold conquerors responsible for their murder and thievery. Let us call them the Calvinites, after the role of Calvin discussed earlier. Suppose they witness the Bobarians kill Archer and all of his relatives to take their lands, as in the fifth case. What may the Calvinites rightly do? Of course, they may denounce the conquest and engage in social and economic ostracism of the Bobarians. But this is hardly sufficient punishment for the Bobarian aggression, nor does it do anything to deprive criminals of their ill-gotten gains. As per the second case, there is no moral prohibition on the Calvinites physically removing the Bobarians from the former Archerian lands by any means necessary. All Bobarians who took part in the conquest or aided the effort are fair targets for defensive force, and any innocent shields killed in the process are acceptable losses. Should the Calvinites succeed in removing the Bobarians, they become both the factual and rightful owners through their labors of justice.
For our eighth case, let us modify the seventh case by having some Archerians survive the Bobarian assault. With many Archerians dead and the rest in exile, the Calvinites intervene. The Calvinites succeed in removing the Bobarians from the Archerian homeland. The Archerians seek to return to their land. As in the third case, the surviving Archerians can come to terms with the Calvinites to resettle their lands and compensate them for their efforts in removing the Bobarians, try to remove the Calvinites by force, or let the Calvinites have the land and go somewhere else. A war between the Archerians and Calvinites will only result in alternate terms of negotiation or the Archerians leaving unless one side completely exterminates the other. If the Archerians leave and the Calvinites stay for several generations such that the original disputants die off, then as per the fourth case, the Archerians lose the right to return because the Calvinites now have the legitimate property claim.
The ninth and most important case to consider in terms of real-world occurrence is that of incomplete conquest, in which a conqueror does not exile or exterminate a native population, but instead conquers them for the purpose of ruling over them. Suppose the Bobarians seek not after an Archerian genocide, but only to annex them into the Bobarian empire. Of course, the Archerians have every right to resist their new rulers; there is not even the illusion of consent of the governed in such a case. But unlike the cases discussed above, a state apparatus initiates the use of force for as long as it operates. Whereas a forced exile or extermination is a crime typically done by one generation of people, a long-term occupation for the purpose of collecting taxes and/or breeding out the natives over the course of generations is a continuing criminal activity. In such a case, the Bobarian occupation will never become just and the Archerians will always have the right to declare independence and remove them. This only becomes difficult to resolve to the extent that Bobarians intermarry with Archerians and produce mixed offspring, but the historical norm is that cultural and genetic vestiges of an occupation remain with a people long after they declare independence from and remove an occupier. After all, the individuals born of such conditions cannot help their lot, the actions of particular individuals are not necessarily representative of the state apparatus, and carefully excising such a cultural and genetic legacy is generally impossible without committing more acts of aggression.
Conclusions
Through application of these nine cases to real-world circumstances, one can theoretically resolve most of the property disputes between population groups, however unlikely the disputants may be to accept these results. What cannot be justified through these examples, however, are the interventions of the state concerning instances of conquest. Any good that a state may do by punishing conquerors is fruit of a poisoned tree, for the state acts as a conqueror over its own people, extorting them for resources and demanding obedience to its edicts. Instead, this is an appropriate role for individuals and private defense agencies who may free oppressed peoples and take payment either in monetary terms or through property claims over territory that has been conquered and liberated from occupation. The libertarian must be wary of state efforts to imitate the market by hiring private contractors or issuing letters of marque and reprisal for the purpose of bringing conquerors to justice.
There is a legal maxim that justice delayed is justice denied, and the libertarian analysis of conquest shows that this is doubly true; not only does a delay in the provision of justice allow injustice to persist, but given enough time, it renders the plaintiff’s grievances invalid. This amounts to a natural statute of limitations and statute of repose, meaning that the arbitrary and capricious statutes of limitations and repose imposed by statist legal systems is generally unnecessary, at least with regard to the property crimes and crimes against the person involved in conquest. In this sense, the libertarian theory of conquest naturally stresses the urgency of seeking justice in a way that statist legal systems can only attempt to simulate.
Another legal expression reinforced by this analysis is that possession is nine-tenths of the law. The idea is that the current possessor or occupant of physical property is assumed to be the owner unless a stronger ownership claim by someone else is proven. This must be the case because the only other consistent position would be to assume that the current possessor or occupant of physical property is not the owner, which quickly leads to absurdity as claims rush in from people who wish to take all manner of property and continually redistribute it ad infinitum.
Finally, one might misconstrue the above analysis to say that libertarian theory defends the idea that might makes right. But in order to believe this, one must ignore all of the arguments in favor of defensive force to separate conquerors from the spoils they have taken. Rather, the libertarian theory regarding conquest recognizes and respects the fact that might makes outcomes. This is a fact which will never change; the only thing that changes throughout space and time is who will have might and how much power disparity will exist between opponents.
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Like this: Like Loading...Donald Trump has been called all sorts of things over the course of his controversial presidential campaign, but yesterday was probably the first time anyone, anywhere, said he’s positioned to play the role of “racial healer.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewed Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R), a vice presidential contender, and the host noted that he’s heard from “a number of Latino-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Native-Americans, Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, all expressing concerns about some of the things Donald Trump has said.” The Republican governor insisted most Americans have the same security concerns, regardless of who wins the election.
It led to this amazing exchange.
TAPPER: Respectfully, governor, you didn’t answer my question. Do you think Donald Trump has campaigned as a racial healer? FALLIN: I think he is trying to campaign as a racial healer. I think that has been part of his message….
In case you’re curious, the governor said this with a straight face.
This comes on the heels of the Trump campaign issuing a statement on Friday morning, responding to the mass-shooting in Dallas, which read in part, “Our nation has become too divided. Too many Americans feel like they’ve lost hope. Crime is harming too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better.”
Questions about racial tensions are inherently difficult and multi-faceted, and Trump has done little to help answer them. But if the presumptive Republican nominee is correct, and tensions have intensified, is Trump prepared to acknowledge his role in the problem?
Slate’s Catherine Piner put together a lengthy collection of incidents involving Trump’s racially divisive campaign tactics, adding, “His observation about racial tensions is especially curious given the many racially and ethnically divisive statements he has made.”
I’m also reminded of this column in June from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank.
The things Trump is doing now – disparaging the “Mexican” judge, disqualifying Muslim judges, calling somebody claiming Native American blood “Pocahontas” and singling out “my African American” – is very much in line with what he has been doing for the past year, and before. More than six months ago, I began a column by proposing, “Let’s not mince words: Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist.” His bigotry went back decades, to the Central Park jogger case, and came to include: his leadership of the “birther” movement suggesting President Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, his vulgar expressions for women, his talk of Mexico sending rapists into America, his call for mass deportation, his spats with Latino news outlets, his mocking Asian accent, his tacit acceptance of the claim that Muslims are a “problem” in America, his agreement that American Muslims should be forced to register themselves, his call to ban Muslim immigration, his false claim about American Muslims celebrating 9/11, his tweeting of statistics from white supremacists, his condoning of violence against black demonstrators and his mocking of a journalist with a physical disability.
This assessment – a sampling, really, of Trump’s record on matters of diversity and respect – was published a month ago, and things have gotten even worse since.Wireless is truly the way to go one notch higher in sports earbuds. With Apple iPhone 7 doing away with headphone jacks, it is the time that our tunes be liberated as well, from the fuss of wires. But it is still quite hard for audio device makers to introduce it in a practical way due to inadequate battery life that is associated with them. In terms of active headphones, you end up compromising on the size and fit and also the wires that bother you and get in your way.
But Axum wireless sports earbuds startup is aiming to change this perception about wireless earbuds. It has produced a truly refined, portable, wireless audio solution defined primarily for sports-inclined individuals. The earbuds offer high quality audio that is able to cope with the pressure of extreme sports and simultaneously it is geared for individuals who want their music to spur them towards greater achievements in sports. They are truly world’s best wireless earphones, that offers high quality audio without fiddling with cords and phones in the pocket. And Axum is certainly here to bridge that gap and bring the clearest sound for modern athletes today.
What is it?
Axum sports earbuds are a combination of true wireless convenience and a tightly integrated audio system that can give true justice to your music. With a technology of M-voiD (Multidisciplinary Virtually Optimized Industrial Design) these wireless earbuds are crafted for optimum fit and comfort.
Perfect Fit Design
Axum Gear is the world’s first pair of Bluetooth wireless earbuds that use this audio technology. With both silicone and foam type ear tips in three sizes, it also provides a convenient and clever way to store your earbuds. This on-the-go storage case also acts as the charging hub in which a 1-hour charge gives you 4 hours of wireless playback. It uses magnets to charge them without a worry. Bluetooth 4.1 technology allows for complete freedom of movement as there are no wires attached. The universal fit feature will never let those earbuds fall from your ears and can easily carry them on the go.
Sound Technology
The sound quality that is provided by Axum wireless sports earbuds is unmatched in the wireless headphone market. The M-voiD system produces some of the clearest sounds possible that reduces audio coloration giving crisp quality. It is equipped to restore any soundtrack as it was recorded originally. It also comes with a microphone with which you can take all the important calls without reaching for your smartphone in the pocket.
Awesome Features
The Bluetooth 4.1 connectivity has a battery life that lasts up to eight hours while on the go.
It has a portable charging case that you can carry around and has up to four hours’ worth of backup.
The earphones have a nano-coating body that makes it essentially waterproof.
The adjustable hook helps the earbuds to remain stick to the ear and don’t come off suddenly.
Because of storage cum magnetic charging port, there is no hassle about powering them up.
The built-in mic allows you to take calls and use voice command for Siri, Google Now.
Why choose Axum Wireless Earbuds?
The best integrated features of Axum Gear are what distances it from the rest of the competitors. The M-voiD sound technology feature stands atop the podium making it the game changing earbuds of this generation. The mechanics and acoustics of Axum are uniquely integrated giving it the perfect audio functionality for dedicated athletes.
Price & Availability
The expected price of Axum wireless sports earbuds is around $299 which will be launched in mid-2017. But one can preorder it from Indiegogo campaign for $169 and get a wireless charging case too.
Verdict
Axum wireless earbuds are the definite choice for fitness lovers as it has protected its sensitive components from water, giving it a nanotech waterproof coating. Even the audio quality is in a compact form where sporty individuals can enjoy a pristine audio quality at all places.The Bangladesh team will sport a new team sponsor when they take on Pakistan © BCB Media
BCB has awarded Top of Mind, a media planning company, the team sponsorship rights for Bangladesh's home series against Pakistan this month. The agreement was reached on Tuesday after their contract with Aamby Valley, an affiliate of Sahara India Parivar, was cut short 15 months before it was scheduled to end.
It is understood the BCB had hoped for a deal over Tk 2.5 crore (approximately US$ 321,000) and the winning quote was for more than Tk 3 crore (approximately US$ 385,000).
BCB revealed last Friday that they had issued an advertisement seeking a new team sponsor after the two parties' deal ended in March. On April 5, BCB president Nazmul Hassan said that a number of companies had submitted their bids but none of them quoted a price to BCB's liking on the last day of submission. Top of Mind and Grameenphone, which was the team sponsor for the eight years before Sahara, were the two highest bidders and were asked by the BCB to bid again.
"We asked the top two bidders to re-bid," BCB CEO Nizamuddin Chowdhury said. "They did so and we are pleased to announce that Top of the Mind has won the team sponsorship rights. We cannot disclose the amount but we are more than happy with it."
Their four-year deal with Sahara, which included branding rights for the national team and the national cricket academy, title sponsorship and in-stadia sponsorship for 2012-13, was worth USD$ 14 million.
Mohammad Isam is ESPNcricinfo's Bangladesh correspondent. @isam84
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Image caption McCormick's fake bomb detectors were used at Iraqi checkpoints staffed by the British military
A millionaire businessman who sold fake bomb detectors to countries including Iraq and Georgia, knowing they did not work, has been convicted of fraud.
James McCormick, 56, of Langport, Somerset, is said to have made £50m from sales and sold more than 6,000 in Iraq, the Old Bailey heard.
Police said the devices, modelled on a novelty golf ball finder, are still in use at some checkpoints.
One Iraqi bomb victim described him to the BBC as a "morally bankrupt" man.
Both civilians and armed forces personnel were put at significant risk Det Insp Ed Heath, Deputy senior investigating officer Fake bomb detectors 'destroyed lives'
During Tuesday's hearing at the Old Bailey in London, the court was told McCormick's detectors, which cost up to $40,000 (£27,000) each, were completely ineffectual and lacked any grounding in science.
Richard Whittam QC, for the prosecution, said: "The devices did not work and he knew they did not work."
McCormick's claims
McCormick had claimed the devices could bypass "all forms of concealment", detecting drugs and people along with explosives, the court heard.
He claimed they would work under water and from the air, and would track an object up to 1km (3280ft) below the ground.
The bomb detectors came with cards which were "programmed" to detect a wide array of substances, from ivory to $100 banknotes.
Other substances could be detected, it was claimed, if put in a jar with a sticker which would absorb its "vapours" and was then stuck on a card that would be read by the machine.
In reality, McCormick's device was based on $20 (£13) golf ball finders which he had purchased from the US and which had no working electronics.
Police said McCormick showed a complete disregard for the safety of those who used and relied upon the device for their own security and protection.
The court heard there was no evidence that McCormick had tried to sell the products to the Ministry of Defence.
'Morally bankrupt'
BBC Two's Newsnight programme conducted an investigation into the devices sold by McCormick's company, resulting in a UK government ban on their sale in Iraq and Afghanistan in January 2010.
It found that senior Iraqi officials knew the devices did not work and it alleged some had received bribes to ensure they were purchased.
Iraq spent more than $40m (£26.2m) on 6,000 devices between 2008 and 2010, the programme said.
General Jihad al-Jabiri, the head of the Baghdad bomb squad, is currently serving a jail term for corruption, along with two other Iraqi officials.
One senior Iraqi official told the BBC that the useless devices had created a false sense of security - and that no punishment would make up for the blood that had been shed as a result.
BBC Newsnight also spoke to Haneen Alwan, an Iraqi woman who needed 59 operations after she was injured in a bomb blast in January 2009. She was two months pregnant at the time and lost her child.
She told the programme: "When people passed through checkpoints using these devices, they thought they would be safe, but they are useless. The man who sold them has no conscience. He is morally bankrupt. How could he sell them just for money and destroy other people's lives?"
Image caption The fake bomb detectors were based on a $20 golf ball finder, pictured between two examples of McCormick's fake devices
Meanwhile, Avon and Somerset Constabulary's Det Insp Ed Heath told the BBC the devices had been used at numerous checkpoints in Iraq.
He said: "It is clear that both civilians and armed forces personnel were put at significant risk in relying upon this equipment.
"McCormick showed a complete disregard for the safety of those that used and relied upon the device for their own security and protection. He amassed many millions of pounds through his greed and criminal enterprise."
The force's Det Supt Nigel Rock described McCormick as a "conman", adding: "We have heard evidence from many, many experts, scientists, leaders in their field, who have said this was a fraud. A sham.
"That device has been used and is still being used on checkpoints. People using that device believe it works. It does not."
McCormick was remanded on conditional bail to be sentenced on 2 May.
Watch Newsnight's full report on the fake bomb detector story and the programme's investigation into it at 22:30 BST on BBC Two on Tuesday 23 April 2013.Boeing test pilot Jason Clements goes through final flight checks in the cockpit of an F-16. He makes sure all his switches are set, the throttle is free and clear, and the lights are on. Clements does a final radio check, and the jet is ready for takeoff. He then steps out of the cockpit and closes the canopy via remote switch. The F-16 takes off with no human occupant. What in the world just happened?
Clements is part of a joint Boeing/Air Force project to convert retired F-16s into unmanned systems; these aerial drones will present a unique challenge for pilot trainees — the most realistic, 4th-generation targets short of a full-scale engagement. Cadets will fire real weapons systems at these “QF-16s”, and while the drones won’t shoot back, they’ll present a modern, highly maneuverable, and difficult to visually acquire target. And when the QF-16s crash, it will cause zero casualties. Welcome to the Air Force of the future (or, at the very least, the most realistic training simulation on Earth).
“Training realism” is the main goal of the program, noted former Air Force Major General Steve Sargeant, now the CEO of Marvin Test Solution, a T&M company that services legacy fighters, among other projects.
Over the course of a long, distinguished career in the United States Air Force that spanned more than three decades, Steve flew a number of aerial systems, including the F-16 Falcon, which he described as a “very capable multirole fighter.”
This is key, because prior to the QF-16, the military relied on a modified version of the F-4 Phantom, a legacy aircraft (3rd-generation) in use since the Vietnam War. The QF-16 provides trainees with a highly-realistic 4th-generation aerial target.
“It’s a replication of current, real-world situations and aircraft platforms they can shoot as a target. Now we have a 9G capable, highly sustainable aerial target,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan Inman, Commander, 82nd Aerial Targets Squadron.
Under the QF-16 Air Superiority Target (AST) Program, the USAF plans to convert up to 126 retired F-16s into remote-controlled aerial systems that, according to Boeing, can be tracked and targeted—and ultimately shot down—by warfighters as part of their training in weapons and tactics. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — the “backbone of America’s tactical aviation fleet for decades to come” — will replace the F-16 (among other jets) in the near future, so this recycling program, as it were, is a great way to mitigate spiraling defense costs.
Boeing accomplished this conversion process — a true technical marvel — by applying reverse engineering practices and performing rapid prototyping as part of their risk reduction plan. The company utilized a technology called the “X-ray Backscatter Non Line of Sight Reverse Engineering System,” and according to Boeing, the QF-16 program applied reverse engineering practices to accurately design the modifications required for conversion of the aerial targets.
“Prior to contract award, we used the X-ray scanning and laser scan data to develop 3-D models of the design,” said Bob Insinna, QF-16 program manager. “We reduced program risk by performing rapid prototyping of the flight termination system and a smoke generation system.”
Indeed, creating viable F-16 drones was no easy task. I spoke with Paul Cejas, Chief Engineer of the QF-16 program, and he noted that while the actual conversion process was straightforward, the challenge was “finding sufficient space in a jet with existing systems to add over 3000 wires and several new systems. That required us to remove some hardware that was not essential to our mission, and create new installations in the same footprint.”
“The other biggest challenge was understanding the electrical systems and displays of the F-16 and tapping into them without affecting performance,” he said. “This allowed us to send aircraft on-board information to the ground station so that it could be flown safely. The most difficult part, however, was the flight software, especially to land the aircraft safely.”
The first retired F-16 arrived at Boeing's Cecil Field facility in Jacksonville on April 22, and the aerospace |
been made intentionally. (For more on this, see my post here, at #7, on why Jay’s and Nisha’s trial testimonies do not support the conclusion that Nisha Call involved a conversation between two or more people.) Moreover, all of the available evidence in this case has been consistent with (and better explained by) the Nisha Call being a pocket dial, as there is not a single witness who has testified that Adnan could have had the possession of the phone at 3:32 p.m. that day.
Of course, even if we were to assume that the Nisha Call was a pocket dial, there is no direct evidence that it occurred during Hae’s murder, and at this point, there is no way that could ever be conclusively proven. The hypothesis is worth considering, however, because it offers an explanation for all of the evidence that we have concerning the 2:30 p.m. to 3:59 p.m. time period, including an explanation for the known inaccuracies in Jay’s statements about that time period.
To show why, it is worth taking a quick look again at the map of the Woodlawn and Best Buy area, as well as the call records for the time period covering Hae’s probable death:
The following calls occurred during the relevant time period:
The Woodlawn Best Buy is located almost on top of the theoretical boundary of the territory covered by the Woodlawn tower’s northeast and northwest antennas, and well within the range of each. This means that we would expect the majority of all calls made or received from Adnan’s cell phone while the phone is at the Best Buy to be routed through either the A or C antennas of the Woodlawn tower (although a minority of the calls will likely be routed through other towers, based on tower traffic or technical considerations). On the other hand, the Southeast antenna, B, points directly opposite of Best Buy, making it less likely for any call made or received from Best Buy to be routed through that antenna.
The cell records are therefore consistent with what we would expect to see if the cell phone had been southwest of Woodlawn at 2:36 p.m., and then went to the Best Buy sometime before 3:15 p.m., where it remained until at least 3:59 p.m. This is far from the only scenario that could have occurred — and we cannot assume, based on cell data alone, that it is what in fact did occur — but such a scenario is wholly supported by the cell records.
We can say with confidence, however, that it is exceedingly unlikely that the cell phone made a trip to Forrest Park and returned at any point between 2:36 p.m. and 3:59 p.m. As the Nisha Call was made in the middle of a 45 minute period in which the cell phone remained stationary within a region that could include the Best Buy or Security Square Mall,1 it does not appear to be possible that Jay was telling the truth when he claimed the Nisha Call was made as he and Adnan drove through Forrest Park.
What does Jay say was going on during this 2:36 p.m. to 3:59 p.m. time period? Well, Jay has consistently maintained, throughout every statement that has been made publicly available, that he was at Jenn’s house until 3:40 p.m., and that Adnan’s “come-and-get-me” call was made between 3:40 p.m. and 3:50 p.m. This is the single most consistent claim Jay has made about any of the events that occurred on the afternoon of January 13, 1999; in fact, the “come-and-get-me” call is the only event which occurs at the same time under every single one of Jay’s stories.2
That does not mean that the claim is true, but it does mean that there is some reason Jay is so insistent about repeating it. Either (A) the 3:40 p.m. claim is a memory that Jay strongly remembers and feels certain about, or (B) it is a lie told for a specific purpose. Given that there were no incoming calls made to Adnan’s phone at 3:40 (meaning that the statement is either based on a false memory or else is an intentional lie); that the cell records show the phone was near Woodlawn and not Jenn’s house from 3:15 to 3:59 p.m. (meaning that Jay’s claim of being at Jenn’s during this time is very likely a lie); and that Jay changed every other statement in his stories when confronted with evidence that the statement was not true (meaning that Jay has shown a complete willingness to “correct” his memory to fit the evidentiary record in other instances, where doing so is to his advantage), the answer would appear to be B. Jay believed that his interests were best served by standing by his 3:40 p.m. story, despite the conflicting evidence, and despite the accompanying damage to his credibility that would be caused by a story that appears to be demonstrably false.3
The only apparent benefit that Jay has to gain from the 3:40 p.m. story is that it provides him with an alibi for Hae’s murder. This suggests that Jay knows for a fact that Hae was murdered shortly before 3:40 p.m., and hence needed an alibi that lasted until that time. If Hae was murdered before 3:40 p.m., the that leaves us with two time periods during which she must have been killed: between 3:15 and 3:21 p.m., and between 3:21 and 3:40 p.m. Why?
First, while our evidence about Hae’s movements that afternoon is limited, we do know that at least two witnesses (Debbie and Summer) have reported seeing Hae at Woodlawn at around 3:00 p.m. that afternoon (Episode 9) (Brief of Appellant at 14) (“The last time Debbie saw Hae on January 13 was in gym class, and Hae was happy and rushing to go somewhere at 3:00 p.m. Debbie could not remember where Hae was going, but she told police on January 28, 1999 that Hae said she was going to the mall with Don.”). Their testimony seems reasonably reliable, at least by the standards of this case, and there is no testimony or evidence contradicting their statements about the time Hae was last seen at Woodlawn.
Second, three calls occur between 3:00 p.m. and 3:40 p.m. — the 3:15 incoming call, the 3:21 call to Jenn’s home, and the 3:32 call to Nisha.
Third, someone who is committing murder by manual strangulation someone does not answer or make any phone calls while carrying out the murder.
And fourth, manual strangulation takes around three to eight minutes to accomplish.4
Assuming then that it takes fives minutes for Hae to drive from Woodlawn to Best Buy (or to a similar location near Woodlawn), then she must have either been killed between 3:05 and 3:15 p.m., 3:15 and 3:21 p.m., or 3:21 and 3:32 p.m. — or, if the Nisha Call was a pocket dial, then between 3:22 p.m. and 3:48 p.m.
We can rule out the 3:05 to 3:15 p.m. time period, because if Hae had been murdered before 3:15 p.m., Jay would not have needed his 3:40 p.m. story for an alibi. Adnan’s cell phone has an incoming call at 3:15 p.m. — and since during the second interview he was shown the cell records, and was asked to identify the time Adnan called, Jay could have chosen to say that Adnan called him at 3:15 p.m. That answer would have both fit the evidence and provided him with an alibi for the time of Hae’s death, if that is when she had actually been murdered.
We can probably rule out the 3:15 p.m. to 3:21 p.m. time period, because the window is just too small. Although it at least theoretically possible that Hae was strangled between those two calls, it would have required precision timing. Moreover, since we believe Hae was strangled while she was in the driver seat of her car, in the minutes after her murder, the killer’s primary concern was more likely to have been getting her body hidden from view, rather than calling Jenn’s home. Since that would probably take at least a minute or two, the good money is against this being the time period of Hae’s death.
That leaves us with 3:21 to 3:40 p.m. If the Nisha Call was an actual conversation, that would mean the call was either made either minutes before Hae was killed (between 3:21 and 3:32 p.m.) or was made minutes after Hae was killed (between 3:32 and 3:40 p.m.). For the reasons discussed supra, however, this isn’t likely to have occurred; not only does no one have a memory of the call occurring that is consistent with what we know from the cell records, but it is pretty implausible to assume that Hae’s killer would have been concerned with calling Nisha for 2 minutes and 22 seconds, when the killer was either already with Hae in her car and getting ready to kill her, or else after the murder, when he was in a car with her body in the middle of the afternoon, and needed to quickly get her out of sight.
The alternative explanation — and the one that I believe is a much stronger fit for the evidence — is that Hae’s murder took place between 3:21 p.m. and 3:40 p.m., and that the Nisha Call was an accidental pocket dial made during the assault. This gives the murderer a full 19 minutes in which to carry out the crime, during which no calls were received or intentionally made, which is more than sufficient time to finish the crime and take the initial necessary steps to avoid being observed (i.e., moving the body to the trunk of Hae’s car).5
This hypothesis would also provide us with explanations for the following problems raised by the existing evidence:
(1) Why neither Nisha nor Jay can remember a phone call to Nisha made from Adnan’s phone that is consistent with the cell records;
(2) Why the cell phone remained in the sectors covered by the Woodlawn tower for at least 15 minutes before and after the Nisha Call occurred;
(3) Why the Nisha Call was routed through the tower and antenna covering the Best Buy parking lot;
(4) Why the Nisha Call, if it was a butt dial, would have lasted for 2 minutes and 22 seconds without whoever had the phone noticing; and
(5) Why Jay is so adamant that he was at Jenn’s house until 3:40 p.m., when all the evidence conflicts with his claim.
On the other hand, assuming the Nisha Call was an actual conversation leaves us without coherent explanations for why no one remembers it, and why it occurred at a time and place that — according to Jay’s statement — it could not have possibly occurred.
So while we can’t know for sure that the Nisha Call was a pocket dial that occurred during Hae’s murder, it does have the benefit of being consistent with all of the known evidence (save for Jay’s testimony), and it appears to provide a better explanation of the data than do any of the alternatives.
-Susan
FN1. By “stationary,” I mean that the phone remained within the L651A and L561C sectors. The phone could still have been moving within those sectors, but based on the consistency and frequency of the calls made during that 45 minute period, there is little possibility that the phone was travelling outside of those sectors.
FN2. For reference, the following are Jay’s statements about the “come-and-get-me” call from his police interviews:
Detective: Does [Adnan] call you at some point in time?
Jay: Yeah.
Detective: What time does he call you?
Jay: Um, time I remember talking to him, actually having a conversation with him, was about three-forty something. (Int.1 at 6.) Detective: Okay, um, at some point you left?
Jay: Um-hum.
Detective: Jenn’s house?
Jay: Yes.
Detective: Do you have any idea what time that was?
Jay: About 3:40.
Detective: 3:40?
Jay: Yeah.
Detective: Was Jenn still there?
Jay: Yes.
Detective: And where were you going?
Jay: I was going to pick up Adnan. (Int.2 at 10.)
At trial, Jay testified that he left Jenn’s house at 3:45 p.m., and that Adnan’s call from Best Buy was made at around 3:50 p.m.
Jay is not simply making a mistake here, and lose track of the time that he left. Jay said that Adnan had specifically instructed him to expect a call at 3:30 p.m. that afternoon. In fact, Jay was watching the clock, and noticed when Jay did not call at 3:30 p.m. as promised:
Um, he had told me he was, he inaudible, he was gonna need me to pick him up at a certain time, that was 3:30. I waited until 3:30, he didn’t call, I left he house, ah with his car and cell phone. (Int.2 at 11.)
Based on his own statements that he was paying close attention to the time, we can rule out any suggestion that Jay was just mistaken when he claimed to have left the house at 3:40 p.m.
Additionally, Jay’s story is corroborated by Jenn, who told the police that Jay received a call and left her house at 3:40 p.m. — which makes sense if Jay’s 3:40 p.m. story is an alibi, since Jay and Jenn conferred about when he was at her house that day before Jenn gave her police statement. But Jenn giving the exact same 3:40 p.m. story as Jay does not make sense if they were both mistaken about the time — because why would they make the exact same mistake? Here’s what Jenn said in her interview:
He just said he was waiting for a call and it was going to come around three-thirty, three forty-five, um Jay got a call and then I don’t know what was said to him in conversation um than Jay got another call, got off the phone and then another call came in and I don’t know if it was the same person or who it was and I don’t know whether it was on my phone or whether it was on the cell phone that Jay had. Um then Jay left my house, probably around three-thirty, four, four-fifteen, well after three forty-five, between three forty-five and four-fifteen. (Jenn Int. at 1-2.)
“Well after” 3:45 p.m. So specific, so close a match to Jay’s statements. She also would have gone to pick up her parents from work within a half hour of Jay leaving, so she would have had a way to orient her memory of when Jay left (i.e., “shortly before I left to get my parents”). Jenn also corroborated Jay’s claim that he was expecting to receive a phone call at 3:30 p.m. that day:
[Jay] sat the phone on the coffee table and he said “I’m waiting for a phone call” I was like, you know, “who’ s going to call you, what’s,” you know his cell phone … cell phone’s out whatever, like it’s just a cell phone … was like “I’m suppose to get a call around three-thirty” and I said “okay” and he said “that’s when I ‘m leaving, around three thirty when I get the phone call. (Jenn Int. at 9.)
Jenn also said, during that same interview, that:
I guess between three-thirty and four um the phone … a phone call came in and I don’t know if it was on my phone or the cell phone that Jay had but a phone call came in, they talked on the phone and than I want to say got off the phone and another phone call came in either um my phone or Jay’s phone and it was for Jay. Jay talked on the phone to who ever and than um and than Jay left. (Jenn Int. at 6-7).
Again, Jenn places the time of the “come-and-get-me” call at around 3:30 to 4:00 p.m., with Jay leaving shortly thereafter. But Jenn is either wrong or lying, because the cell records show that the phone was not at her house at that time (indeed, at 3:21 p.m. the phone was calling Jenn’s house).
Despite the clear testimony and police statements that unambiguously state, over and over again, that the “come-and-get-me” call did not occur before 3:40 p.m., at trial the prosecution went with the theory that Hae had died at around 2:35 p.m. because it conveniently fit their theory of the case, despite the fact that it did not actually fit the evidence. In addition to the lack of any testimonial evidence supporting the prosecution’s theory, we know, from Episode 4, that accomplishing the murder by 2:36 p.m. would have been all but impossible for the killer to actually do. Moreover, the fact the 2:36 p.m. call is 5 seconds long is also inconsistent with it being the “come-and-get-me” call, unless Adnan waited until the second Jay answered the phone, quickly said “that bitch is dead, come and get me, I’m at Best Buy,” and then immediately hung up. (Since Jay says he did not know where Adnan was going to be, Adnan would not have been likely to hang up before he could even confirm Jay had heard him correctly.) Which means the only thing suggesting that Hae died before 3 p.m. is the prosecution’s need for that to be true, in order for their case against Adnan to make any sense.
FN3. We know that Jay’s story about leaving Jenn’s house at 3:40 p.m. cannot be true. Why? The Nisha Call occurs at 3:32 p.m., and everyone agrees that Jay did not call Nisha while he was on his own. This means that, unless the Nisha Call was a butt dial made by Jay while he was at Jenn’s house, Jay’s claim about leaving Jenn’s house at 3:40 p.m. is false.
FN4. See, e.g., Commonwealth v. Serino, 436 Mass. 408 (Mass. 2002) (“The medical examiner testified that it usually takes five to eight minutes for manual strangulation to result in death.”); State v. Bingham, 719 P. 2d 109 (Wash. 1986) (“To show premeditation, the State relied on the pathologist’s testimony that manual strangulation takes 3 to 5 minutes.”). It remains possible that Hae was manually strangled between the 3:15 p.m. and 3:21 p.m. phone calls, but it seems unlikely enough that I am willing to discard it as a possibility.
FN5. If Hae was murdered shortly before 3:40 p.m., it would also align almost perfectly with Jay’s story from his second police statement, regarding the events that occurred following Hae’s death. Jay claims that after Hae is murdered, there are two phone calls that are made to or from Adnan’s phone, prior to their trip out to buy weed. The first call occurred around 3:40 p.m., and it was Adnan calling after killing Hae. The second call occurred about twenty minutes later, and was a call made to Jay’s friend Patrick.
If Hae was killed between 3:21 and 3:40 p.m., the that portion of Jay’s story could very well be true. Because we would indeed have two calls made after Hae’s murder: a call made a little after 3:40 p.m. to Phil, and a call made at 3:59 p.m. to Patrick.One of the most exciting movements in contemporary politics is the Pirate party. It's attracting huge support across Europe and around the world, and not just because it represents protest. It points to a new kind of politics – one that anyone involved in policy needs to respond to.
The first Pirate party was founded in Sweden on New Year's Day 2006 by Rick Falkvinge. But its precursor was a thinktank called Piratbyrån, or Piracy Bureau, which was created in 2003 and inspired the beginnings of the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Within six months of Piratbyrån's launch, sister parties were springing up around the world. From Argentina to Venezuela, there are now more than 65 national pirate parties.
They all have three common policies: in addition to reforming copyright and patent law, they propose increased government and corporate transparency and accountability, and greater protections for personal privacy. Underlying this is the importance of a free and open internet.
In an age of austerity, this might seem somewhat marginal until you consider the issues that have dominated the news recently – privacy and media practices; corporate power and its influence on policymakers; a lack of regulation in financial services; and the extradition of British citizens accused of hacking and copyright theft.
In May, the British courts ordered that The Pirate Bay should be blocked by internet service providers. As a direct result and in a matter of weeks, the UK Pirate Party's website has become incredibly popular. It is currently the 425th most popular website in the UK (according to research by Alexa.com) – an increase 1,390% in just three months. This makes it many times more popular than the websites of the mainstream political parties:
• Labour Party – 6,555th
• Conservative Party – 16,999th
• UKIP – 19,638th
• Liberal Democrats – 44,557th
Whatever your views on copying and/or sharing, something significant is going on here. Though disillusion and disengagement from traditional politics is certainly part of it, the pirate parties are talking to audiences largely neglected by mainstream parties – a point made by Juli Zeh in a recent Guardian article – and the possibility of a new kind of politics, one where parties enable people to be part of the process of creating policy collectively.
In Germany, Sweden and other countries, pirate parties are winning considerable electoral support. Whether or not the same happens here or whether the pirate party phenomenon persists, anyone involved in policy – locally or nationally, in the public sector, a charity or a think tank – needs to respond by recognising that developing policy without the direct participation of the public is what created the current crisis in democracy.
In our own project, we're just staring a project to draft a'manifesto' for public and practitioner involvement in policy. In the spirit of pirate politics, we want anyone to be able to contribute thoughts and proposals for this, so do get involved via our website.
If we're complacent – if collectively we don't recognise what's going on and find ways to respond to voters' anger – we should note that the second most popular UK political party website belongs to the BNP.
Michael Harris is chief executive and founder of Guerilla Policy
This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Guardian Public Leaders Network free to receive regular emails on the issues at the top of the professional agenda.Updated with quotes from Danilo Petrucci.
Danilo Petrucci has been given a three place grid penalty for next weekend's Czech MotoGP, plus one penalty point, for irresponsible riding on the last lap of Sunday's Austrian race.
The Pramac Ducati rider clashed with Eugene Laverty on the last corner of the race, causing the Irishman to fall.
"During the last lap and the last turn in the braking area of Turn 10, you made contact with rider #50 who was in front, causing him to crash. This is considered to be irresponsible riding causing a crash," declared the MotoGP Stewards Panel.
Laverty was in no doubt who was to blame for the incident.
"I was fighting for eleventh on the final lap with Petrucci. In my opinion, he was riding more than aggressively - it was too much," said the Aspar rider.
"At Turn 3 he rode almost on the inside of me instead of overtaking. He hit me at the apex and then I repassed him on Turn 4.
"I defended the line on the final corner, and again he did the same thing - coming up the inside - and I crashed. I'm not happy, because it happened more than once from him.
"It's cost me eleventh place and we worked too hard this weekend for someone to ruin things for us 200 metres before the line, and all for a single point [more]."
Speaking later in the evening, Petrucci accepted the blame and apologised for the incident:
"First of all I want to apologize to Eugene for hitting him. I did not want to pass him, I was just trying to attack, but I lost the front and I had to leave the brakes. I'm really sorry
"It has been a very difficult weekend. I never found the right set up. The race pace was not as bad, but I did too many mistakes in the first few laps. Thank God this weekend is over. Brno is next week and I can't wait."
Laverty rides the 2014 spec Desmosedici and Petrucci the 2015 model.Bring back the vigor and vitality with Testogen
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Other low T effects
Having low levels of T shall not only affect the sex drive of yours but also one’s ability to indulge in sex. It can result in myriad other symptoms like an increase in weight, having less stamina than what used to be, reduced mass of muscles, feeling of depression and massive trouble to concentrate.
Health Concerns
A deficit in the levels of testosterone may have serious long-term effects on the body. In those men with the lowest T levels, bones can become weaker and it can eventually lead to osteoporosis. Osteoporosis makes the people considerably increasingly prone to a maximum number of injuries. One study like low levels of T to high death risks from heart diseases and various other causes.
Diagnosing Low Testosterone
If there are many symptoms like reduction in the sex drive or various other erection problems then it is advisable that the problems are discussed with the doctor. The doctor determines your low T levels with blood tests. Because the levels of T can fall during the daytime, you might have to show up for another test. The doctor of yours can take this test for blood during the morning when T levels tend to be the highest.
Getting treatments for low T
If the levels of T are low, then you can be prescribed TRT that is therapy for testosterone replacement. Most men that are suffering from low T can rub testosterone gel. This gel can be rubbed on shoulders or the arms. Another procedure is getting shots into the muscles. A patch can also be worn on the shoulder that shall help in releasing T into the blood. There are pellets which go under the skin. There are therapies of oral replacement but these shall not be recommended for replacing testosterone. Men that have prostate cancer must not take T because that fuels the growth of cancer.
Five natural ways of boosting the levels of Testosterone when you are not resorting to Testogen:
Getting good sleep during the night
It never gets more natural than to get good sleep at night. Research studies that have been published have shown that when there is a deficit of sleep, it can greatly reduce the T levels of any young man that is super healthy. The effect is only clearer after a week of sleep levels reduced, have been passed. It was seen that level of T was low particularly from ten pm to 2 pm on the days when sleep was restricted. The participants on whom studies were conducted, reported decreased well being sense whereby levels of T were low particularly low on days when sleep was restricted.
How much of the sleep body needs, is dependent on many factors. Most of the adult need generally between nine to seven hours of sleep every night so that they can lead healthy life and function well.
Lose the excess amount of weight
Middle-aged, overweight men that are pre-diabetic may have low levels of T. Studies have revealed that diabetes and low T have close connections. Men that maintain a normal amount of weight possess lower risks to develop diabetes that is full-blown and hypogonadism.
Research has published that when some weight is lost the testosterone levels can be boosted. These findings do not imply that you can easily opt for going into crash diets. The best way of achieving a desirable body besides maintenance of healthy weight is by exercising regularly an going on sensible diets.
Getting enough Zinc
Men that are suffering from hypogonadism often suffer from deficiencies of Zinc. Studies have suggested that zinc always plays a crucial role to regulate serum levels of T, in men those are healthy. Eating those foods that have a high percentage of Zinc can really help in boosting the testosterone levels. These include poultry, red meat and zinc. Other sources of food with high zinc percentage include whole grains, lobster, crab, nuts and beans.
If you want you can shop for the supplements of zinc.
Go easy over sugar
Zinc is not enough for ensuring that you are having a nutrition rich diet. This is because human body is on complex system requiring wide category of minerals and vitamins that guarantee smooth operation. Endocrine system has reported decrease in the sugar levels as well as T levels in the blood by almost twenty five percent. This proved to be a true fact for studies on those participants that were suffering from normal glucose intolerance, diabetes or pre-diabetes.
Getting old fashioned exercises
There are many doctors that offer advice in few minutes and thus it is essential that you make great connections with experienced doctors offline and online. Specialists and pediatrician can also help you but exercises have shown to decrease the T levels. Especially, when any overweight person is indulged in resistance training the T levels can increase. Low levels of T affect the mood and sex drive. Good news regarding this particular aspect is that mood is well improved and brain is stimulated with chemicals which make you feel a lot better. Fitness experts have recommended almost thirty minutes for exercise each day.
Knowing when to get treatment
Over last few decades, many of the drug companies have advertised products that were designed for treating low T. between 2011 and 2001, number of the men over the age of forty started using TRT and the rates of TRT also tripled over the past few years. It is thus important that you get tested for really needing it. Testosterone boosting pills have made the biggest mark in people’s life and one of them is testogen.
How low is the testosterone?
The testosterone will eventually be lost when one gets older. It is the downside of getting old. Men have high levels of T compared to that of the women. It is often thought testosterone influences developing many of the characteristics related to male traits/ Levels of the T keep on changing in response to the needs of the body. However, overall T level in the body changes throughout a lifetime. While you can get your vigor back, it can take some time to get treated holistically. Now, with Testogen, you can get all that back while also start loving and living again with this wonder product. If you have always dabbled in fitness and bodybuilding, then you can now find the lean muscles of yours while also train much harder, longer.
The differences you witness are going to amaze you. First of all, it shall be helpful for you to see low testosterone symptoms. It is advisable that you take a small quiz on answering the questions a scorecard at the end of it shall let you know what it all means.
Take this test- Is low Testosterone to be blamed?
If you are adult male belonging to any age bracket, then the T levels will probably fail without you comprehending, even. Hence, have you ever thought how big this is an issue for you? Does one really need the boosting of the T levels? This quick test shall make you find out. It will not take much long and might just make the life of yours a lot better.
Have you found that you are irritable and lacking vitality for no specific reason? Have you felt weaker after involving in a physical act? Do you feel you are experiencing lower libido and also gaining weight? If the answer to all the questions mentioned here is yes. Then, you are undergoing low T symptoms.
Can the right food be just eaten?
Testogen is known to contain all things natural in it hence that is the question that is quite obvious. But, not all the ingredients that are present in the food and also if they are, it is more than difficult to tell what are the quantities of it present in the food. Not just that, some of the food items can be available throughout the year where one lives but that’s not all. It is often not enough for relying on eating the right food if the testosterone levels have to be boosted. Even if one could find that particular food and eat it, that would still not be enough.
Through diet, how does one know if they are getting appropriate quantity of nutrients for boosting T levels?
The simple answer is, that you do not. If you are reliant on the food and aware about how much of the T boosting goodness, you are assimilating. But it is testogen that gives all natural and necessary ingredients in right amounts each day for boosting the T levels in the most naturally safe manner.
Testogen mostly works because it has natural ingredients, is the safest option you can incorporate, is convenient and easy.
Testogen- all you need incorrect amounts
With testogen pills you can be certain, about a lot of things for boosting the T. It has to be present in right amounts for being effective. Natural ingredients all work well harmoniously together for putting the ingredients within the body.
The ingredients are not just put within the body but they also help in working you properly once they have started reacting in the bloodstream.
You do not need anything else when you have Testogen, this is because of it your complete answer to having the T levels boosted.
It has those ingredients that are naturally tested and help you in really doing the job.
The right balance quantities get blended carefully into one single dose that can be taken easily.
The T levels can be boosted and in the safest as well as simple manner, you can take the testogen without having to lose effectiveness.
You are certainly getting everything you need and more with Testogen for boosting the levels of T naturally. There is no way you need measuring out anything. There is also no need for you to buy multiple supplements and wonder if they can be mixed safely. The testogen shall be delivered to you completely free of any charge irrespective of where you live in this world, bringing one of the easiest ways for safely boosting the levels of T.
Testogen is indeed on your side
At testogen, the makers pledged to help the users get their mojo back. Life is extremely short to be miserable constantly, without vitality, motivation, being choleric and lacking all the vigor. Life must be lived to the fullest and this includes healthy body as well as mind. Boosting the T with Testogn, has often been considered one of the easiest and safest |
I don’t think they understand that someone can be as passionate about something else as passionate as they are about what they are passionate about. So if you’re as passionate about something, there’s someone who’s opposite, and that’s okay. You can get along, you can talk about it. No one’s right, no one’s wrong. This is my life; I like living it this way. You like living your life that way. I totally get it. But we can coexist in this. And let’s really be diverse,” Hetfield said.
While I agree wholeheartedly with Hetfield’s assessment of liberal California elitists, I’m not sure Vail, CO is the place to escape that. Colorado has been turning bluer ever year and Vail is the playground of rich liberal elitists. Sure, The Rocky Mountain State has better hunting and gun laws, but for how long? It’s just a matter of time before liberals ruin Colorado the way they’ve destroyed California. They are like a cancer.
It is nice to see a musician, especially one from a band I love, who isn’t a radical leftist. I don’t like or hate a band based on the personal politics of the members, its all about the music for me, but it is kind of refreshing that James Hetfield respects personal liberty, individuality, and the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Follow Brian Anderson on TwitterSamsung is going to officially unveil the Galaxy Note 8 on August 23. We’ve already seen many leaked images and renders of this smartphone. There have also been countless reports detailing the specifications and features it’s likely going to have.
The leaks won’t stop until the handset is officially announced so it’s not surprising to see something new pop up. The folks at Ausdroid have received a leaked sales brochure for the Galaxy Note 8 which confirms some major details about the handset.
The leaked Galaxy Note 8 brochure confirms that the Galaxy Note 8 is going to feature a 6.3-inch QHD+ Infinity Display with S Pen support. It’s also going to feature an iris scanner and wireless charging. The Galaxy Note 8 will be IP68 dust and water resistant.
The Galaxy Note 8’s dual camera will have f/1.7 lenses with support for 2x optical zoom and Optical Image Stabilization. Since this is a Note device after all, it will be very easy to take notes, the Screen-off Memo feature will be onboard to jot down notes with the stylus even when the screen is off.
Samsung is going to offer it in Midnight Black and Maple Gold colors, as far as the Australian market is concerned. The new Deep Sea Blue color option may be limited to select markets. The brochure doesn’t reveal any pricing information for the Galaxy Note 8.October 4, 2017
2017-10-04T10:03:25-04:00
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Former Equifax Chair and CEO Richard Smith testified before the Senate Banking Committee on the company’s data breach that left more than 140 million consumers' data at risk. Senators focused their questions on what he and other Equifax executives knew about the data breach and when, and about the company’s resources for consumers affected by the theft. They also pressed Mr. Smith on how the Equifax credit reporting agency had been able to lock down a security contract with the IRS in the wake of the latest data breach.
This was the second of four congressional hearings Mr. Smith was scheduled to testify at in a week’s time.
Former Equifax Chair and CEO Richard Smith testified before the Senate Banking Committee on the company’s data breach that left more than 140 million… read moreGet the biggest celebs stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Benedict Cumberbatch’s first brush with fame was nearly his last – as the Star Trek baddie twice cheated death before he made it big as an actor.
The Sherlock actor was introduced to the world at four days old on page 5 of the Daily Mirror, snuggling with parents Wanda Ventham, who was in Emmerdale Farm at the time, and actor Timothy Carlton.
But before Benedict became a star in his own right he was subjected to a horrifying carjacking ordeal in South Africa.
He was filming BBC series To The Ends Of The Earth in 2005 in South Africa, with ex-Coronation Street actress Denise Black and a local actor, when their car tyre blew.
As they struggled to change it in the dark, six armed men ambushed them. Benedict says: “They frisked each of us for weapons and valuables then bundled us back into the car and drove us into the bush.
The car stopped and we were hauled out and told to kneel with our hands on our heads. We were in the execution position with a duvet over our heads to silence the shots.
“I tried to stand but to them this was clearly a sign of panic or evasion. They ordered me to stand up and get into the boot.
“I heard Denise saying, ‘Please don’t kill him’. The lid opened and I found myself calmly lying that I was claustrophobic and I could panic and die and be a problem for them. ‘Dead body in a boot, problem, not good!’ The lid slammed shut again. A lot of arguing. It opened again and they told me to get out.
“They took me up a small hill away from the others, made me kneel and tied my hands behind my back with laces from the trainers they’d removed earlier.
“I heard, ‘We are not going to hurt you but make one mistake and we will kill you. Lie on the ground’.
“I could hear the others being brought up and Denise talking calmly. Eventually the car sounded like it was leaving.”
After three hours shivering face down on the ground, the petrified victims ran for help and called the police.
Benedict says: “I’ve still got a scar where I was tied up. It was terrifying. The next morning I woke up as a free man with the sun on my face and I cried. I thought I’d never feel its warmth again.”
In the aftermath of the carjacking, Benedict’s gratitude and thirst for life turned him into an adrenaline junkie and he took up skydiving and hot-air ballooning.
But it wasn’t his first near-death experience. As a gap year student teaching English at a Tibetan monastery he and four friends got hopelessly lost for nearly two days while trekking in Nepal.
Benedict, 36, says: “We got altitude sickness and then amoebic dysentery.
“We were lost for a day and a half, trekking at night and squeezing moss to get water.
“We slept in an animal hut that stank of dung and had hallucinogenic dreams because of the altitude sickness.”
(Image: Paramount)
Now, as his fame is set to skyrocket with the release of Star Trek Into The Darkness, public recognition is more likely to strike fear into him.
Recently a Twitter stalker live tweeted his every move inside his £2million North London home. Benedict says: “I would say that it was the strangest fan experience that I’ve ever had.
“It was such a strange and a direct thing to see these tweets saying what I was doing as I was doing them. I found it really worrying and, yes, of course, very hard to deal with.”
Friends worked out it was a neighbour and asked, politely, if she’d stop.
Despite his legion of ardent female fans who call themselves Cumberbitches (although he prefers the term Cumberbabes) Benedict, who plays Captain Kirk’s nemesis Khan in the movie, hasn’t got to grips with his role as a celebrity and object of lust. He says: “It’s all gone a little bit vertiginous recently.
“Fame is a weird one. People see a value in you that you don’t see yourself.
“So when I’m told of my sex-symbol status and all that nonsense I find it laughable, silly. I mean, I’m 36 and I’ve been looking at this same old mush all my life. But it’s to be enjoyed. It seems girls are really going for my Shergar look.”
There’s never been any shortage of women in his life. His first crush was on his mother’s actress friend, Emma Vansittart.
His 12-year relationship with university sweetheart and actress Olivia Poulet ended in 2011. Since then, there has been a year-long romance with the fashion designer Anna James and dates with actress Liv Tyler and models Lydia Hearst and Natalia Vodianova.
Benedict makes no secret of his longing to become a father and lists his biggest disappointment as “not being a dad by the age of 32”.
He says: “I’ve been broody since I was 12, but I can’t just get anyone pregnant. It has got to be the right person.
“But to make meaningful relationships is very hard at the moment. Also, I was in a very, very long relationship all through my twenties and early thirties, so I know about looking for the right one, I guess. And it’s tough, it’s tough.”
Despite having actors as parents, Benedict’s first stage appearance went hilariously wrong.
At school in Notting Hill, West London, he starred as Joseph in the nativity play and earned his first laugh when he shoved Mary off the stage.
“I didn’t really understand it and I wasn’t intending to play to the house,” he says. “I was just furious about how self-indulgent she was being.”
Early school reports tell of a boisterous boy. His headmistress wrote: “Ben is slightly more controlled but must try to be less noisy.”
From there he went on to a boarding school in Sussex, where the teachers urged him on to the stage, a ploy he believes was designed to quell his behaviour.
“It was almost like a control thing, to repress the tearaway in me,” says Benedict. “I was a hyperactive nightmare. I was pretty naughty, I got into fights.”
(Image: PA)
The naughtiness included flashing church congregations while playing with other children on holiday in Greece. Benedict confesses: “I used to expose myself in front of religious places. I was a very hot, bored boy and was surrounded by people who were older than me who were goading me.
“So when they got bored or the football went through a stain-glassed window — not to be returned — they’d always get me to do pranks. So one day they said, ‘Go on, go on, go on. Pull your pants down!’ Of course I did. I obliged willingly, no pun intended.”
Benedict’s parents made endless sacrifices to send their only son to prestigious boarding school Harrow.
But he is at pains to point out that he is not as posh as he sounds.
He says: “I was desperately proud of my parents for sending me to Harrow. It was a huge stretch for them and my grandmother paid two-thirds of my fee. They were working actors who never knew when the next pay day might come.
“There were those at Harrow who were super rich and went off on their holidays to Aspen, and I’d go and see my grandmother in Brighton.
“My parents wanted the best for me. I wasn’t sent to the school my dad went to. I’m not a hereditary peer.
“I wasn’t born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.”
Concerned about being typecast, Benedict – who recently denounced “fat-faced, flatulent Cameron’s efforts at Toryism” – has tried to disguise his public school accent.
However he can’t disguise his fabulous talent or burgeoning success.
Test your Star Trek trivia credentials by playing our fiendish Star Trek quiz.
Star Trek Into Darkness is out nowVANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – There could be more incentive to sign up for a car share service if the BC Liberals are re-elected.
The party is promising a tax credit to help out drivers, and says it will implement the credit as soon as possible if successful on May 9th.
Liberal candidate for Vancouver-Point Grey James Lombardi says people are looking for alternative ways to get around that are affordable.
“That’s why our platform includes a clear commitment to implement a new car sharing tax credit in budget 2018,” Lombardi says.
“We have fully costed this commitment at $1.5 Million annually.”
Liberals want to introduce new car-sharing tax credit if re-elected @NEWS1130 pic.twitter.com/TQUIXpRsJW — Hana Mae N. Nassar (@HanaMaeNassar) April 30, 2017
According to Lombardi, there are multiple benefits to car-share services, and creating a tax credit for users is going to make it even more accessible.
“Evo, Car2Go, Modo, they give people affordable options to get around and they’re also good for our environment. Many people in Vancouver Point Grey and across Metro Vancouver already use these services and this tax credit is going to help make it a little bit more affordable for everyone.”
As for how much each user will get, the party says there’s no set amount, and a person’s return will depend on their income.
The Liberal party says it will be working with tax and industry experts to look at the credit’s exact form if re-elected.ATHENS, Greece — Theodore Flesouras, among the rising number of unemployed in debt-ridden Greece, is a regular at his local betting parlor where he visits friends but rarely gambles. Winning just seems impossible.
"There is no future for us," the 49-year-old father of two said while sipping a coffee near Lambrini Square. "There is no hope for the people here, no hope. You see, around here, nobody smiles. Every day we hear bad news. Every day."
Ordinary Greeks are feeling enormous pressure from the government's efforts to persuade wary lenders that it can cut spending and raise revenue. Without rescue loans from Europe and the International Monetary Fund, Greece faces financial collapse, which threatens not just the euro but the global economy.
In the past year, the government reduced pensions and salaries and, among other initiatives, began overhauling a dysfunctional tax collection system that had allowed widespread evasion.
More from GlobalPost: Greece will stay in euro zone, say Merkel and Sarkozy
But when auditors up and left the country earlier this month — reportedly frustrated with the slow pace of reforms — it forced Prime Minister George Papandreou's Socialist government, which inherited a $410 billion debt in 2009, to accelerate austerity measures in a bid to clinch the latest installment of the $150 billion loan package negotiated in May 2010.
A new property tax was imposed in a bid to raise $2.8 billion. It will be collected through electricity bills. Power will be cut off if you don't pay. A parliamentary vote is scheduled next week. In recent days, the government announced it will put 70,000 workers on a "reserve" list to be laid off after one year on reduced salaries.
Uncertainty about the country's future — it is already battling a recession and an unemployment rate of 16.3 percent — is causing anxiety.
"One day we hear from the government about property taxes, the next day it's something else. I'm worried," said a fruit-and-nuts vendor at an open-air market in the Galatsi neighborhood. She would only give her first name, Katherine. "I don't feel safe."
Unions shut down trains, buses and taxis on Thursday — the latest in a series of protests that turned violent this past summer when riot police and demonstrators clashed in the streets. Mass transit strikes are planned for next Tuesday and Wednesday. Air traffic controllers were to strike Sunday. General strikes are planned in October and unions say they'll go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the government's latest moves.
Meanwhile, the workers union of the state-owned electric utility have vowed to block collection of the new property tax. Despite that, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said Thursday the property tax — originally announced as a temporary measure — would be extended "in coming years." He warned Greece would face an Argentina-like crisis, referring to its 2000 bankruptcy, if reforms are not implemented.
Papandreou says there's no turning back. "I am fully committed to this national effort of ours," the U.S.-educated prime minister said in a recent speech in Thessaloniki. "It is for the sake of our shared future and joint interests. And this is a road of no return."
More from GlobalPost: 2,388 years of unpaid government debt
But Christos Argyris, a 32-year-old pediatrician at a public hospital, said the government is asking too much. He joined 1,000 fellow health workers in a peaceful march that ended at the doors of the Health Ministry on Wednesday.
"We are not rich," said Argyris, who estimated that he earns $32,000 annually and works "100 hours" per week. "Now, they are cutting more."
Salary cuts this year will cost him about $550 per month, he said.
"We have few doctors in the public hospitals. They are cutting 300 to 400 euros per month in our wages to give the money to the banks," he said. "So we say no, we say drop the debt. It's not our debt. It's a capitalist debt from the banks, from big capitalist corporations."
At the open-air market in the Galatsi neighborhood, a florist who preferred to give only his first name, Theo, said the financial crisis has taken a toll on his family. His wife lost her business-consulting job a year ago. They sold one of their two cars, moved to a smaller, older apartment, and pulled their two young children out of private preschool.
"I'm waiting for them to get older so they go to public school, which is free," said Theo, who was born in New York to Greek parents and returned to Athens when he was 3 years old.
His clients are buying fewer flowers and plants, some ask if they can pay next week and others stopped coming.
"People here are afraid that we're already bankrupt and they just don't tell us," he added. "But I don't think it's as dramatic as they show it to be. Fear is a very good way to control the masses."
He hopes to see more strikes.
"They have us by the neck. What are we going to do, just sit there and die? Not going to happen. Not here, this is Greece. We survive, we never die," he said. "You can't live in fear. I have two kids to raise. I have to find a way."
More from GlobalPost: Euro zone headed toward breakup(Newser) – President Obama is convening with six Arab leaders today at Camp David, hoping to assure them that a deal between the West and Iran to contain the latter country's nuclear efforts won't compromise the security of the Middle East. But the Saudis already seem to be balking, announcing they have every intention to keep up with the Joneses in their region and maintain similar nuclear capabilities as Iran, the New York Times reports. "We can't sit back and be nowhere as Iran is allowed to retain much of its capability and amass its research," an Arab leader who didn't want to be named until he had his audience with the president told the Times. And Prince Turki bin Faisal, an ex-chief of Saudi intelligence, recently said at a Seoul press conference, "Whatever the Iranians have, we will have, too."
It wouldn't exactly be simple for the Saudis to proliferate in the nuclear arena without help, the Times notes: The Nuclear Suppliers Group, which tries to keep such programs in check by controlling nuclear component exports, refuses to send product to the Middle East, meaning Saudi Arabia would likely have only North Korea and Pakistan as source options. Meanwhile, the lukewarm feelings of Arab leaders toward Obama are quite evident: A few of the heads of state are sending lower-level reps to the meeting today (notably, Saudi King Salman, who pulled out just a few days ago), and Prince Turki issued a past-tense lament in the Times: "We were America's best friend in the Arab world for 50 years." (Benjamin Netanyahu definitely isn't on Iran's side.)This article is over 3 years old
• Sports ministry reacts after Russian fighter jet was shot down • Russian clubs cancel winter training camps in Turkey as well
Russian sports clubs will be banned from signing Turkish players during the upcoming winter break, the Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko said on Sunday.
“I think that, if anyone wants [to sign a Turkish player] during the upcoming transfer window in the winter break, there will not be such a possibility,” Mutko, who is also president of the Russian Football Union (RFU), told the R-Sport news agency.
“We don’t need to jump too far ahead but [the clubs] have already got the message.”
Asked in clarification if the sports ministry was telling clubs not to sign Turkish players, Mutko replied: “Of course, absolutely.”
Russia introduced a raft of punitive economic measures against Turkey on Saturday after Turkey shot down a Russian war plane last week.
Mutko said the sports sanctions would not affect Turkish players currently playing for Russian clubs, including Rubin Kazan’s midfielder Gokdeniz Karadeniz who joined them in 2008.
“Everyone who has an existing contract will carry on working,” Mutko said.
Turkish companies already involved in constructing stadiums for the 2018 World Cup in Russia would be allowed to continue, he said. “They won’t be here in the future but at the moment they have contracts and these will not be looked into,” the minister said.
Earlier the sports ministry recommended that Russian soccer clubs cancelled winter training camps to Turkey. Several clubs, including Lokomotiv Moscow, Spartak Moscow, FC Krasnodar and Kuban Krasnodar said they would heed the advice.
Relations between the two countries have been strained since Tuesday’s incident near the Syrian-Turkish border in which a Russian pilot died. A Russian marine who tried to rescue the crew of the downed jet was also killed.Davoset is command line tool for conducting DDoS attacks on the sites via Abuse of Functionality and XML External Entities vulnerabilities at other sites.
Sites that allow requests to other web sites (to arbitrary web pages) have Abuse of Functionality vulnerability and can be used to carry out CSRF attacks on other sites. Including DoS attacks via Abuse of Functionality, as noted above. CSRF attacks can only be done on pages that do not require authorization.
For these attacks, you can use both Abuse of Functionality vulnerabilities (similar to those in this article) and Remote File Include vulnerabilities (as in PHP applications) – this is Abuse of Functionality via RFI.
This attack method may be needed when it is necessary to conduct a covert CSRF attack on another site (not to be lit), for DoS and DDoS attacks, and for other attacks, in particular to perform various actions that must be performed from different IPs. For example, on-line voting, for scrolling on meter clicks and impressions on the site, as well as for click fraud.
Abuse of Functionality:
Attack occurs when one site (http: // site) hits another (http: // another_site) when using the appropriate site functionality (http: // site / script).
http://site/script?url=http://another_site
Advantages of this method of attacks.
This method, which uses external sites to attack other sites, has the following advantages (compared to using your own computer):
Use of resources of other servers.
Hide the referee (compared to CSRF attacks through site users).
Hiding your own IP, which, in addition to concealing the source of the attack, can also be used to circumvent IP restrictions.
Conducting DoS attacks on other sites, using external server servers.
Conducting DDoS attacks on other sites, using external server servers.
Also, when conducting DoS attacks, you can use several such servers at once, and thus conduct a DDoS attack. In this case, these servers will act as zombie computers. That is, the botnet will be made not from home computers, but from web servers (which can have more power and faster communication channels). Therefore, these vulnerabilities can lead to the emergence of a new class of botnets (with zombie servers).
Examples of vulnerable web sites and Web services.
To perform CSRF attacks on other sites, you can use various services:
1. Online services regex.info and www.slideshare.net.
2. Anonymizers, such as anonymouse.org.
3. Online translators at www.google.com, translate.google.com, babelfish.altavista.com and babelfish.yahoo.com.
4. Services for downloading video from video hosting, such as keepvid.com.
5. Web Firebook application on all sites that use it (but need to have access to the admin or CSRF attack on the site admin).
6. W3C Validators – All 11 vulnerable validators (12 scripts).
7. iGoogle Functionality:
http://www.google.com/ig/add?feedurl=http://google.com
Video Demo
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Like this: Like Loading...France said Tuesday it will send at least 1,000 troops to the Central African Republic to bolster regional peace-keeping forces. France’s UN ambassador told FRANCE 24 the operation would "probably be easier” than the military intervention in Mali.
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France said on Tuesday it would increase its force in Central African Republic (CAR) to at least 1,000 soldiers once a UN resolution is passed next week to try to prevent sectarian violence from destabilising the entire region.
The landlocked nation of 4.6 million people at the heart of Africa has descended into chaos since the Séléka coalition of rebels, many of them from neighbouring Chad and Sudan, ousted President François Bozizé in March.
TENS OF THOUSANDS FLEE CAR VIOLENCE
Séléka leader Michel Djotodia, installed as an interim president, has failed to control his mostly Muslim fighters, who have preyed upon the mainly Christian population, unleashing a wave of tit-for-tat killings.
“This is a real humanitarian concern,” France’s ambassador to the UN Gérard Araud told FRANCE 24 on Tuesday. “The CAR is collapsing and it could lead to mass atrocities, with each community trying to slaughter the other. What you have right now in the CAR, on both sides, are thugs who are raping and plundering. We need to restore law and order.”
“But here we are up against armed thugs, not an organised opposition,” he added. “It will probably be easier than military intervention in Mali was.”
Araud said that French troops in CAR would restore law and order until the 3,600-strong MISCA force was fully operational. The African Union is due to take control next month of a 2,500-strong contingent already deployed by the Economic Community of Central African States.
France, which presides over the 15-member UN Security Council in December, hopes a resolution for international intervention in its mineral-rich former colony can be adopted next week.
France now has 400 troops in the riverside capital Bangui, securing the international airport and French interests. Central African Republic Prime Minister Nicolas Tiangaye told Reuters on Monday after a meeting with Fabius in Paris that France aimed to boost its force by 800 soldiers.
Asked about the figure of 800 additional troops, Fabius said the number “makes sense”.
Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian later told Europe 1 radio that France would support a planned African-led force with “around 1,000” troops. He did not specify whether that was the size of the reinforcement or the total number.
In Bangui, Djotodia welcomed France’s determination to send troops, saying he had personally written to French President François Hollande to request military support.
“They have to come to help us. It is important,” Djotodia told Reuters after a meeting with civil society groups.
The United Nations estimates that 400,000 people have been displaced and 68,000 have fled to neighbouring countries due to the spiralling violence.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)Doctors Save Man’s Finger by Attaching It to Stomach
Making lemons from lemonade and the best of any situation is one thing, but a fingertip attached to a stomach is a horse of another color, as another old saying goes.
After accidentally sawing off the tip of his finger with an electrical saw, Yongjun Wang, a 20-year-old furniture worker in China’s Liaoning Province, was rushed to the hospital.
Wang was lucky enough to encounter Dr. Xuesong Huang, a very enterprising physician, who was concerned by the gravity of Wang’s amputation.
All of the muscle and skin from the end of his finger had been sheared away and only the bone remained.
“We had to make a quick decision or he could have lost his finger. We decided to cultivate a new fingertip on his stomach,” the doctor told the press.
In order for the body to repair itself and new skin and muscle to grow around the injured finger, blood circulation had to be restored to the damaged digit.
Totally disgusting to behold, nevertheless, the surgery was a complete success. Wang will have a brand new fingertip on his hand that will then be separated from his stomach within a month.
It would appear that the fickle finger of fate shall live to point again!
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RedditOn September 14, 2017 Olive Garden fans will be offered the opportunity to snag a much coveted $100 Never Ending Pasta Pass or the new $200 Pasta Passport to Italy.
The new $200 Pasta Passport to Italy comes with all the benefits of the $100 Pasta Pass plus a trip for two to Italy. (More info below)
With the Never Ending Pasta Pass, fans can enjoy eight weeks of access to unlimited pasta, homemade sauces, pasta toppings, soup or salad and breadsticks for the duration of the Never Ending Pasta Bowl promotion which runs from September 25, through November 19, 2017.
22,000 Never Ending Pasta Passes along with 50 Pasta Passports to Italy will be up for grabs at www.PastaPass.com for just 30 minutes beginning Thursday, September 14, at 2 p.m. ET, while supplies last.
Pasta Passport to Italy
For 2017, Olive Garden is taking the annual sale to new heights by giving 50 fans the opportunity to buy a Pasta Passport to Italy for $200.
The Pasta Passport includes all the feasting benefits of the Pasta Pass plus an all-inclusive, week-long trip to Italy for themselves and a friend. Only 50 Pasta Passports will be available, so you’ll have to hit the buy button fast and move quickly to secure your purchase.
If you’re lucky enough to snag a Pasta Pass or Pasta Passport, you will move straight to the cart and have only 8 minutes to complete your purchase.
Never Ending Pasta Bowl
Additionally, beginning September 25, fans without a pass can take part in Never Ending Pasta Bowl and enjoy unlimited servings of pasta combinations, homemade soup or salad and freshly baked breadsticks starting at $9.99 throughout the promotion period.
Image – Olive Garden11.14.14 CTR Weekend TPs
From:burns.strider@americanbridge.org To: CTRFriendsFamily@americanbridge.org Date: 2014-11-14 16:50 Subject: 11.14.14 CTR Weekend TPs
Hi all, Please find Correct The Record's weekend talking points package both attached and below. Thanks and stay warm! *11.14.14 Weekend Package* *1. **2016 Emerging Themes* <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#149af711972b6114_A> *2. **Women Voters in 2014* <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#149af711972b6114_women> *3. **Eleven Things You Should Know About Hillary* <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#149af711972b6114_eleven> *TALKING POINTS: 2016 EMERGING THEMES* *BACKGROUND: **Even though the 2014 midterm elections were just a few days ago, political pundits have already directed their attention to the 2016 presidential election. While Hillary Clinton has not decided yet whether to run, the exit polls from the midterm elections suggest that she would be extremely well positioned if she does.* *TALKING POINTS:* - Exit polls from the recent midterm elections provide interesting insight into the 2016 presidential race – primarily that Hillary Clinton, and her policies, are boding well with the American people. - 83% of Democrats think Hillary Clinton would make a good president, according to a CNN exit poll. - More than 40% of midterm voters, both Democrat and Republican, agreed that Hillary Clinton would make a good president – higher than any of the other potential contenders, including Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, and Rick Perry. - While campaigning for Democratic candidates all over the country, Hillary Clinton consistently articulated her vision for the future of this country – advancing opportunity and prosperity for all Americans and for generations to come. - As recent exit polls show, Hillary’s vision addresses the primary concern of Americans today: Americans are worried about the future. When asked what they thought life would be like for future generations in America, 48% said it would be worse, 27% said it would be about the same, and only 22% said it would be better. - Throughout Hillary’s many appearances where she has expanded on her vision for the future of this country, several themes have emerged: - Advancing Middle Class Families - Growing Economy & Jobs - Advancing Women & Children - Supporting Democrats, Progressive Values - Holding Republicans, Washington Accountable - Strengthening Education - Relating Her Personal Narrative & Values - Supporting Our Support Our Military & Veterans - Asserting America's Place in The World – Foreign Affairs *TALKING POINTS: WOMEN VOTERS IN 2014* *BACKGROUND: **As Hillary Clinton campaigned for Democrats all over the country this fall, her message of advancing middle-class families, women, and children resonated with female voters, whose support for Democratic candidates increased from 2010 in states Hillary visited on the campaign trail.* *TALKING POINTS:* - Hillary Clinton campaigned for Democrats all over the country this election cycle with a message focused on advancing middle-class families, women, and children. - As evidenced by polling data, Hillary’s message on the campaign trail resonated with women voters and translated to their increased support for candidates backed by Hillary. - In the states Hillary visited on the campaign trail this year, turnout among women was the same as it was in 2010, but women’s support for Democratic candidates in those states increased. - Furthermore, in many instances, the increase in women’s support for Democratic candidates occurred after Hillary Clinton campaigned for those candidates. Here are a few examples: - In Colorado, before Hillary campaigned for John Hickenlooper on October 21, polls showed women supporting him 4.8% more than the general electorate. Exit polls showed that the gap nearly tripled after Clinton’s visit, with 12% more women supporting Hickenlooper, helping him win the election. - In New Hampshire, Maggie Hassan won 60% of the women vote, 8% higher than before Hillary visited the Granite state. - In Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf received 16% more of the women vote than his opponent. In 2010, the women vote was split 50/50 between the Republican and the Democratic candidates. Clinton’s message of economic opportunity and a “fresh start” for the middle class resonated with all voters – especially women, who resoundingly voted to oust Corbett. - Hillary Clinton’s message of advancing middle-class families, women, and children is empowering women to take action and stand up for policies that work for them. * ELEVEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT HILLARY* *Secretary Clinton helped restore America’s leadership and standing in the world during a time of global challenges and changes.* Secretary Clinton worked tirelessly to revitalize American diplomacy and strengthen alliances by traveling nearly a million miles for hundreds of meetings with foreign leaders in 112 countries. As America’s lead diplomat, Secretary Clinton understood the importance of engaging the public and took diplomacy directly to people around the world. Just as she was as a senator, Secretary Clinton was a workhorse, often taking on difficult challenges and addressing them directly around the world. *Secretary Clinton built and maintained a coalition to enact the toughest sanctions in Iran’s history.*Secretary Clinton helped impose the toughest sanctions in Iran’s history by getting Russia and China on board. Even the Wall Street Journal <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703957904575252600443502256?KEYWORDS=HILLARY+clinton> editorial board noted that, “Clinton surely pulled out every stop to get Russia and particularly China…on board.” And as Howard Dean recently told CNN <http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1311/25/cg.02.html>, “Hillary Clinton cranked up the sanctions for the first time under President Obama that actually made the Iranians come to the table.” *Secretary Clinton played an integral role in the New START Treaty with Russia. *Secretary Clinton played an active role in reaching a missile reduction agreement with Russia, working to push it through the Senate <http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/08/11/clinton.start.treaty/> and securing more than the necessary two-thirds majority. She entered the treaty into force <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/02/156037.htm> in Munich with her Russian counterpart. As a result of the treaty’s passage, there will be fewer nuclear missile launchers <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2011/02/156037.htm>. Simply put, the world is safer. *Secretary Clinton supported the raid that brought Osama bin Laden to justice.* As NBC’s Brian Williams reported <http://rockcenter.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/02/11493919-president-obama-bin-laden-raid-is-most-important-single-day-of-my-presidency> on his website, “Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recommended an air strike with no forces on the ground. CIA Director Panetta supported a raid by Special Forces and so did Secretary of State Clinton.” *Secretary Clinton helped avert all-out war in Gaza by negotiating a cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians. *In November 2012, after eight days of violence, Secretary Clinton negotiated a Gaza cease-fire with Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. In an article titled “Hillary Clinton scores Gaza cease fire success,” Politico noted <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84145.html> that, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got a Gaza cease-fire right at the moment hope seemed dead for a rapid end to the violence…” *Secretary Clinton played |
of coffee and take it easy in the afternoon. But now there are 2.8 billion users posting content in every nook and cranny of the World Wide Web, and I can barely keep track of it all (even on my ample HP monitor).
As someone who takes pride in their work, it drives me crazy how many errors slip through the cracks. Time was you could count the Internet up with the New Yorker for copy-editing and fact-checking excellence, but I'm afraid we've fallen far, far behind. It's a disgrace.
Right now I have about 1.2 million documents open that still need a read-over before going live, which breaks down to about one document per pixel on my HP monitor. It will take me all of Christmas Day just to organize those into a meaningful workflow, so enjoy your time with family and friends. I'll be here alt-tabbing.
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What is the Family?
It’s the most well-connected religious organization that no one talks about. Formed in 1935 by an itinerant preacher, Norwegian immigrant Abraham Vereide, the Family has grown into “a veritable underground of Christ’s men all through government,” in the words of Family member and evangelical minister Charles Colson, the convicted Watergate conspirator. The Washington-based group counts many prominent politicians, mostly conservative Republicans, among its flock, and several members of Congress pay $600 a month to rent rooms in the group’s townhouse on C Street, near the U.S. Capitol. There are Family “prayer cells” in many federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the Justice Department. The Family tries to maintain a low profile (see below), but was thrust into the headlines in recent weeks when it emerged that three politicians embroiled in sex scandals—South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, Nevada Sen. John Ensign, and former Mississippi Rep. Chip Pickering—are longtime members. Pickering, in fact, last week was accused in court papers of having trysts with his mistress in the C Street house.
Are all members politicians?
No. While members include Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, former Secretary of State James Baker, and former Attorney General Edwin Meese, many business leaders and military officers are also involved. “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe, 81, the group’s leader since 1969, said in a rare interview in 2002, “and build power where we can’t.” The Family’s only high-profile endeavor is the National Prayer Breakfast, at which world leaders gather each year in Washington for a morning of nondenominational worship; but the Family always stays in the background, and many participants have no idea that the group is even involved.
What does the Family believe?
Its theology is vague, elastic, and focused on power. The basic precepts came to Vereide in a vision in 1935, according to the group’s literature. Living in Seattle, he came to believe that union organizing in the city was communist-inspired. Jesus appeared to him in the form of the president of U.S. Steel, who told him to gather “key men”—prominent businessmen and political leaders—to beat back the unions in His name. Vereide’s recruiting efforts spread eastward, and in 1941 he arrived in Washington, where he began cultivating friendships with powerful people and setting up prayer groups. By then, Vereide was convinced that conventional Christianity had it backwards: Instead of ministering to the down-and-out, Jesus wanted believers to tend to the “up-and-out”—members of America’s elite who lacked intimacy with Jesus. In Vereide’s worldview, free-market capitalism is divinely ordained, and unions and regulations are a form of blasphemy.
What about personal morality?
It’s not the most important consideration. “The people involved in this association are the worst and the best,” Coe says. “Some are total despots, some are totally religious.” The mere fact that they are powerful means they have God’s favor, argues Coe, citing a line from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “The powers that be are ordained of God.” Scholar Jeff Sharlet, author of the authoritative book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, explains the theology this way: As long as the powerful develop a close relationship with Jesus, “then they will dispense blessings to those underneath them. It’s a sort of trickle-down fundamentalism.” The theology stems from Vereide’s belief than only “key men” can change the world, and only with Jesus’ guidance will they change it for the better. The Family believes in a “total Jesus,” who pervades every thought and action.
Does the Family excuse adultery and other sins?
Not exactly, but it considers the powerful to be accountable only to God and their peers, not to their constituents or the Constitution. Coe speaks often of the biblical King David, who slept with another man’s wife, then ordered the cuckolded husband into battle, effectively sentencing him to death. Yet despite his personal failings, David was one of God’s chosen, and his reign was a blessing to the Israelites. When Gov. Sanford invoked King David to explain why he wouldn’t resign over his adulterous relationship with an Argentine woman, “you could almost hear Doug’s voice,” says Sharlet, who considers the Family’s disregard for conventional morality “potentially very dangerous,” because it “leads you away from accountability to the public.”
Is the Family a threat?
Few in Washington seem too worried. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has taken part in Family activities despite her liberal politics, and has called Coe “a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.” The first President Bush called Coe an “ambassador of faith.” Supporters also note that Family members helped convince President Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin to call for a worldwide day of prayer to usher in the Camp David Peace Accords. And members helped broker a 2001 peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Such successes, Family members say, demonstrate the group’s good intentions. “There’s nothing sinister here, no dark secrets,” says former Rep. Tony Hall of Ohio. “It’s the exact opposite of what Washington is about.”
Secrecy by design
Family members quickly learn that the first rule of the Family is not to talk about it. In 1966, Vereide, who referred to his following as an “invisible army,” decreed that the Family should “submerge the institutional image” of the group—a policy maintained by Coe. As Coe once said in a sermon, “the Family functions invisibly like the Mafia. The more you can make your organization invisible, the more influence it will have.” Family members organize themselves into small “cells” that are, in the group’s own words, “publicly invisible and privately identifiable.” Coe has expressed admiration for the way such leaders as Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, and Osama bin Laden organized followers into small groups that shared a “covenant.” With a covenant, he says, “two or three people can do anything.” Where those leaders went wrong, he says, was in not making their covenants in Jesus’ name.North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (C) and military leaders visit the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang on 15 April 2014 to mark the birth anniversary of founder Kim Il-sung (Keystone)
Switzerland has paid for North Korean army officers to attend peace and security training courses in Geneva since 2011, it has been revealed. But several parliamentarians have criticised the support worth CHF150,000 ($170,000).
According to Swiss public radio (RTS), eight North Korean officers have attended courses at the Geneva Center for Security Policy over the past three years, funded by the Swiss defence ministry. Two are currently present.
There they have followed study programmes on global security issues such as weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and human rights. The Ukraine crisis and the Arab spring uprisings have also been studied from the armed forces and democratisation perspectives.
Bern hopes these courses will contribute to peace efforts and encourage the hardline Communist regime to open up. An official told RTS that their engagement was ‘quite limited’ but nonetheless ‘worthwhile’.
However, Swiss parliamentarian Jacques Neirynck called the ministry’s initiative extremely naïve and said the money was ‘badly invested’. Other politicians, including members of the Foreign Affairs and Security Policy commissions, are also reportedly critical of the Swiss support and plan to send an official question to the government.
Bern has maintained diplomatic relations with Pyongyang since 1974. Since 2003, Switzerland and North Korea have been engaged in annual political dialogues, held alternately in Bern and Pyongyang.
Since 1953, Switzerland has participated in the Neutral Monitoring Commission for Korea (NNSC), which is active on the demarcation line between the two countries. At the beginning, 146 non-armed officers were deployed there; today there are five.
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation has maintained an office in Pyongyang since 1997. By the end of 2011, Switzerland had largely finished its development cooperation with North Korea. However, it remains active in terms of humanitarian aid.
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SWI swissinfo.ch on Instagram SWI swissinfo.ch on InstagramCome enjoy a ballroom filled with epic beer, great food and one of the area’s very best bands…along with some amazing people! Keep checking the facebook page for updates. That’s really all I use. We are working on the other things as we speak.
Extreme Pint's goal is to present a curated collection of beers from some this country’s greatest brewers available in Connecticut. All American Craft focused, we spend time trying to put together the kind of beer list you would have to drive around and be trading for months to get access to in one room. We are proud to be able to offer the Polish National Home’s authentic Polish cuisine for you to enjoy as part of the event ticket. As well as the fine musicianship of Boo Yah, and members of West End Blend.realize
seen
("Oh I'm sorry, we don't make Star Wars cakes at this bakery, but we'll happily make you one with plenty of'space'." [Yeah. Seriously.])
Skywalter has to save the beautiful Princess Leia from the evil grip of Dark Vader and his Terminators:
"We will destroy Hans Solo by playing checkers. "
In order to get past all of the Cylons, Skywalter makes some friends with magical powers:
RD2D, CP3O, and Spider-Man.
RD2D, CP3O, and Spider-Man follow Luke to the planet Vogon. There they find a short psychic Muppet in a swamp:
"We will destroy Hans Solo by RD2D, CP3O, and Spider-Man.
First
back
But the ship is now underwater, which makes it impossible to turn on their Life Savers.
Accio pixie power!!
But wait! Slimer pops up from the dead and casts lightning into Vader's helmet. Pew! Pew! Vader falls to the ocean floor, and Slimer says, "You killed my father; prepare to die!" Then he crosses the tachyon streams to open a wormhole which sends Vader back to Gozer.
Then Luke, Slimer, CP30, RD2D, Scully, Mulder, and Superman all run to rescue the beautiful Princess Leia a third time, and she proclaims her love for Luke:
And they all live together on the island until John Locke finds himself dead in the coffin.
THE END
But wait! Slimer pops up from the dead and casts lightning into Vader's helmet. Vader falls to the ocean floor, and Slimer says, "You killed my father; prepare to die!" Then he crosses the tachyon streams to open a wormhole which sends Vader back to Gozer. And they all live together on the island until John Locke finds himself dead in the coffin.THE END
Thanks, Amanda K., Anony M., Autumn P., Amanda N., Sarah, Jessica H., Ruth K., and Mattie T. And as the brown coats say, "Live long, and may the force be with you."
So say we all.
UPDATE from Jen:
Don't miss today's CNN article on Katie, with quotes from yours truly!
Remember Katie, the little girl with the Star Wars water bottle who's been unofficially adopted by every geek on the Internet? Well, in Katie's honor, tomorrow is Wear and Share Star Wars Day! This is a day to rock your Star Wars clothing or accessories, and also to donate a Star Wars or other geeky toy to your local shelter or hospital. Cool, right?Now, for this special occasion Jen has asked me, Number 1, to write a Star Wars themed post. What Jen doesn't(and what I'm not going to tell her), is that I've neverStar Wars. Ever. But I've seen Spaceballs a whole bunch of times, so I figure this'll be no biggie.Ok, so, the movie is set in space, "the final frontier", sometime in the future. Luke Skywalter is the pilot for the Star Ship Firefly.Slimer tells Luke to "use the force," but Luke doesn't know what that means so he shoots him. (.) Luke and his gang then goto the Enterprise to fight Dark Vader and rescue Princess Leia. Again.Dark Vader thinks it's unfair that Luke brought friends to help him fight, so Vader calls a friend of his own:By: Jay Dyer
Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange was definitely due for a full treatment – a full Ludovico Treatment! I last watched the film some six or seven years ago and, while I knew there were obvious “MK Ultra” themes, there was much I missed. The same happens with literature too, depending on the phase and time in your life. Being much more grounded these years later, I am surprised at how much I missed (isn’t that always the case?).
A Clockwork Orange is a film about MK Ultra, and not only that, it is about the truest, fullest and most dangerous aspect the years of programs under that moniker – that pop culture itself is a form of that mind control, that the masses are actually a kind of Alex deLarge writ large. Premiering in 1971, some eleven years after the novel’s release, Kubrick’s version is rightly praised for its vision, art direction and message, yet as time propels us forward into the uncertain future, the dystopian feel of the film seems less shocking. One could argue that is because of the intense popularity of apocalyptic dystopias in fiction and film, or is it because we actually are moving inexorably into the abyss of Alex’s demented, absurd world?
The first idiosyncrasy which stuck with me was the story’s most famous – the degenerated English which, arguably as difficult as ebonics, at least has a degree of creativity and humor in it, which today’s emoji-textspeak makes look brilliant by comparison. Me textspeak makes me gulliver want to return eggiwegs upon your table, good sir. Orwell warned of the disintegration of the language in 1984 and Burgess acquiesced, but could either have ever foreseen the shit emoji? Eventually we’ll merely think in pizza, dog, cat and shit emojis. And yoga.
Alex’s world, at the lower class, Bauhaus Apartment Complex surrounded by socialist style art level, is anarchic and crime-ridden – a perfect contrast of reality set against the endless, doomed government social projects that characterize any Marxist society. Alex’s life is roving bands of warring “droogs” battling one another over puerile insults and whom to rape. Juxtaposing the utterly trashy appearance with English Gentleman’s garnishes like a Bowler Hat is an interesting concept, much like Alex’s out of place obsession with Beethoven, to whom he inexplicably grants an almost religious devotion.
Alex, we are to believe, is utterly brutish and depraved, aside from this one, mysterious high culture fascination. Indeed, in the scene where Alex plays Beethoven’s 9th, we see a serpent, a naked woman and four Jesus statues clumsily rammed together, as if it constituted Alex’s crude attempt at a religious altar. Edenic and Satanic all at once, Alex’s bedroom is also prepped for what appears to be his own preferred sexual ritual of the old, orgiastic in-out. Alex’s whole world, including his gang of droogs, are iconic embodiments of the brutish state of nature, direct from the pages of Hobbes. It is here the Leviathan will attempt to “rehabilitate” him.
Before we come to that, other cultural comments stood out to me. A milk bar – doesn’t that sound like a pretentious, hipster fad? Avant Garde pornographic art everywhere, and receptacles that are tits? I would give the “Milk Bar” a good chance of happening in the near future, but the problem is, is it degenerate enough? We already have sexbot bars, so a Milk Bar wouldn’t be very edgy. Of course, if you put a Chocolate Milk Bar in a low-income, minority area, it would be edgy, especially if the mammaries also dispensed Kool-Aid.
Also pervasive in Alex’s world is a degenerate, consumerist popular music “culture” where band names appear as hilarious and nonsensical as if they were cut and pasted directly from Paste Magazine’s last top ten. Dude, have you heard the new Heaven 17 and Cyclops? While pop culture is much older than the 1960s, Burgess knew it would be a powerful social engineering force in the dystopian future, and I believe this scene is crucial for interpreting the rest of the film. What Alex is forced to watch, strapped down as he undergoes the Ludovico Treatment, is his own droogs killing a man and raping a woman. In other words, we are Alex and the two most notable images Alex is forced to watch are his own attacks and World War 2/Hitler footage. Through the creation of new “imprinting” and association, the sickness Alex is made to feel is a behaviorist-style operant conditioning.
“Aversion therapy,” and ultimately the entire time Alex spends in and out of “the system” is not at all about rehabilitating prisoners, but as Kubrick makes clear concerning the film, a statist apparatus using these methods and techniques upon a mass audience. The prisoners and “patients” are thus merely guinea pigs for the long-term social engineering goals, not the least of which is to create a catatonic, pacifist public, emasculated and ultimately dispossessed of any free volition – as Bertrand Russell predicted. For those interested, I have an entire chapter in my book Esoteric Hollywood on this topic, which can be purchased here.
Like Brave New World, the facade of better living through chemistry is unmasked to be a gigantic pharmacological public-private partnership, aimed at creating “sheep,” which Alex mentions numerous times in the film. In fact, the film even carries this point much deeper, elucidating that the liberal, behaviorist conception from a Skinner or a Watson that man can be perfected and engineered into something docile and obedient to the whims of the state-god is merely a demythologized, emasculated Christianity applied to the state. The state apparatus becomes a de facto church, and this is precisely what even Alex learns as he ponders the “Big Book,” the “sheep” and the government plans to mold Alex into the “model citizen.”
As has been said many times, while it’s my analysis that the ideas of creating a mind controlled assassin and using trigger words was a real aspect of the MK Ultra projects and research, it was not the chief point. The real power of this research was in its use for mass psychology and social engineering. This is why so many of the MK Ultra doctors were involved in psychology, pharmacology, academic research, psychiatry, medicine, etc. It was not primarily a series of programs focused on sexy snipers and head shots, but on the psyche, from a pragmatic, materialistic perspective.
It is chiefly under this scientistic facade it was able to become so anti-human. As Kubrick points out so many times in his films, the establishment that purports to cure man of his ills and “perfect” him is, in so many cases, a large part of the cause of his ills – Kubrick even has Alex’s case worker/social worker molest him! With the prevalence of sexual and pornographic art throughout the dystopia, we can deduce the normalization of sexual traumatization and abuse, possibly even pedophilia. This also fits with Burgess’ other dystopia, The Wanting Seed, where the whole society is homosexual. Alex, we see, is a subject of sexual-based traumatized mind control throughout his whole life. It should come as no surprise that a social order that protects and allows and propagates these crimes is unable to ‘cure’ man of anything, other than dosing him full of more drugs.
The “criminal reflex” cannot be cured by external stimuli, because free will is real. Western civilization, since the time of the Greeks, has consistently fallen back into this pagan notion – popularized by the Greek philosophers and even the pre-Socratics – that the only reason man does wrong is a lack of education. Thus, the logic goes, more social programs, more welfare, more external stimuli applied, from womb to tomb, might one day hold forth the hope of ‘curing man.’ Yet what is man, on this ridiculous scheme?
Nothing but a supposedly more complex bag of goo and hair that are a distant cousin of the apes in Kubrick’s 2001. If we are still just a ‘planet of the apes,’ and those apes are just a slightly more advanced worm, the notion of “fixing” something is rendered utterly meaningless. Fixing a thing assumes some higher, more advanced objective standard by which one can measure the need, or lack thereof, to be “fixed.” In Democritus’ world of chaotic atoms falling through space, nothing is ever “fixed,” because nothing is broken. On the other hand, if man is not what these stupid and contradictory worldviews say, and is made in the image of a divine Creator, endowed with a logos and a soul, then man has the capacity for free will. If man has the capacity for free will, no amount of external stimuli, chemical or cinematic, can “cure” what is within him. As the minister tells Alex, “goodness comes from within.”
The reason the film prominently portrays the All-Seeing Eye is because the hell-hole world Alex inhabits is the world of the actual Illuminists – characters like Weishaupt, St. Just, St. Simon and Comte, who continued the Illuminist tradition of socialism, communism, rationalism and scientism. This ideology, adopted by the Royal Society and the modern scientistic establishment, as well as most of modernity, is based on MK Ultra. Behind these “philosophers,” academic entities and CIA entities are the billionaires and oligarchs like the Rockefellers, who set up the Tavistock Institute to participate in this type of research.
Subscribe to JaysAnalysis in the Purchase Membership ShopThe world’s longest graffiti scrolled has been confirmed at Jumeirah Beach in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The Guinness World Record on Sunday officially announced that the 2,245.40 metre artwork, depicting the “history of the UAE”, would be entered into the record book, to the delight of Hassan Al-Mazroui, events director of the 43rd UAE National Day, for which the painting was commissioned.
(Dubai Photo Story)
“Initially, we were worried because it was so difficult to make sure that we would beat the previous record,” he told Gulf News.
“Even if you are sure that you followed every detail of the Guinness World Record requirements, you can never tell if we would make it or not. It was not an easy task.”
Over 150 graffiti artists from around the world took part in its creation, involving 7,000 spray paint cans.
(Dubai Photo Story)
Guinness World Record adjudicator Praveen Patel said it took more than an hour to measure the entire artwork.
“I saw the history of UAE and I know from the air it looks like the map of the UAE. Because the art is so brilliant, it was a wonderful journey,” Patel told Gulf News.
“It was an absolutely fantastic effort by a multi-national team of graffiti artists. And to put them together to produce a single piece, that’s phenomenal. I haven’t seen any record like this.”
(Dubai Photo Story)
Though the artwork was sanctioned by Crown Prince of Dubai Shaikh Hamdan Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, graffiti artists in Dubai can face arrest for defacing walls, streets or public buildings.ACTIVE Network, a leading provider of activity and participant management solutions, has announced that the company is inviting developers to participate in the first-ever "HACKTIVE" public hackathon. The 24-Hour hackathon will take place Saturday, September 21 - Sunday, September 22 in San Diego, California and awards will be given to developers for creating the best applications using ACTIVE Network APIs.
Image Credit: ACTIVE Network
ACTIVE Network APIs provide developers programmatic access to a huge repository of the most up-to-date and accurate curated activity data available. The goal of HACKTIVE is to find and create innovative new ways of using technology for people to engage in a healthier lifestyle and participate in activities that will benefit their health. The official HACKTIVE site describes current health issues and why developers should participate in the hackathon:
"Physical inactivity is estimated to be responsible for over 200,000 deaths in America each year. It's no secret that obesity and exercise are major concerns in America (just take a minute to check out the PHIT America Movement). This is your chance to help make a difference, flex your skills, and even win some prizes."
Not only will developers participating in HACKTIVE be helping to create applications that encourage people to engage in healthy activities, they will also have the opportunity to win cash prizes and network with technology executives and their peers.
The judges for the 2013 HACKTIVE hackathon include:
Neil Mansilla - Director of Developer Platform and Partnerships, Mashery
Erik Suhonen - Head of Yahoo! Developer Network, Yahoo!
Jesse Givens - Head of Product for CarePass, Aetna
Jon Belmonte - Interim CEO, ACTIVE Network
Cash prizes for the 24-hour HACKTIVE hackathon are:
First Place - $5,000
Second Place - $1,000
Third Place - $500
Internship Opportunities
If you are a developer that will be in the San Diego area September 21 - 22 and would like to participate in HACKTIVE, please visit the ACTIVE Network developer site for more information.
Registration begins on August 13 and ends on September 20.Co-authored by Renee Randazzo, MS, and Dana J. Pardee, BS
For trans masculine people -- an umbrella term referring to people assigned a female sex at birth who identify as female-to-male, transman, man, men, masculine of center, boi, genderqueer or another diverse non-binary gender identity and expression -- seeking healthcare can be a challenging and potentially traumatizing experience. We are hearing about all of it.
At The Fenway Institute -- the research, education and training, evaluation and policy division of Fenway Health in Boston, Massachusetts -- we are collecting data from a diverse array of trans masculine people about their experiences seeking and accessing healthcare. Through a two-year-long research project funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, in collaboration with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health (CoE) at the University of California, San Francisco, we are able to also study the sexual health of trans masculine adult patients.
We hear over and over again about the myriad of ways transgender patients can be hurt by, rejected or feel mistreated in healthcare settings and contexts, including by their medical doctors and other clinical care providers. We are finding that lack of cultural competence (trans-incompetence) in healthcare contexts and by providers themselves comes in many forms. One central theme emerging in our research is regarding nonbinary trans masculine people (who may not identify with the male/female or man/woman gender dichotomy) and binary trans masculine people (who may identify as men or males).
Toward nonbinary individuals, healthcare providers may demonstrate confusion. Toward binary-identified transgender men, healthcare providers may be entirely dismissive or feel betrayed when finding out the patient is transgender having assumed he was a cisgender (non-transgender) male.
"[There are] different version[s] of bullsh*t that trans guys get... I get the 'you-don't-fit-in-a-box-and-we-don't-really-understand-you-and-you-behave-differently-and-you-challenge-our-experiences-on-stuff.' So that's the version I get. Other trans guys get the 'you-lied-to-me.' I didn't lie to you. I just walked through the door, I didn't lie to you." - Participant, Clinical Visit
When providers don't inquire about and honor individuals' preferred terminology for their gender and their body parts, the outcome is more than just discomfort. It exacerbates a potent source of distress--distress so intense as to be potentially life-threatening for the patient. It is alarmingly common for trans masculine patients in qualitative data from our study to report extreme anxiety, needing to dissociate in order to get through doctor visits and even avoidance of healthcare services altogether. This is particularly true in the context of sexual healthcare services.
"And my body was, like, looked as -- not as my own... it was just like really hard, like, mentally on top -- like because my body wasn't looked like -- wasn't referred to as, like, mine. So even when someone's like, not even about to perform a certain procedure and they're talking about it, I think language is very important. And so if I'm already anxious before, I'm like even more anxious than even if I'm going through the pain during the procedure. Like, so that kind of builds on and builds on top of each other." -Participant, Clinical Visit
In addition to honoring individuals' terminology, there are simple guidelines healthcare providers can follow to ensure their clinical practice and patient interactions are healing rather than wounding. For example:
Use transgender-inclusive paperwork.
Train support staff in trans-competence.
Avoid making assumptions.
Provide non-judgmental space for gender identity and expression.
Inquire about experiences of discrimination or prior mistreatment during intake/assessment.
Integrate responsive therapeutic support into sexual health services by offering counseling and making appropriate referrals.
Lastly, remember that a transgender person is just that, a person. The gender identity of any individual is merely one facet of a complex human being, and may or may not be relevant to any particular visit to the doctor.
"Really, when I'm sick in the doctor's office -- all I want is the doctor to treat me like a human, any other human, and not bring up my trans status unless it is absolutely pertinent to the visit at hand. It may be easier to catch a unicorn, however, than achieve that in a doctor's office." - Participant, Online Focus Group
Healing wounds may begin one doctor's visit at a time, but ultimately its scope is much larger. As one participant in our study noted, the work of healing must be embarked upon by the community as a whole -- those who fall under the transgender umbrella, loved ones, and allies and those to whom the community turns for care.
"You've got a community that disproportionately doesn't like themselves very much and then we say OK, you have to do this [get sexual healthcare] because if not you're going to get sick and die. If you don't like yourself particularly much that's not the biggest motivating factor, bit is there a way to sort of reframe the whole discussion onto something far more positive?... And especially if you're talking about the health of parts that you're not super interested in having... Create a community that likes itself better, that feels more empowered, that focuses on sexual health and wellbeing dividends in the long run around sexual health of the community. I think that's some of the best work we can be doing in terms of improving sexual healthcare." -Participant, Clinical Visit
As we at The Fenway Institute work toward enhancing what the trans masculine patient above refers to as "sexual health and wellbeing dividends," we invite those who meet the study criteria to consider participating in The Trans Masculine Sexual Health Collaborative. We invite readers to share information about this study with your personal and professional networks. Our hope is that this work will improve the landscape of trans masculine sexual healthcare, and will inspire healthcare providers to do their part in helping trans masculine patients "catch the unicorn" of gender affirming healthcare.
Sari Reisner, ScD is Affiliated Research Scientist at Fenway Health; Associate Scientific Researcher at Boston Children's Hospital; and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. He is the Principle Investigator of CER-1403-12625.
Renee Randazzo, MS is the Community Liaison for the Trans Masculine Sexual Health Collaborative with The Fenway Institute, and School-based Clinician with the Boston Institute for Psychotherapy.Brendan Sinclair North American Editor Friday 4th March 2016 Share this article Share
Companies in this article Disney Interactive Studios Wargaming.Net
The Electronic Entertainment Expo is leaking publishers. VentureBeat today reported that two more major companies have decided against having booth space on this year's show floor.
A Wargaming representative explained its decision, saying, "From a company perspective, we're focusing a large majority of activities on events focused on our players and community. Whether it's a small group of players or hundreds at one of our player gatherings, they're our main priority. From a strictly business perspective, E3 just doesn't fit our current direction. It's a show that is very centralized on retail product, and as a free-to-play digital download gaming company, we've realized that while the show may be a good fit for lots of other publishers and developers, it's currently not a great fit for us."
While Disney has more of a retail emphasis thanks to its flagship toys-to-life series Disney Infinity, the lack of a new major release in that franchise this year might have played a part in its thinking, as well. A Disney representative told VentureBeat that it has chosen to focus on "additional direct-to-fan engagements through the summer this year."
In January, Electronic Arts announced that it would not have an E3 booth this year. Last week, Activision Blizzard did the same. ESA senior vice president of communications Rich Taylor downplayed the significance of losing these long-standing exhibitors from the show floor.
"Individual companies will make their own decisions in each iteration of E3," Taylor said. "Overall, E3 for the past several years [has] been among the best shows we have ever experienced. E3 remains a dynamic and valuable and preeminent show of its kind in the world for video games, entertainment, and innovation. It's still the place to be. We have a record number of press briefings this year in the ramp to opening the show. That's an indicator that folks recognize how valuable a launch pad it is. Being a part of E3 adds rocket fuel to the attention and eyeballs and interest and visibility of new titles and hardware and innovations that our industry produces each and every year. E3 is a strong, critical, and integral part of our video game ecosystem."Limited Run Games Interview - Vita, the Physical Indie Market, & the Future - Article
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by, posted on 27 September 2017
On 28th October 2015 an interesting shift happened in the market for physical collectors on Vita. A small spin-off from the development studio Mighty Rabbit Games released its first physical game - Breach & Clear - which managed to sell out of all 1,500 copies that had been printed within a few seconds, sparking the birth of a company that would release an unprecedented 34 further titles within two years.
I recently had the chance to interview one of the founders - Douglas Bogart - to find out how the business had grown, how the Vita factors into their plans going forward, and what he thinks about the ever-growing market for indie physical releases as a whole.
It's been nearly two years since your very first physical release - Breach & Clear on Vita. Is it difficult to believe how fast your business has grown since then?
It's extremely unbelievable, every day we are thankful for still going so strong. We never believed it would be this successful.
You've recently made a number of changes to your business including the introduction of a hold shipping service. How do you feel this is going so far?
It seems to be going really well. It works for a lot of our international customers. But there are risks, by doing it you are having to worry about a much bigger package getting lost in the mail if your postal service is bad.
Other changes include the addition of playing cards and other physical goodies with every release. Do you feel the need to continue to adapt and change to stay viable in the market?
We do feel the need to adapt and change with the market. We are trying to do our own thing though which is why we introduced trading cards once we saw others adopting our postcard approach. As for special editions, it's something we always wanted to do and now that we can we've become kind of addicted.
What are your feelings on the ESRB's change that now requires you to put a rating on every game? Has the extra cost involved made things less viable for you?
We understand why they want us to comply. We aren't fans of the process but we are willing to do it if it means it's the only way to bring physical games to our fans. The extra costs do hurt smaller releases but we are looking into ways to help boost those releases.
As previously mentioned, your very first release was a Vita title and you continue to ship games on the console to this day. Have you been impressed with the enthusiasm for the console from the fanbase?
Vita fans are the best and we plan to support it until Sony tells us to stop!
You've spoken about being fans of SEGA's Dreamcast. Do you feel the similarities between it and the Vita, in both being ignored by the mainstream, have arguably shaped their status as under-appreciated gems?
We definitely see Dreamcast and Vita being extremely similar. They both have great games that the mainstream gamer seems to miss. They are also both consoles that the industry likes to forget and call a mistake. The Dreamcast definitely gets a better rap now as will the Vita in later years.
Despite Sony publicly pulling support for Vita a number of years ago, your releases continue to sell out. How much longer do you feel the Vita will be a viable venture for you?
I feel like with the advent of the Switch |
fact that Zcash transactions can be stored on the blockchain fully encrypted opens up new possibilities for cryptocurrency applications. Encrypted transactions allow parties to enjoy the benefits of public blockchains, while still protecting their privacy. Planned future upgrades will allow users to selectively disclose information about shielded transactions at their discretion. See our Near Future of Zcash blog post on future plans for Zcash. For a more in-depth explanation of how shielded transactions are constructed in Zcash, see our blog post on How Transactions Between Shielded Addresses Work. For full details on the current Zcash protocol, refer to our protocol specification.TORONTO – Princess Bride fans, prepare to laugh. This year’s live read at the Toronto International Film Festival will be the beloved Rob Reiner fairy tale.
Jason Reitman announced the pick on Twitter, noting that the family favourite won the people’s choice award at the festival back in 1987.
In 1987, Princess Bride won Toronto Film Festival. On Sep 12th, we're going to pay tribute to that perfect script. https://t.co/IJyMhxPP3P — Jason Reitman (@JasonReitman) August 26, 2015
Reitman’s popular stage event features celebrities and comedians who are invited to read a screenplay aloud in its entirety.
READ MORE: Matthew Weiner, Julianne Moore, Salma Hayek to discuss careers at TIFF 2015
The Montreal-born director recently staged a star-studded edition in Montreal that featured Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender reading Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski.
Expected celebrity guests at this year’s TIFF include The Princess Bride director Reiner and star Cary Elwes.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs Sept. 10 to 20.Those include the Cauchy, Weibull, normal, log-normal, logistic, exponential, uniform, gamma distributions, the central and noncentral beta, chi-squared, Fisher's F-distribution, Student's t-distribution, as well as the discrete binomial and negative binomial distributions, geometric, hypergeometric and Poisson distributions. In addition, there are functions for calculating theoretical moments of distributions, which allow to evaluate the degree of conformity of the real distribution to the modeled one.
The MQL5 standard library has been supplemented with numerous mathematical functions from R. Moreover, an increase in operation speed of 3 to 7 times has been achieved, compared to the initial versions in the R language. At the same time, errors in implementation of certain functions in R have been found.
Contents
Introduction
The R language is one of the best tools of statistical processing and analysis of data.
Thanks to availability and support of multiple statistical distributions, it had become widespread in the analysis and processing of various data. Using the apparatus of probability theory and mathematical statistics allows for a fresh look at the financial market data and provides new opportunities to create trading strategies. With the statistical library, all these features are now available in the MQL5.
The statistical library contains functions for calculating the statistical characteristics of data, as well as functions for working with statistical distributions.
This article considers the main functions of the library and an example of their practical use.
1. Functions for calculating the statistical characteristics of array elements
This group of functions calculates the standard characteristics (mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis, median, root-mean-square and standard deviations) of array elements.
1.1. MathMean
The function calculates the mean (first moment) of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN (not a number). Analog of the mean() in R.
double MathMean ( const double &array[] );
1.2. MathVariance
The function calculates the variance (second moment) of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the var() in R.
double MathVariance ( const double &array[] );
1.3. MathSkewness
The function calculates the skewness (third moment) of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the skewness() in R (e1071 library).
double MathSkewness ( const double &array[] );
1.4. MathKurtosis
The function calculates the kurtosis (fourth moment) of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the kurtosis() in R (e1071 library).
double MathKurtosis ( const double &array[] );
1.5. MathMoments
The function calculates the first 4 moments (mean, variance, skewness, kurtosis) of array elements. Returns true if the moments have been calculated successfully, otherwise false.
bool MathMoments ( const double &array[], double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, const int start= 0, const int count= WHOLE_ARRAY );
1.6. MathMedian
The function calculates the median value of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the median() in R.
double MathMedian ( double &array[] );
1.7. MathStandardDeviation
The function calculates the standard deviation of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the sd() in R.
double MathStandardDeviation ( const double &array[] );
1.8. MathAverageDeviation
The function calculates the average absolute deviation of array elements. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the aad() in R.
double MathAverageDeviation ( const double &array[] );
All functions that calculate the kurtosis use the excess kurtosis around the normal distribution (excess kurtosis=kurtosis-3), i.e. the excess kurtosis of a normal distribution is zero.
It is positive if the peak of the distribution around the expected value is sharp, and negative if the peak is flat.
2. Statistical distributions
The statistical library of the MQL5 contains 5 functions for working with the statistical distributions:
Calculation of probability density (the MathProbabilityDensityX() functions);
Calculation of probabilities (the MathCumulativeDistributionX() functions);
The probability distribution function is equal to the probability of a random variable falling within the range of (-inf; x]).
Calculation of distribution quantiles (the MathQuantileX() functions);
The quantile x of a distribution corresponds to a random value falling within the range of (-inf, x] with the specified probability for the given distribution parameters.
Generating random numbers with the specified distribution (the MathRandomX() functions); Calculation of the theoretical moments of the distributions (the MathMomentsX() functions);
2.1. Normal Distribution
2.1.1. MathProbabilityDensityNormal
double MathProbabilityDensityNormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityNormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function calculates the values of the probability density function of normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the dnorm() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityNormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the values of the probability density function of normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityNormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.1.2. MathCumulativeDistributionNormal
The function calculates the value of the normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionNormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionNormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
bool MathCumulativeDistributionNormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the pnorm() in R.
The function calculates the value of the normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionNormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.1.3. MathQuantileNormal
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileNormal ( const double probability, const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileNormal ( const double probability, const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
false
bool MathQuantileNormal ( const double &probability[], const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the values of inverse normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns. Analog of the qnorm() in R.
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the values of inverse normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathQuantileNormal ( const double &probability[], const double mu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.1.4. MathRandomNormal
The function generates a pseudorandom variable distributed according to the normal law with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathRandomNormal ( const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function generates pseudorandom variables distributed according to the normal law with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the rnorm() in R.
bool MathRandomNormal ( const double mu, const double sigma, const int data_count, double &result[] );
2.1.5. MathMomentsNormal
The function calculates the theoretical numerical values of the first 4 moments of the normal distribution. Returns true if calculation of the moments has been successful, otherwise false.
bool MathMomentsNormal ( const double mu, const double sigma, double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, int &error_code );
2.2. Log-normal distribution
2.2.1. MathProbabilityDensityLognormal
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of log-normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityLognormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of log-normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityLognormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of log-normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns NaN. Analog of the dlnorm() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityLognormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of log-normal distribution with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityLognormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.2.2. MathCumulativeDistributionLognormal
The function calculates the value of the log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionLognormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionLognormal ( const double x, const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the plnorm() in R.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionLognormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionLognormal ( const double &x[], const double mu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.2.3. MathQuantileLognormal
The function calculates the value of the inverse log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for the specified probability. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileLognormal ( const double probability, const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the inverse log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters for the specified probability. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileLognormal ( const double probability, const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the values of inverse log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the qlnorm() in R.
bool MathQuantileLognormal ( const double &probability[], const double mu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the values of inverse log-normal distribution function with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathQuantileLognormal ( const double &probability[], const double mu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.2.4. MathRandomLognormal
The function generates a pseudorandom variable distributed according to the log-normal law with the mu sigma parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathRandomLognormal ( const double mu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function generates pseudorandom variables distributed according to the log-normal law with the mu and sigma parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the rlnorm() in R.
bool MathRandomLognormal ( const double mu, const double sigma, const int data_count, double &result[] );
2.2.5. MathMomentsLognormal
The function calculates the theoretical numerical values of the first 4 moments of the log-normal distribution. Returns true if calculation of the moments has been successful, otherwise false.
bool MathMomentsLognormal ( const double mu, const double sigma, double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, int &error_code );
2.3. Beta distribution
2.3.1. MathProbabilityDensityBeta
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the dbeta() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, double &result[] );
2.3.2. MathCumulativeDistributionlBeta
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the pbeta() in R.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of beta distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, double &result[] );
2.3.3. MathQuantileBeta
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse beta distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileBeta ( const double probability, const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse beta distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileBeta ( const double probability, const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the values of inverse beta distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the qbeta() in R.
bool MathQuantileBeta ( const double &probability[], const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the values of inverse beta distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathQuantileBeta ( const double &probability[], const double a, const double b, double &result[] );
2.3.4. MathRandomBeta
The function generates a pseudorandom variable distributed according to the law of beta distribution with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathRandomBeta ( const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
The function generates pseudorandom variables distributed according to the law of beta distribution with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the rbeta() in R.
bool MathRandomBeta ( const double a, const double b, const int data_count, double &result[] );
2.3.5. MathMomentsBeta
The function calculates the theoretical numerical values of the first 4 moments of the beta distribution. Returns true if calculation of the moments has been successful, otherwise false.
bool MathMomentsBeta ( const double a, const double b, double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, int &error_code );
2.4. Noncentral beta distribution
2.4.1. MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralBeta
double MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const double lambda, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the dbeta() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const double lambda, double &result[] );
2.4.2. MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralBeta
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralBeta ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const double lambda, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the pbeta() in R.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralBeta ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const double lambda, double &result[] );
2.4.3. MathQuantileNoncentralBeta
The function calculates the value of the inverse probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters for the occurrence of a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileNoncentralBeta ( const double probability, const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the inverse probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters for the occurrence of a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileNoncentralBeta ( const double probability, const double a, const double b, const double lambda, int &error_code );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the value of inverse probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the qbeta() in R.
bool MathQuantileNoncentralBeta ( const double &probability[], const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the value of inverse probability distribution function of noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathQuantileNoncentralBeta ( const double &probability[], const double a, const double b, const double lambda, double &result[] );
2.4.4. MathRandomNoncentralBeta
The function generates a pseudorandom variable distributed according to the law of noncentral beta distribution the a, b and lambda parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathRandomNoncentralBeta ( const double a, const double b, const double lambda, int &error_code );
The function generates pseudorandom variables distributed according to the law of noncentral beta distribution the a, b and lambda parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the rbeta() in R.
bool MathRandomNoncentralBeta ( const double a, const double b, const double lambda, const int data_count, double &result[] );
2.4.5. MathMomentsNoncentralBeta
The function calculates the theoretical numerical values of the first 4 moments of the noncentral beta distribution with the a, b and lambda parameters. Returns true if calculation of the moments has been successful, otherwise false.
double MathMomentsNoncentralBeta ( const double a, const double b, const double lambda, double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, int &error_code );
2.5. Gamma distribution
2.5.1. MathProbabilityDensityGamma
double MathProbabilityDensityGamma ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of gamma distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of gamma distribution with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityGamma ( const double x, const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of gamma distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the dgamma() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityGamma ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of gamma distribution with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityGamma ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, double &result[] );
2.5.2. MathCumulativeDistributionGamma
The function calculates the value of the gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionGamma ( const double x, const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionGamma ( const double x, const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the pgamma() in R.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionGamma ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionGamma ( const double &x[], const double a, const double b, double &result[] );
2.5.3. MathQuantileGamma
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileGamma ( const double probability, const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileGamma ( const double probability, const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the value of inverse gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the qgamma() in R.
bool MathQuantileGamma ( const double &probability[], const double a, const double b, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the value of inverse gamma distribution function with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathQuantileGamma ( const double &probability[], const double a, const double b, double &result[] );
2.5.4. MathRandomGamma
The function generates a pseudorandom variable distributed according to the law of gamma distribution with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathRandomGamma ( const double a, const double b, int &error_code );
The function generates pseudorandom variables distributed according to the law of gamma distribution with the a and b parameters. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the rgamma() in R.
bool MathRandomGamma ( const double a, const double b, const int data_count, double &result[] );
2.5.5. MathMomentsGamma
The function calculates the theoretical numerical values of the first 4 moments of the gamma distribution with the a and b parameters. Returns true if calculation of the moments has been successful, otherwise false.
bool MathMomentsGamma ( const double a, const double b, double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, int &error_code );
2.6. Chi-squared distribution
2.6.1. MathProbabilityDensityChiSquare
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
double MathProbabilityDensityChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for a random variable x. In case of error it returns
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the dchisq() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, double &result[] );
2.6.2. MathCumulativeDistributionChiSquare
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the pchisq() in R.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, double &result[] );
2.6.3. MathQuantileChiSquare
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse chi-squared distribution function. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileChiSquare ( const double probability, const double nu, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
For the specified probability, the function calculates the value of inverse chi-squared distribution function. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathQuantileChiSquare ( const double probability, const double nu, int &error_code );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the value of inverse chi-squared distribution function. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the qchisq() in R.
bool MathQuantileChiSquare ( const double &probability[], const double nu, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
For the specified 'probability[]' array of probability values, the function calculates the value of inverse chi-squared distribution function. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathQuantileChiSquare ( const double &probability[], const double nu, double &result[] );
2.6.4. MathRandomChiSquare
The function generates a pseudorandom variable distributed according to the law of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathRandomChiSquare ( const double nu, int &error_code );
The function generates pseudorandom variables distributed according to the law of chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the rchisq() in R.
bool MathRandomChiSquare ( const double nu, const int data_count, double &result[] );
2.6.5. MathMomentsChiSquare
The function calculates the theoretical numerical values of the first 4 moments of the chi-squared distribution with the nu parameter. Returns true if calculation of the moments has been successful, otherwise false.
bool MathMomentsChiSquare ( const double nu, double &mean, double &variance, double &skewness, double &kurtosis, int &error_code );
2.7. Noncentral chi-squared distribution
2.7.1. MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralChiSquare
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, const double sigma, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the dchisq() in R.
bool MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, const double sigma, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability density function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathProbabilityDensityNoncentralChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.7.2. MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralChiSquare
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for a random variable x. In case of error it returns NaN.
double MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralChiSquare ( const double x, const double nu, const double sigma, int &error_code );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false. Analog of the pchisq() in R.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, const double sigma, const bool tail, const bool log_mode, double &result[] );
The function calculates the value of the probability distribution function of noncentral chi-squared distribution with the nu and sigma parameters for an array of random variables x[]. In case of error it returns false.
bool MathCumulativeDistributionNoncentralChiSquare ( const double &x[], const double nu, const double sigma, double &result[] );
2.7.3. MathQuantileNoncentralChiSquare
For |
rich similar to what they paid under President Ronald Reagan. Rehberg replied the nation’s economy had been rocked by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, and that tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 were necessary to keep it afloat.
“I’m glad we had the tax relief that created the opportunity that helped us pay for and stabilize the economy during that tough time,” Rehberg said, according to the newspaper. Rehberg said that the federal government should take the blame in the collapse of the housing bubble, according to the newspaper.
“Is it the banker’s fault, the homebuilder’s fault, the Realtor’s fault, the purchaser’s fault?” Rehberg asked. “We have a tendency to ignore the government’s action that helped create the meltdown in the financial market (by promoting the idea that) everybody deserved an opportunity to be in a house, even if you can’t afford it. You can’t blame the banker, the homebuilder and the Realtor, when the government is encouraging the action that created the meltdown that occurred.”
Democrats pounced on Rehberg’s comments. Ted Dick, executive director of the Montana Democratic Party, said in a statement that Rehberg ‘s “biggest struggle is understanding the reality that regular Montanans face every day.”“We were made aware of some information that had not previously been disclosed. When we approached Mr. Wheeldon with this information, he submitted his resignation,” wrote Lavigne.
Then late Sunday, Brad Lavigne, senior campaign adviser for the New Democrats, confirmed by email that Wheeldon had resigned as the party’s candidate for the Nova Scotia riding of Kings-Hants in the federal election.
The first hints of trouble came when aspiring NDP candidate Morgan Wheeldon vanished from the party’s official website and his own campaign page was reduced to a blank slate.
The “information” to which he refers is believed to be a comment made by Wheeldon last year on Facebook regarding Israel’s attack on Gaza.
“Our position on the conflict in the Middle East is clear, as Tom Mulcair expressed clearly in the debate,” Lavigne said. “Mr. Wheeldon’s comments are not in line with that policy and he is no longer our candidate.”
Wheeldon, 33, was prominently featured on a Conservative attack website that highlights his Facebook comment.
“One could argue that Israel’s intention was always to ethnically cleanse the region — there are direct quotations proving this to be the case. Guess we just sweep that under the rug,” his Facebook post reads in part. “A minority of Palestinians are bombing buses in response to what appears to be a calculated effort to commit a war crime.”
A supporter defended Wheeldon Sunday, tweeting that the entire matter is “a Harper smear.” Wheeldon replied: “I am disappointed in Canadian democracy today, but I remain hopeful.”
The Star’s request for comment Sunday night was not returned by Wheeldon or Kings-Hants riding president Judy Swift.So we jump from the curiously gloomy comic shop (one day when I magically have all the time, I may brighten up that page a bit) to the thankfully better lit Archon lounge, featuring Dabbler’s latest Sexual Detritus. Which would be a good name for a band I guess.
So… I guess I didn’t quite think this page through entirely when I drew it, but it’s been several days in comic time, and Krona is still there and wearing the same clothes. I guess her and Dabbler were very thorough when going over her code. Presumably Krona got a “I saved several Archon agents but got hauled in anyway but everything’s okay now and all I got was this shirt” shirt in the meantime, and not the same shirt the Barberian got. The real reason is I’m just used to drawing everything moment to moment and I didn’t quite think it through. So yeah, Krona was under observation for a few days but treated as a guest otherwise. I’m sure Maxima had a very measured exchange with Ingsol about it too.
A-kon is this weekend, I will be there. No I don’t have a table as I yet again don’t have anything to sell, but I’ll be hanging around the Antarctic Press table and Artist Alley webcomic people and occasional panel.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like.The 3rd Annual Rose Ball, an exclusive collaboration between Boris Van Dyck of IceBox Bar and Camille Key of Charleston After Dark, will be held on Wednesday, December 31st, at the Johnson Hagood Stadium, home of the Citadel Bulldogs. Guests will enjoy a fashionably upscale New Years Eve Ball inside the Club Level & VIP patio from 9:00 pm until 2:00 am, with all-inclusive hors d’oeuvres and bar service, different genres of entertainment, visual and artistic production inside and outside on the football field, along with beautiful rooftop views of the entire city. A portion of proceeds benefits The Tanzanian Education Foundation, a Charleston based 501c-3 non-profit which provides funding for elementary education in Africa.
The entertainment lineup for the 2nd Annual Rose Ball, NYE 2014, included VIP Headliner DJ Jonas Tempel, Co-founder of Beatport & Factory Design Labs from Denver, Colorado, along with Vocalist Quiana Parler of Charleston, Miami based DJ & Radio Personality – DJ Cato K – who headlined in the Club Level; DJ Arthur Bros. from Charlotte, The Dubplates Band, Vocalist Timmy Davis, DJ Mateo, Deejay D-Nyce, Ballerina Andrea De Vries and Visual Art Production by Artist Banks Pappas of NYC, and more surprise performances..
Dress to impress in whatever makes you feel good, whether you feel like dressing up for a sophisticated ball or just a classy night out on the town. Indoor and outdoor access will be available throughout the night with additional seating areas for all guests.
Purchase tickets and VIP tables at here.In April 2015, the New York City television station NY1 filed a open-records request for “unedited video files from the NYPD’s body camera program” captured during five specific weeks in 2014 and 2015. Four months later, the New York City Police Department agreed to review and release the footage—but only after NY1 paid a $36,000 “copying fee.” NY1 appealed the N.Y.P.D.’s decision and, in a letter dated September 16 of last year, was once again denied by the N.Y.P.D.’s deputy commissioner of legal matters.
As the New York Post reported yesterday, the details of the N.Y.P.D.’s response, including the exorbitant fee (charged by a public agency with a budget of $4.8 billion*), were revealed in a lawsuit NY1 filed against the N.Y.P.D. in the Supreme Court of New York County on Wednesday. In it, the channel accuses the department of violating New York State’s Freedom of Information Law by inflating the cost of producing the requested body camera footage—a process that, according to the N.Y.P.D., involves copying video segments that could be withheld under certain privacy and security exemptions.
The fee does indeed come from a curious calculation of labor costs. In a letter to NY1 explaining the administrative denial of the channel’s appeal, a police official explained:
The [record access officer]’s estimate of the cost of processing a copy of the [body camera footage] was reasonable based on an estimate that the total time of footage recorded during the five weeks specified in the FOIL request was approximately 190 hours, and that in addition to the 190 hours required to view the recordings in real time, an additional 60% (or 114 hours) will be required to copy the footage in a manner that will redact the exempt portions of the [body camera footage], for a total of approximately 304 hours. The lowest paid NYPD employee with the skills required to prepare a redacted copy of the recordings is in the rank of police officer, and the cost of compensating a police officer is $120.00 per hour. Multiplying $120.00 by 304 hours equals $36,480, which closely approximates the amount estimated by the [records access officer].
It’s unclear where exactly these figures came from. A police officer is the third-lowest rank within the N.Y.P.D.’s rank structure; individuals holding that title make nowhere near $120 per hour, which is the equivalent of $249,600 per year (assuming a 40-hour workweek).
According to the Post, city lawyers had not yet been served with the complaint as of Wednesday night. In an email to Gawker, a spokesperson for NY1 wrote:
NY1 initially submitted a request to obtain video files from the NYPD’s pilot body camera program. The NYPD agreed to provide edited footage, but at a cost that is prohibitive and that we believe undercuts the purpose of our New York Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. We are appealing their decision.
We’ve asked the N.Y.P.D. for clarification about the $36,000 fee, and will update this post if we hear back. You can read the entirety of NY1’s lawsuit here.
* Correction: This post mistakenly attributed New York City’s municipal budget to the budget of the New York City Police Department. The city’s budget is 78.5 billion, and the N.Y.P.D.’s budget is 4.8 billion. (H/T Matt)
Email the author of this post: trotter@gawker.com // Photo credit: ShutterstockRiley. Bill Riley.
On 23 July 2009, Chris made his first and last IRC appearance in months. This time, however, he enters what he believed to be a secret "troll" chat, and thus adopted the troll alias of SonichuClone, a.k.a. Bill Riley (though he forgot that his hostname still said he was ChrisChanSonichu, thus blowing his cover immediately; the trolls played along, though). When pressured for a picture, Chris provided one that was on the first page of a Google image search for "man" at the time. Additionally, it was of a middle-aged man in formal attire; not exactly what would come to mind when you think of a typical troll. The Jack Thaddeus E-mails reveal that Jack had instructed Chris to join the Chat, as part of a larger plot to make Chris hump his favorite console.
Notably disturbing are 2 instances where "Bill" tries to persuade the trolls that compelling "Chris" to rape his pastoral counselor Rocky would be the perfect way to troll him. While there's a 0.001% possibility that Chris was particularly clever and tried to set a trap for the trolls by having trolls plan to rape Rocky, then notify the authorities, it is still 99.999% likely that he wanted to lose his virginity and wanted the trolls to give him a good excuse to come onto her.
Transcript
Artist's interpretation of Chris 'incognito.'
Start of #trolltrain4andhalf buffer: Thu Jul 23 19:35:32 2009
Now talking in #trolltrain4andhalf
Topic is 'I'M BORED OF WAITING ON SAM STILL LIKE
SERIOUSLY�'
Set by vivitheg!~starroadg@adorable.bunny on Wed Jul 22
22:29:56
Ganondorf has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
Ganondorf sets mode: +o Ganondorf
Ganondorf sets mode: +o vivitheg
Looking up vivitheg user info...
Looking up Ganondorf user info...
Luna has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
Luna is now known as Guest6138
Guest6138 is now known as Pudding
Pudding is now known as Lila
GeckoMantis has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
Lila is now known as Sabrina
Sabrina is now known as Serena
<Ganondorf> I WANT THE FUCKING TRIFORCE
Serena is now known as Stella
Stella is now known as Ruby
< Ruby > lets PARTY
champthom has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
champthom is now known as NumberTwo
Awesome_Sauce has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
< NumberTwo > BROTHERS!!!!!!
Awesome_Sauce is now known as NickDunbar
Retrieving #trolltrain4andhalf modes...
< NumberTwo > fffffffffffffffffffff
vivitheg changes topic to 'i'm sleepy�'
Looking up GeckoMantis user info...
Looking up vivitheg user info...
< NumberTwo > Twenty, twenty five minutes to go, I wanna be sedated.
< NumberTwo > Nothing to do, no way to go home, I wanna be sedated.
vivitheg changes topic to 'DEATH TO AMERICA�'
< NumberTwo > ALLAH ACKBAR!
< NumberTwo > ALLAH ACKBAR!
< NumberTwo > ALLAH ACKBAR!
Sonichu has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
Sonichu has left #trolltrain4andhalf
< NumberTwo > GREETINGS, CHRISTIAN...
< vivitheg > What was that?
SonichuClone has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
Looking up SonichuClone user info...
< Ruby > Herro
< vivitheg > Who are you?
Bill Riley
< SonichuClone > Hey, My name is Bill.
< Ruby > Bill WHO
< SonichuClone > Bill Riley
< vivitheg > Bill o reilly?
< SonichuClone > No, Bill Riley
< Ruby > lol
< NumberTwo > Fair enough...
< Ruby > where r u from?
< vivitheg > Who invited you?
< Ruby > asl?
< SonichuClone > I live in Maryland.
< vivitheg > This is invitation only
< NumberTwo > INVITATION ONLY!
< Ruby > A/S/L?
< SonichuClone > Yeah, I am a close buddy of Jack Thatius.
< SonichuClone > Thadius
< Ruby > shut up guys he might be hot
< vivitheg > of course, hot guys always welcome
< vivitheg > lol
< Ruby > lol
< SonichuClone > You bet I am, ladies. :)
< vivitheg > You got a picture?
< Ruby > Mmm how big?
< vivitheg > PICTURE!
< vivitheg > I WANT A PICTURE!
< Ruby > pics or gtfo
< Ruby > Whats ur cock size, Partner?
< SonichuClone > Okay, hang on. I gotta look it up on this computer.
< SonichuClone > about 5 Inches, give or take.
<Ganondorf> WHERE IS THE TRIFORCE OF COURAGE
< Ruby > Eh
< vivitheg > shut up ganon
< NumberTwo > WE WANT INFORMATION
< Ruby > Ball size?
< SonichuClone > I don't play that game.
< Ruby > How big is the sack?
< vivitheg > SHUT UP
< vivitheg > YOU PEOPLE ARE STUPID
< vivitheg > I JUST WANT A PICTURE OF NEW GUY
< SonichuClone > 2 inches in diamater.
< vivitheg > hot
< SonichuClone > let me find my pic.
< Ruby > thats a small sack, bucko
< vivitheg > so small is good
< vivitheg > well imo
< SonichuClone > small sack, LOTS OF CUM
< Ruby > hmmm
< vivitheg > well, we're going to be holding a meeting in 15 minutes
< Ruby > know how to use it?
< SonichuClone > Yeah, I am here for that.
< vivitheg > okay
< vivitheg > well just stick around
< vivitheg > BUT FIRST I WANT A PICTURE!
< SonichuClone > I'm down with it; I've been hating that Chris Chan for MONTHS.
< Ruby > ME TOO
< vivitheg > eh
< Ruby > I'm here cos Chris Chan's cock is too small
< Ruby > I h8t small cocks
< vivitheg > lol
< Ruby > So, I troll him.
< vivitheg > of course you do sweetie
< vivitheg > ANYWAY, PICTURE WOO
< Ruby > ;)
< Ruby > we can share this new cowboy vivi
< SonichuClone > I hear that.
< vivitheg > of course Ruby
< Ruby > Double dip, twist!
< SonichuClone > I found my pic, but I forgot how I share it; do I upload it on the IRC, or do I share a link?
< Ruby > tinypic.com
< vivitheg > upload it to like imageshack
< Ruby > upload there
< vivitheg > or tinypic wherever
< SonichuClone > cool.
< vivitheg > SQUEE
< vivitheg > I CAN'T WAIT
GeckoMantis is now known as TheRealCapnCrunch
< Ruby > mmmmm
JackThadeus has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
< vivitheg > WHAT UP JACK
< JackThadeus > welcome gentle trolls
< Ruby > Cowboy, can you double dip me and Viv?
< NumberTwo > WELCOME, BROTHER JACK.
< Ruby > I'm so wet right now
vivitheg sets mode: +o JackThadeus
< Ruby > I'm masterbating with my playstation controller
< SonichuClone > http://tinypic.com/r/2nvup01/3
< Ruby > i have it set on vibrate..........
< SonichuClone > LOL! :)
< vivitheg > snap! you're a bit old
< vivitheg > but I BET YOU GOT EXPERIENCE
< vivitheg > DONTCHA!?
< SonichuClone > I only LOOK Old; I'm actually 30
< Ruby > mmmm
< vivitheg > shit, you should do something about that
< SonichuClone > I get that a lot. ;)
< Ruby > looks like a soap opera star
< Ruby > I can dig it
< JackThadeus > You guys seen Boku No Pico?
< vivitheg > oh jack you
< Ruby > lolol
< JackThadeus > awesome boy porn
< Ruby > mmmmm shota
< Ruby > fap fap
< JackThadeus > want me to link pics guys?
< vivitheg > delicious
< Ruby > plz
< JackThadeus > meh mayber later after we get bizness done
< vivitheg > ANYWAY, where's your stupid ass daughter jack
<TheRealCapnCrunch> hey guys hows it going i just got back the meeting start yet
< vivitheg > SHUT UP CAPNCRUNCH YOU FUCKING MORON I HATE YOU
<NickDunbar>...Goddamnit Capn
< Ruby > Wheres cowboy?
< Ruby > Bill, hello
< JackThadeus > Ok people
< vivitheg > WHERE'S YOUR STUPID DAUGHTER OR IS SHE OUT OF THIS JACK
< Ruby > damn Jack is it buisness [sic] time already? I was about to get fucked by Bill.
< JackThadeus > Do you know the real reason for chris to follow the demands?
< vivitheg > duhhhhhhhh
< vivitheg > fuck microsoft, shit.
< JackThadeus > She was suppose to be here
< JackThadeus > i left her an email and everything.
< Ruby > ikr where the fuck is she
< vivitheg > WHATEVER, PROBABLY TOO BUSY DOING COCAINE lol
< Ruby > lolol
< JackThadeus > probably out with Maurice
< vivitheg > and cocaine
< JackThadeus > & Jamal
< vivitheg > and cocaine
< Ruby > and the rest of the jackson five
< Ruby > slut
< vivitheg > do ho ho ho
< vivitheg > ANYWAY, cowboy
< vivitheg > you know what's going down?
Ruby slaps SonichuClone around a bit with a large trout
< SonichuClone > :D
< JackThadeus > We want to piss off the Xbox 360 tards
< Ruby > Took you long enough
< vivitheg > fuck microsoft fanboys seriously
< Ruby > lol yeah
< JackThadeus > and ruin their sells
< vivitheg > we need to end the console wars
< vivitheg > SONY WILL WIN WOO
< Ruby > Hot huh, Bill? <TheRealCapnCrunch> nah the xbox is the shit
< vivitheg > okay i'm banning you
vivitheg sets mode: +b *!*@gecko.mantis
Timer 1 activated
< Ruby > HAHAHAH
Timer 1 halted
TheRealCapnCrunch was kicked by vivitheg (fuck you�)
< Ruby > what a small cock
<NickDunbar> So clueless
vivitheg sets mode: -b *!*@gecko.mantis
< vivitheg > ugh so stupid
< JackThadeus > A true fan of Sony would Hump/thrust the shit out of the ps3 console.
< vivitheg > so naive
< Ruby > yeah
< Ruby > a guy with a big cock would do it
< Ruby > and women would suck that shit
< Ruby > they'd eat all dat cum
< vivitheg > and none of us have big dicks HUH JACK EHHHHHHHHHHH
< vivitheg > HEH
FireBurnt has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
< JackThadeus > Plus anything would be better than seeing that crappy white console being humped
< vivitheg > shit son.
< Ruby > yeah
< JackThadeus > Xbox360 don't know hwo to make good GAMES
< vivitheg > but he's expressed resistance to the idea
<NickDunbar> Y'know why they call it the 360 right?
< NumberTwo > I do not know, why?
< Ruby > Yeah why
<NickDunbar> Because when you see it, you turn 360 degrees and walk away
< vivitheg > look, jack you gonna get him banned from psn permanently right if he doesn't agree?
< NumberTwo > LOLOLOLOLOL
<FireBurnt> you turn 360 degrees and moon walk away
< vivitheg > SHUT UP YOU JOKERS
< JackThadeus > 360 should be named 180, as in you see the console and wanna turn to go away
< JackThadeus > amirite?
< vivitheg > ugh jack listen to me
<FireBurnt> yeah
< JackThadeus > Yes My 2nd
< vivitheg > oh okay good
< Ruby > You fucking shriner, FireBurnt
< vivitheg > i want to ban him though, it'll be awesome
< vivitheg > can i do it?
< Ruby > Did you burn ur brain AND dick off in that fire of '06
< JackThadeus > only if we DONT have the sony humping video
< JackThadeus > that is when i'll consider it
< Ruby > right.
< JackThadeus > & I am not afraid of myself getting banned at the process
< vivitheg > god then i hope he doesn't do it then
< Ruby > If he doesn't do that video, he's a fucking no dick pussy
< vivitheg > anyway cowboy, what do you think of this whole thing?
< JackThadeus > I have an extra console in my person for the situation to happen.
< Ruby > kewl
vivitheg slaps SonichuClone with a HUGE-ASS TROUT.
< Ruby > SonichuClone
< vivitheg > yo cowboy
< vivitheg > pay attention bro
<FireBurnt> you there?
< SonichuClone > Yo, I'm just waitin' for the BIG Plan; what's next for the r-tard
< SonichuClone >?
< Ruby > lol
< vivitheg > lol
< NumberTwo > lol
Mysterious_Stranger has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
< Ruby > whadya mean, newbie?
< JackThadeus > why you gotta censore?
Mysterious_Stranger is now known as The_C_Man
< SonichuClone > I ain't censorin'
< vivitheg > well, what do you think about the ps3 thing
< Ruby > better not be
< JackThadeus > r-tard*
< SonichuClone > he's a motherfuckin retard
< vivitheg > that's what we wanted to know
<The_C_Man> Sounds pretty solid
< JackThadeus > ok then
< JackThadeus > the big plan
< SonichuClone > I LOATHE the 360. Damn Red Ring
<FireBurnt> this is a chat you know we chat here not wait
< Ruby > yeah he is, and he's goanna be a no dick retard if he doesnt do this
< vivitheg > yeah, fuck the 360
< SonichuClone > YES
< vivitheg > i'm ambivelent on the wii though
< vivitheg > what do you think about the wii?
< Ruby > agreed, I like Animal Crossing
< Ruby > It's cute.
< JackThadeus > You ever played any 360 games?
< SonichuClone > it's alright; I've only checked it in a store demo.
< JackThadeus > SonichuClone, aren't they terrible?
<FireBurnt> i say we plan a away to destroy all 360s but they're doing that by themselves
< vivitheg > do ho ho ho ho
<The_C_Man> Ooooh, that shit's gonna be TIGHT yo
< Ruby > you so black C WOMAN
< SonichuClone > I hated the 360 fuck-ups.
< vivitheg > of course
< vivitheg > Bill Gates...more like...Bill Gaytes
< vivitheg > heh amirite?
< NumberTwo > lol
< JackThadeus > Gears of War...shit...more like TEARS OF WAR
< Ruby > lol
< NumberTwo > VERY
< Ruby > lol ZING
<The_C_Man> Yeah dawg, dat shit'z gay
< JackThadeus > Star Wars: The Force unleashed? more like Star Whores: GAYS IN A LEASH
< NumberTwo > lol
< vivitheg > anyway, let's introduce cowboy here to the gang
< vivitheg > you know jack obviously
< vivitheg > leader of us all
< vivitheg > And I'm Vivian Gee
<The_C_Man> Man, dat sum homo shit
< vivitheg > nice to meet ya
<NickDunbar> D'oh ho ho
< JackThadeus > greetings
< SonichuClone > HAIL Jack! :)
< JackThadeus > :D
< vivitheg > FireBurnt is some crazy pyromaniac
< Ruby > I'm Ruby Serenity Minge
< vivitheg > and the other people are a bunch of faggots
< JackThadeus > Now SonichuClone
< Ruby > yeah he burnt his dick off
< SonichuClone > I'm a bit clueless on one detail, HOW is it you can get the retard banned from his fuckin' PSN?
< JackThadeus > everyone here has at least 3 reasons of hating/trolling Chrischan, The MAn Child.
< JackThadeus > What are your 3 reasons, my friend.
< JackThadeus >?*
< SonichuClone > Killed Clyde; Called me a homo after I trolled him, I think he even sent me a virus to take down my computer; I just fuckin' hate the batard.
< SonichuClone > *bastard
< JackThadeus > ok
< JackThadeus > On psn
< JackThadeus > you have 3 strikes then your out deal on the psn
Minovsky has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
< JackThadeus > Chris has been banned 2 times now
Surprise Sex
< SonichuClone > You know what we should do, we should make him force himself on his counslor; forgot her name, and film it.
< SonichuClone > *have him film it.
< JackThadeus > Which Counselor?
< Ruby > lol why?
< Ruby > Explain.
< SonichuClone > the counsoler he sees weekly
<The_C_Man> Whoa, dat shit's nuts
< JackThadeus > don't know
< vivitheg > uhhhh is her name julia?
< JackThadeus > don't care
< Ruby > EXPLAIN
< JackThadeus > listen
< SonichuClone > IDK, I think it started with an "R" if I recall.
< JackThadeus > Chris has 2 strikes on the banning
< Ruby > OH YEAH Rocky
< JackThadeus > the 3rd will console bann him for good
< SonichuClone > That's it.
< JackThadeus > yes
< JackThadeus > If he wants to complain
< JackThadeus > then he will have to hang himself in the process
< SonichuClone > hells yeah!
< vivitheg > lol like he told sam right?
< JackThadeus > So if he wants to shoot himself in the head he has no choice but to comply
< Ruby > Where IS Sam
< vivitheg > probably cocaine...ing.
< JackThadeus > but I do intend on following my end of the bargain
< Ruby > She needs to be off the case if shes doing this shit...
< JackThadeus > That much I promised him.
< vivitheg > of course, then we see a happy sony fan and PISSED OFF 360 FANS AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
< vivitheg > WOO.
< SonichuClone > YES!
< Ruby > You're so awesome Jack, you have the biggest cock
< vivitheg > (when he doesn't)
< JackThadeus > I know...
< Ruby > So honest...
<The_C_Man> SHit yeah, nigga got a WANG BANG
< Ruby > And humble...
< Ruby > Did you guys know Chris fucking shits himself 2
< Ruby > he's such a retard
< SonichuClone > DUDE!
< Ruby > lol ik
< Ruby > SonichuClone, you ready to be face sat?
< JackThadeus > Chris has 12 hours to comply before I call psn and report the both of us.
< vivitheg > shut up Ruby
< Ruby > lol
< vivitheg > you always gotta ask that
< JackThadeus > The video much be within 8 minutes of him begging me for his psn and humping/thrusting himself upon his console.
< vivitheg > of course, showing how loyal he is to sony
< Ruby > Jack, you are like an electrode
< vivitheg > that way we have something to hang over the head of 360 fans
< vivitheg > they have nothing
< vivitheg > we have chris
< vivitheg > yawn, i'm sleepy
< JackThadeus > So what did you think of clyde, my former lover, sonichu clone? mind if I call you SC for short?
< Ruby > we need some pep
< vivitheg > i liked cowboy better
< JackThadeus > w/e proceed please.
Ruby slaps SonichuClone around a bit with a large trout
The_C_Man is now known as Nigafingaonnatrigga
The_Mistress has joined #trolltrain4andhalf
< SonichuClone > He was a cool man; I enjoyed our conversations.
< SonichuClone > and smokin weed too. :)
<The_Mistress> Hello everyone.
<Nigafingaonnatrigga> Sounds like a tight nigga. Whatchoo talk about
< Ruby > lol
< SonichuClone > SC is cool; sounds like Soul Calibur.
< vivitheg > sup mistress, we got a newcomer here
< vivitheg > anyway jack continue
<The_Mistress> Oh really?
< JackThadeus > What have you conversed with clyde about awhile back?
Nigafingaonnatrigga is now known as NigaTriggaFinga
< JackThadeus > i'm blurry on the details
< JackThadeus > never told me while we were in bed/smoking weed.
<NigaTriggaFinga> Weed iz da BOMB
< Ruby > I love Soul Calibur
< Ruby > I am Talim
< SonichuClone > Shit about Chris, and whatnot. Yeah, this was about a year ago, the last time I talked to him.
< SonichuClone > I like the picture he shared on the net to deceive the retard.
< JackThadeus > If u could do 1 thing to chris, SC, what would you do?
< SonichuClone > really off-the charts.
Doubling Down on the Surprise SexIt’s a Tuesday afternoon on campus, and as I’m about to pass through Sather Gate, I see a nice-looking girl handing out flyers and yelling something about saving trees or lowering fees or some other important thing that sounds like that. Whatever it is, I’d rather just keep walking. So when she extends her flyer-ful hand at me, I employ the classic thwarting technique: “Sorry, I’ve got to get to class!” Even though it’s only 1:54 p.m.
Continuing past Dwinelle Hall, an unprecedentedly jovial CalPirg representative asks me if I’ve pledged. Panicking and knowing that he’ll ask for my money, I opt for a simple shaking of my head. The dude behind me, walking with two of his friends who probably endorse his impudence, lets out a semi-flippant “nah.” Internally I chuckle, not because I condone his sassy behavior or because I actually find his remark funny, but because I empathize with his aversion.
Having safely escaped the outer periphery of the Land of Solicitation, I reflect: Why is it that whenever I’m asked to take a survey or a flyer or to sign a petition, I’m overwhelmed with this soul-crushing sensation of anxiety and guilt? Is it our fault, as students, for being too close-minded and self-centered in our own life and responsibilities? Or does the blame belong to the solicitors for being too rapacious and impersonal?
In order to delve into these questions, I decided that I would have to make myself a solicitor. But in order to solicit, one must have some sort of soliciting tool. I didn’t want to make flyers (too brief an interaction), and I didn’t want to make something political or money-requiring (too soulless).
So I decided to go where no man has gone before: I decided to make a weird-ass, pointless survey.
After much soul searching, this is the survey that I created:
What is your favorite color? Describe your hands using two different adjectives. If you had to jump into a swimming pool full of a substance of your choice, what substance would you choose? Yes or no question: Do you consider yourself dangerous? What is your favorite word? What is your favorite brown food? Describe your favorite texture in one word. What’s the first word that comes to your mind when I say “facemask”? Describe how you felt when I asked to give you a survey. Describe how you feel right now.
Needless to say, I was excited to start asking people these ludicrous questions. But as a first-time solicitor, I had to lay down a few guidelines for myself:
I cannot answer the question: What’s this survey about? (If I tell them it’s “fun,” they will be more inclined to take it, which would compromise the validity of the experiment.) If someone asks me that question, I tell them, “You have to take it to find out.”
I must approach everyone with the same demeanor: smiling, positive — at times downright ebullient.
I must always phrase the question in the same way: “Hey, would you mind answering a really quick survey?”
Over the course of four days, I went around campus to Memorial Glade, QualComm Cafe, the Dwinelle benches, 4.0 Hill and Sproul Plaza, and I had some of the most enjoyable social interactions of my life. When I first approached them, most people seemed to be completely willing to participate (to be exact, 60 out of 77 agreed to take the survey). That was the first surprise. The second surprise was how few people seemed to be nonplussed by the unconventional nature of the survey. A lot of people didn’t even care to ask me what the survey was for.
Of course, there were those 17 people who rejected me — I’ll never forget the girl in QualComm who said she couldn’t participate because she was “having a texting conversation.” But overall, most seemed eager to have a break from their reading or their texting or whatever solitary activity they had been engaged in.
Before I go any further, here’s the stuff you really care about:
Twenty-nine out of 60 said their favorite color is blue.
By far the most common adjective that people used to describe their hands was “small” (27 percent).
An overwhelming plurality of free-thinking, creative UC Berkeley students (21 out of 60) said, in response to the swimming pool question, that they would like |
caps in the Waiver Draft.
The Union also released central defender Juan Diego Gonzalez and goalkeeper Thorne Holder. Waiving Gonzalez and Holder opened up two international roster spots, one of which was needed to acquire Khalfan.
Khalfan is a Tanzanian international, having represented his country in 25 officially sanctioned FIFA games, scoring five times. The 23-year-old's time with the Whitecaps wasn't nearly as successful as his international career, spending 48 games between Vancouver's USL and MLS editions, scoring only three times. He potentially fills in directly at left midfielder for the departed Mapp, but worries about his endurance make him more likely to be an impact substitute later in games.
Each of the Union's two released players did not see the field last season. Gonzalez and Holder both spent time either not being included in the team's game day squad of 18, or with the medical staff.
Holder was hampered all season by multiple injuries, including a couple of concussions. The former Trinidad and Tobago youth international started the season off as the Union's second string goalkeeper, but injuries and strong showings from fellow rookie Zac MacMath in practice pushed Holder down the depth chart. Late in the season, Holder was injured against the Columbus Crew in a reserve game and did not return from it. Emergency goalkeeper Chase Harrison joined the Union, taking the role of back up while Faryd Mondragon recovered from surgery on his right ring finger.
Gonzalez was signed in August of 2010 and made a few starts for the Union, but was quickly relegated to the bench, where he was seldom seen by the end of the 2011 MLS season. The 31-year-old has had a hard time settling with any club during his 14-year soccer career, playing with 10 different teams over that span, none for longer than two seasons. The Colombian center back made around $193,000 in guaranteed compensation last season, making him one of the worst values in MLS.by CYRYL JAKUBOWSKI
A bill that would increase the total of allowed runways from eight to 10 at O’Hare International Airport without the need for state approval and possibly lead to increased soundproofing was approved by the Illinois House Transportation Vehicles and Safety Committee in the House of Representatives last week, according to State Senator John Mulroe (D-10).
Mulroe said that passage of Senate Bill 636 would be the first step toward increasing the number of allowed runways at O’Hare.
Under the current law the Chicago Department of Aviation must be granted approval by the Illinois Department of Aeronautics in order to operate more than eight runways at the airport.
Mulroe said that he is working on the legislation in order to prevent the decommissioning of two diagonal runways at O’Hare. City Department of Aviation spokeswoman Karen Pride said in an e-mail that the department still plans to decommission Runway 14 Left/32 Right on Aug. 20.
"Everyone has been pushing to get the bill called, and I think it’s a move in the right direction so that we can have more time to discuss possible solutions without closing the diagonals," Mulroe said.
The committee did not hear a second bill sponsored by Mulroe, Senate Bill 637, which would prohibit the city from closing the diagonal runways altogether. Both bills were approved by the Illinois Senate by 52-0 votes recently.
State Representative John D’Amico (D-15), who is the chairman of the transportation committee, said that getting Senate Bill 636 passed by the committee was a step in the right direction.
"Everyone has been keeping pressure on this so that we can provide some relief to the communities on the Northwest Side and in the suburbs," D’Amico said.
Mulroe said that by not using the diagonal runways, 97 percent of air traffic was directed to areas east and west of the airport, which resulted in significant increases in the numbers of complaints about jet noise.
"In order to operate more runways, they would need permission from the state, that’s why one of the bills increases the number of allowed runways to 10," Mulroe said.
State Representative Marty Moylan (D-55) sponsored an amendment to Mulroe’s bill that replaces the current aircraft noise monitoring metric, the Day Night Average Sound Level, with a new metric called the Community Noise Equivalent Level.
The current day night standard adds a 10-decibel penalty on each aircraft that operates from 10 p.m. to 7 p.m., but no penalty is added on flights before 10 p.m. The proposed community noise standard would place a 5-decibel penalty on flights between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. in addition to the 10-decible penalty on overnight flights.
The Federal Aviation Administration currently accepts the CNEL standard when determining noise impact on families, businesses and other institutions such as schools, according to Moylan.
The greater the emphasis on evening noise may result in more soundproofing funds for the areas affected by expanding the noise contour, according to Moylan’s office. The FAA controls qualifications for residential soundproofing, and the O’Hare Noise Compatibility Commission and Chicago Department of Aviation administer the program.
"This legislation can provide relief from the burden of airplane noise through an increase in soundproofing eligibility, as well as potentially allowing the diagonal runways to stay open," Moylan said. "A combination of increased eligibility for soundproofing and a more equitable distribution of flights across all available runways is one way to provide meaningful relief to families impacted by the unbearable level of noise."
The Fair Allocation in Runways coalition of community groups supports keeping the diagonal runways open because it said that would not expose any new residents to increased noise and that it would allow for more options to allocate air traffic in a fairer manner.
Coalition co-founder Jac Charlier said that the legislation is a step toward saving the diagonal runways, but he was skeptical about the intentions of the city Department of Aviation.
"I have never encountered a public agency that behaves so secretly as if they were the National Security Agency," Charlier said. "They don’t call back and they don’t release any information."
Charlier criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel for failing to meet with the group and other lawmakers who support the issue. "This is Emanuel’s Meigs Field, and the entire O’Hare operation continues to move forward in secret without any citizen input," he said.
Charlier said that the city aviation department recently moved equipment from the runway that is scheduled for decommissioning in August and that the move undermines Mulroe’s efforts. "It just makes it seem that the diagonals will close either way and that it’s all going to happen regardless of what he is trying to accomplish," he said.
"There is no down side to the mayor coming to the table and listening to people’s concerns," Charlier said.
The FAA recently announced that it would hold four public meetings this summer to present results from a re-evaluation of an environmental impact study conducted several years ago before the opening of a new runway in October on the south side of O’Hare.
Aviation administration spokesman Tony Molinaro said recently that the re-evaluation was made necessary because of a change in the schedule of runway construction. Molinaro said that runway 10 Right/28 Left originally was scheduled to be the last one to open.
Molinaro said that the city agreed with United Airlines and American Airlines on a schedule to open new runways as part of the O’Hare Modernization Plan but that the schedule has changed and a re-evaluation is required. Runway 9 Center/27 Center originally was the next one to be commissioned, but now it is scheduled to be completed by 2020.
The runway will be located north of Irving Park Road, which was redirected in recent years to make way for it. "The FAA doesn’t close or open runways, the city does," Molinaro said. "The only thing that’s really changing for us is that a new runway will be opening a lot sooner than originally expected, and we want to re-evaluate the impact of that."
In other O’Hare news, U.S. Representative Mike Quigley (D-5) announced that he had secured language in the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development funding bill for fiscal year 2016, which was approved the House Appropriations Committee, mandating the FAA develop short- and long-term measures to mitigate jet noise experienced by communities around the airport.
"As an appropriator with direct oversight of the FAA, I am doing everything in my power to ensure that the FAA is not only responsive to my constituents but is also committed to finding solutions to the unprecedented level of noise pollution they’re experiencing every day," Quigley said in a press release. "By mandating the FAA to investigate the increased noise that has resulted from the O’Hare Modernization Program and report to Congress on potential measures to alleviate local concerns, I’m holding the FAA accountable to Chicagoans who live beneath the flight paths of the world’s busiest airport.
The bill would require the FAA to report to the Appropriations Committee 90 days after the House approves the bill.
Quigley announced in April that the Office of Management and Budget approved conducting a study the FAA will use to determine if the current 65 decibel Day-Night Average Sound Level metric used to measure acceptable airplane noise should be changed to address increased noise pollution.
The 65 DNL standard has been in place since the 1970s when air traffic volume was far lower than it is today, according to Quigley.
Emanuel announced on May 8 that the FAA would expedite the study to review the national metric for measuring noise near 20 airports in the country. The study could help more residents qualify for the O’Hare Residential Sound Insulation Program.News Release: Associated Press
April 8, 2015
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Traffic ticket quotas for law enforcement agencies would be illegal under a bill passed by the Florida Senate.
The so-called "Waldo Bill" (SB 264) passed unanimously with no debate Wednesday. It must still pass the House and be approved by the governor to become law.
The bill's nickname comes from the city of Waldo on heavily travelled U.S. 301, once considered one of the nation's worst speed traps. In 2014, Waldo police officers disclosed a quota system, and the Gainesville Sun reported that traffic tickets accounted for almost half the city's revenue. The police force has since been disbanded.
The bill also requires a city or county to report to state officials if traffic ticket revenue exceeds a third of the cost of operating its law enforcement agency.
News Release: Associated Press
October 1, 2014
WALDO, Fla. (AP) -- The City Council of a tiny north Florida town known as one of the nation's worst speed traps has voted to disband its small police force.
The Waldo City Council on Tuesday voted 4-1 to eliminate the department just weeks after the chief and interim chief resigned because of state investigations into many issues, including an illegal ticket quota.
City Manage Kim Worley told the Gainesville Sun that a Florida Department of Law Enforcement audit found many expensive computer and facilities fixes were needed, a cost the small town cannot afford.
The move follows a revolt by five Waldo officers, who alleged that they were forced to meet an illegal ticket quota and that evidence was being stored improperly by the department's interim chief.
News Release: Associated Press
September 6, 2014
WALDO, Fla. (AP) -- One of the two Waldo police chiefs suspended over the past month due to allegations of illegal ticket quotas has resigned.
The north Florida town this week agreed to allow the Alachua County Sheriff's Office to provide security.
Waldo Police Chief Michael Szabo was suspended Aug. 12 after a state investigation into the alleged quotas. The Ocala Star-Banner reports that Szabo resigned Friday evening.
Szabo's interim replacement was suspended after a group of officers complained at a city council meeting about the illegal ticket quotas.
City Manager Kim Worley says the agreement with the sheriff's office gives her time to find a permanent replacement who does not currently work for the police department.
State authorities also are investigating the ticket quota and other alleged misconduct by Szabo.Nex
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Event information
Friends Chat – UwS Kamikazi
– UwS Kamikazi Location – Nex boss door, world 39 (may change due to people already there, etc)
– Nex boss door, world 39 (may change due to people already there, etc) Date and time
UTC Pacific Mountain Central Eastern UK Europe East Aus 7:00 pm
Sat, 6 Sep 11:00 am
Sat, 6 Sep 12:00 pm
Sat, 6 Sep 1:00 pm
Sat, 6 Sep 2:00 pm
Sat, 6 Sep 7:00 pm
Sat, 6 Sep 8:00 pm
Sat, 6 Sep 6:00 am
Sun, 7 Sep
The event is over.
Requirements:
You need to have a Frozen Key to enter the Zaros room in the God Wars Dungeon. Getting this key can take a while, so do this before the event. Do not bring this into the room where we fight Nex - if you lose it on death, you won't be able to come pick up your stuff.
Due to the latest update to Nex you MUST use two styles of combat, in order to kill Nex efficiently. See down below for more information on this topic
Partial completion of the Troll Stronghold quest.
39 Prayer necessary, 43 Prayer EXTREMELY recommended
70 Ranged (Cannot be boosted)
At least 70+ Combat in whatever style your are using is EXTREMELY recommended.
At least 75+ Defence
Optional:
Ancient ceremonial robes EXTREMELY recommended for anybody, including high levels. While they do let you skip the kill count for Nex, monsters in the dungeon are still aggressive.
God related armor to protect you on your way to the Nex (Optional)
Drops distribution: Coinshare
This is a guide with basic information about nex.
For a full strategy guide, see Nex/Strategies
Getting there
You will need a pair of Climbing boots if not utilizing the Trollheim Teleport spell and a rope if you have not been inside the GWD before.
Climbing up the mountain - Using climbing boots, you can teleport to Burthorpe with a games necklace and climb all the way up to Trollheim through Death Plateau.
Teleporting there - Using the Trollheim Teleport (or tablet) will teleport you right to the top of the mountain, making it the ideal arrival method. No climbing boots are needed.
When we all get to Trollheim using the various methods mentioned above, as a group, we will run past Thrower trolls to get to a snowy area with a large boulder. Your stats will be drained here so we must be quick. Push away or slide past the boulder and run forward until you find the ruins with wolves and a giant hole. Take 10+ food with you to protect you from the monsters inside. Once you are in, head South until you get to the large door to access Nex's stronghold. Here you need to have at least 70 Strength, Constitution, Agility and Ranged.
Note: In order to get in, you need a Frozen Key. It is highly recommended to bring Ancient Ceremonial Robes.
Once we are past the frozen door, climb down the stairs and squeeze through the gap in the wall. The monsters in this room will always be aggressive, so take plenty of food. Run until the end of the cave and equip your Ancient Ceremonial Robes. Enter the door and you have made it to the Nexbank. This is the place where you set yourself up for the actual Nex event. Make sure you bank your Frozen Key!
Recommended setups
You are not obligated to wear anything on this list for the event.
Note that since the latest update to Nex, you now need two combat styles in order to kill Nex efficiently. Nex will switch Ranged and Magic prayers every other kill and often uses Deflect from Melee therefore you can not use just one of those styles when you start your Nex trip. This means you would have to bring a hybrid setup such as Ranged+Melee or Magic+Ranged).
The recommended gear section below assumes you bring two combat styles and bring the armour from that style aswell. You can use a hybrid armour instead, such as Warpriest armor to save yourself inventory slots but doing this is not recommended due to the low Armour ratings of these armours.
Inventory
The following is only a recommendation.
Runes for your best spell, if using Magic
Familiar: Bring a beast of burden, and summon a healer once it is empty.
Emergency teleport, also used to leave the chamber
The phases
This section lists all the different attacks Nex will use. A caller from the Events Team will shout out which prayer to use each phase during the fight and he will also tell you which style not to use when Nex uses one of her deflect prayers.
This is the basic for your prayers: Magic, Ranged, Magic, Magic, Magic (1st phase, 2nd phase, 3rd->5th phase)
The basic for Nex her prayers is: Magic OR Ranged deflect during our first kill, after that she switches deflects every other kill. If she prays Deflect from Magic during our first kill, she will use Deflect from Ranged on the 2nd kill and then Deflect from Magic again during our 3rd. Note that during the 5th phase her Deflect prayers are RANDOM so she could pray any deflect curse during that phase.
"Let the virus flow through you!" - One player (the one Nex targets) will be infected, saying "cough" every time their stats are drained. The player will rapidly lose stats and after a while, it will dissipate. It can spread to other players, and has a 3x3 spreading radius from the player.
"There is... NO ESCAPE!" - Nex will teleport and fly through one of the paths of the central symbol, damaging players who stand in her way for up to 4000 and disabling their protection prayers.
Dragging a player - Draws a player to Nex, deactivating their prayers and stunning them. Nex tends to do this during the beginning of the phase, and after that she usually tends to do the drag after she does her "NO ESCAPE!" attack.
During this phase, she will use Smoke spells in the form of chaotic clouds. These have a moderate range and are also capable of poisoning the player, up to 360 poison damage. Her special abilities in this phase are:
After she reaches 4/5th of her life points and her mage Fumus is killed, she will go to the next phase.
"Fear the shadow!" - Shadow traps will appear under every player in the area. After 3 ticks, any player still standing on them will be hit for up to 4000 damage.
"Embrace darkness!" - The room will be darkened drastically. The closer you are to Nex, the darker the room will be. If you stand too close to Nex for five seconds, you will get a message saying "The shadows start to consume you!" and be dealt rapid damage up to 700 per tick until you get away from her.
During this phase, she will use Shadow spells, which are in fact ranged attacks that represents a shadowed vampyre. This is the only phase where she uses ranged-based attacks. Her special abilities in this phase are:
After she reaches 3/5th of her life points and her mage Umbra is killed, she will go to the next phase.
"A siphon will solve this!" - Nex will summon up to three blood reavers and kneel down for about 8 ticks. During this, all damage she receives instead heals her, shown by purple hit splats. Any blood reavers from the previous siphon will instantly die, and Nex will be healed by however many life points they had remaining.
"I demand a blood sacrifice!" - Nex will target a player, who will glow red. If the player does not move away from Nex in time, she will heal an amount equal to 100% of the targets maximum life points and deal damage equal to 10% of them. It is advised to run if targeted. Note that the Escape ability will not work if you have recently used a stunning basic ability e.g. Backhand or Impact, and it is therefore not advised to use them until it uses the blood sacrifice attack. Nex seems to use this attack on the farthest player from her. If all players are close enough, she will pick a player within melee range.
Healing - This ability is active from the start of the blood phase and last until the phase ends. If Nex is attacked with a successful bleed over time ability, such as Combust, Fragmentation Shot, Deadshot, Dismember or Slaughter, the hits will instead heal Nex instead of doing damage.
During this phase, she will use Blood spells which will heal her. Her special abilities in this phase are:
After she reaches 2/5th of her life points and her mage Cruor is killed, she will go to the next phase. If she sacrifices the Blood reavers before she calls Cruor's name out, the health must be depleted again. If she calls Cruor's name out, she will not heal from the reavers.
"Die now, in a prison of ice!" - Nex freezes a targeted player using an ice stalagmite attack. When the ice recedes, the trapped player will be hit for 5000+ damage. However, it is possible to use the ability freedom and eat or break the icicles and for other players to destroy the icicles that make up the prison, allowing the trapped player to avoid damage.
"Contain this!" - Nex creates a barrier of ice (3 by 3 squares) around her. Players caught in the original ice barrier will be dealt up to 3500 damage, get stunned and be unable to eat. Small icicle rushes will surge from them, dealing up to 2000 damage if they hit a player but will not cause any stun effects.
During this phase, she will use Ice spells which will target all players, freeze them and lower prayer points. Her special attacks in this phase are:
After she reaches 1/5th of her life points and her mage Glacies is killed, she will go to the last phase.
Final phase: During this phase, she will only use her normal magic and melee attacks. However, they will become far more accurate and powerful, hitting massive (2000) damage even through prayer. She will cycle between using Soul Split, Deflect Curses and no overhead prayer.
"NOW, THE POWER OF ZAROS!" - At the start of this phase, Nex heals to 2/5th of her life points (she heals 40,000 turning it to 80,000) and activates Turmoil, giving her greater Attack, Strength, and Defence and lowering those stats from all players.
"Taste my wrath!" - Upon death, Nex will activate Wrath, dealing up to 3000 damage to all nearby players. Her version of Wrath has a larger radius than that of players, but activates after 3 ticks.
Should you die
Death is usually fairly bothersome, but not on this trip. If you should die, your grave will be blessed, giving you a complete hour to return and pick up your items. For this reason it is very important that you don't bring your Frozen Key into Nex's room - if you lose your key, you won't be able to reach your items!
Obviously, any items you may be carrying that are not being protected by the gravestone will be lost, so plan what you will bring accordingly. If you require boosts or are very new with the GWD area, you can ask an events team member or a friend to help you on the way back. Your grave will be in the place you died.
Drops
Nex is among the toughest bosses one can fight, but her standard drops are worth hundreds of thousands of coins, with some of them even worth more than harder bosses like Vorago. Unlike most bosses, Nex's drops are split into equal sections of 4 or 5 at a time, to let all players receive some loot.
Drop splits
Depending on your LootShare potential, you may be able to receive most if not all of the split drops.
Nex's unique drops are tier 80 Power armour for every class, three full armour sets that offer high defence and offense and are sought by many players. She also drops the Virtus wand and book, tier 80 Magic weapons together equivalent to the chaotic staff, and the zaryte bow, a Ranged equivalent to the chaotic maul.More men turning to implants for chests of gold MORE MEN SEEKING PEC PERFECTION, AND WILL PAY FOR IT
Pectoral implants were received in this man two years ago. Pectoral implants were received in this man two years ago. Photo: Liz Hafalia Photo: Liz Hafalia Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close More men turning to implants for chests of gold 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
The poster boy in the Abercrombie & Fitch window looks like Huck Finn, if Huck were genetically engineered with "Say howdy!" nipples and perfectly symmetrical, squared-off pecs. In "300," last year's cartoonish gladiator epic, the actors looked so exaggerated, so cyborg-like in their soccer-star thighs, ripped abs and shield-like chests, that they all seemed airbrushed.
The list goes on: the ultra-reconditioned Brad Pitt in "Troy," Daniel Craig in tight trunks in "Casino Royale," that buck-naked beauty in the steamy Dolce & Gabbana magazine ad.
Is anybody just average-looking anymore? In a culture that enshrines physical perfection and makes the Philip Seymour Hoffmans among us feel homely and inadequate, more men are attempting impossible goals. Most do it through weightlifting and dieting. Some men are driven to steroids, human growth hormone and plastic surgery if those other methods fail.
"Location is everything," says Bill Hayes, a lifelong bodybuilder and writer on health and medical issues ("The Anatomist"). "And in the landscape of the body, the chest is prime territory. Think about it: It's at the top of the trunk; it protects and covers the heart and lungs. It's a great spot for a head to rest on."
More and more often, when men don't achieve results through weightlifting and exercise, they compensate with cosmetic surgery. Pectoral implants, although still a niche product, are growing in popularity: 409 procedures were performed in 2006, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, a 99 percent increase over the year before. There's a stigma attached to them - the feeling that men who go that route are lazy or excessively vain - but those who buy the implants contend that the psychological benefits are substantial.
"It's such a confidence booster," says one San Francisco massage therapist who got the implants two years ago as a 40th birthday gift to himself. "I walk a little taller now. And of course you want to buy every tight white T-shirt. It's crazy!"
Anthony Durante, a San Francisco personal trainer for 25 years, says well-defined pecs project "power, strength, health, virility.
"A guy with a great chest looks like a warrior, wearing armor for battle. Nothing can penetrate that hull."
Among his clients, Durante says, "the chest is usually their first concern." "Every time a man looks in a mirror," adds Hayes, "whether shaving or at the gym, he sees his chest. So naturally it becomes a focus of his attention or even obsession - as opposed to back muscles, which generally go unseen and are often ignored entirely."
For most of the 20th century, weightlifting and the "300" body ideal were marginalized, regarded as fetishy by mainstream standards. Consider 1940s movie stars like Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant, or '60s icons Steve McQueen and Paul Newman: They had looks and charisma; they were trim. But none had the Vin Diesel superhero physique or overdeveloped chest of today's cultural ideal.
"It was sometime in the '80s when it sort of all began for men," says Edisol W. Dotson, author "Behold the Man: The Hype and Selling of Male Beauty in Media and Culture" (Haworth Press, 1999). "You saw it in the 'Terminator' films and big action adventures. The early Batman films."
Pec implant surgery starts at about $7,000. Beverly Hills surgeon Adrien Aiache, who performs about three dozen procedures per year, says he charges $9,000. The massage therapist, who asked not to be identified because he is sensitive about appearing overly vain, says he paid $12,000 and has no regrets. "No one's ever said, not once, 'Are those implants?' " he claims - including the men with whom he's been intimate.
He'd thought about getting new pecs for years, but balked because of bad implants he'd seen.
"There was this one guy at a bar in the Castro, years and years ago," he said. "Oh my God, it was so obnoxiously fake. Like a Pamela Anderson kind of thing. I would never want to be that obvious."
Randall shopped around, researched the pros and cons, and chose Dr. James J. Romano, a San Francisco plastic surgeon who performs 35 to 40 pec implant surgeries per year. The procedure is expensive, in part, Romano says, because the implants, manufactured by Allied Biomedicals in Ventura, cost $1,600 for a pair.
"People buy cars, right?" said the massage therapist. "People buy property. I thought, 'I'll buy a set of pecs!' Like shopping at Crate & Barrel. 'I'll take that one.' " The implants come in two shapes and five sizes, and are made from silicone - not the soft liquid gel in breast implants, but a semi-solid substance. They're slightly more firm than the consistency of a Gummy Bear.
"My close friends asked me, 'Weren't you frightened going in for that kind of surgery?' I said, 'Oh, my God, I could walk out on Powell and get hit by one of those crazy cabs.' Never postpone joy is, like, my big mantra."
Pec implants were introduced 20 years ago, Romano says, although as recently as 2000, the statistics weren't recorded by the surgeons' group.
"It's a cult following, almost, although it's growing because of the media and the Internet." For the most part it's cosmetic, but in some cases men seek implants because of congenital deformities: They're missing ribs or a pectoral muscle on one said, or there's a natural concavity they want to correct.
During the operation, Romano says, "I make an incision high up in the armpit in the hair-bearing region. It's about three fingers wide. Then the space is made under the muscle in what we call a 'free area' in surgery: free of nerves, free of blood vessels."
Romano folds the implant in half and positions in between the pectoral muscles, sews up the incision and then repeats the process on the other side of the chest. Recovery is "mostly quite comfortable," Romano says, "and is mostly complete within two weeks."
When the massage therapist awoke in the recovery room, he remembers, "I felt like someone had beat the crap out of me. Thank God there's Demerol. It was hard for me to even get up. I was so heavy and taking all these pain pills to dull the throbbing.... I was kind of scared. And being a massage therapist I thought, 'Oh, my God, what if I can't use my arms?' (But) I have full range of motion and I'm strong. You would just never know!"
Romano says he screens patients carefully to make sure their expectations are realistic.
"Some men come in and ask for it, and either don't have the anatomy that will allow me to do it and look good, or they want something that is too big or out of proportion. I don't take all comers."
The risks of the procedure include a possible migration. "(The implant) can move a little bit. I tell the patients, 'You're going to feel the edges sometimes when you're lifting or involved in the extreme ranges of motion or other activities. It's never going to be like your God-given chest.' But that's the art and science of putting in pectoral implants. You've got to match them to the body."
Even today, men form a tiny minority of plastic surgery patients. In 2006, there were 11.5 million cosmetic procedures performed in the United States, 1 million of which were on men. Nose reshaping was the most popular procedure for men in 2006, followed by eyelid surgery, liposuction, hair transplant and gynecoplastia - the removal of breast tissue caused by an estrogen imbalance.
So why, given the obsession for the perfect chest, haven't pec implants been more popular? One reason is that pectoral muscles are large, and with diligent workouts they can usually be developed. Women, by contrast, don't have that option when larger breasts are the goal.
Aiache of Beverly Hills thinks homophobia is also a factor.
"A lot of people with pectoral implants are gay, and many physicians don't want to take care of the gay population in general," he says. In his own practice, Aiache says, 80 percent of pectoral implant recipients are gay.
"Pec implants have much more shame attached to them than, say, breast implants," says Durante. "Breast implants are so widely known that even though they are'spotted' or'suspected,' they are part of the cultural landscape. There is also a vanity attached to pec implants: They may be considered a character flaw (in the man). He's seen as weak."
San Francisco plastic surgeon James Anthony doesn't perform pec implants surgery, in part because of the risks. "It's possible to have malpositioning of the implant, where it's in the wrong spot and one's a little higher than the other. It also has a chance of infection, but any foreign body has a chance of infection. And then the other thing you have to be careful of is not to damage the nerve that goes to the nipple. Because otherwise you get numbness, which is a consideration for some men."
Opinions differ on the attractiveness of pec implants. Durante says the majority look obvious "because they don't match their shoulder and arm development - not unlike a woman whose breast implants are too big." Hayes said he finds implants "rigid and plasticky."
Maura Armstrong Morgan, an echocardiographer with Golden Gate Radiology in San Francisco, has her own problem with implants, pectoral or breast alike. "You can't see through them with sonar. They block the sound waves, so you're unable to obtain useable images," she said. "Normally, you shoot between the ribs and get this wonderful image of a beating heart."
With implants, "you get this big, egg-shaped void.... So I have to shoot obliquely. I had one patient doing everything but standing on their head to get a picture of their heart."
Before he had the pectoral implants, the massage therapist said his chest was "OK." "But I just wanted it to be more. The whole peacock image, if you like. You want a bigger spread of feathers.... It's a bit of a magnet."
Some people understand his decision to get the implants, and some people don't. "There's a community out there that says, 'Oh, God, why would you do plastic surgery?' And I'm like, whatever. 'Why do people eat at McDonald's every day?' You could go on and on forever, right?"India is on its way to building what will be the world’s tallest statue, honoring Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the country’s first home minister and one of the founding fathers of the Republic of India.
Named the “Statue of Unity,” the monument is slated to be about 600 feet tall, nearly twice the size of the Statue of Liberty (305 feet) in New York and more than four times higher than Christ the Redeemer (130 feet) in Rio de Janeiro.
The structure, a pet project of Narendra Modi, opposition leader and chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, is to be built on an island in the Narmada River and is expected to take about four years to complete. Authorities have also encouraged citizens to contribute to the project by donating scraps of metal and tools to be used in the statue’s construction.
“People come to see the Taj Mahal, flock to America for the Statue of Liberty and France for the Eiffel Tower. Now people from all over the world will come here to see this wonder,” Modi said during the inaugural ceremony of the construction on Thursday, the 138th anniversary of the birth of Sardar Patel, often known as the “Iron Man of India.”
“We have asked farmers from every village in India to give old pieces of their agricultural tools, just 200 grams or 400 grams would do,” Modi said from the site at Kevadia, 105 miles from Gujarat's biggest city Ahmedabad, AFP reported.
According to reports, the total cost to build the “Statue of Unity” is estimated at about $340 million, which will be comprised of both public funds and private donations. Once completed, the new statue will surpass the 420-foot Spring Temple Buddha in China's Henan province, currently the world’s tallest statue.
The memorial is seen by some as a political maneuver from Modi and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, as it honors a man who was associated with the ruling Congress Party, the main rival of the BJP in the upcoming national elections in 2014. The iron-and-bronze statue of Sardar Patel with its theme of national unity is also considered to be an effort by Modi to create a secular image of himself among India’s 1.2 billion people.
Sardar Patel was a close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, and being staunchly secular in his outlook, he opposed the 1947 partition of British-ruled India into Hindu majority India and Muslim Pakistan. Patel joined the Congress Party in 1934 and worked with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India.
While the Congress Party has been criticized by many for neglecting Patel’s legacy, Modi has been quick to use the same to his advantage ahead of the national elections.
According to some opinion polls, Modi is more popular than the Congress Party’s Rahul Gandhi, and is also favored by India's business community for his pro-investment policies and the rapid economic growth in Gujarat, Reuters reported.Alan Turing (Science Museum, London/SSPL)
Alan Turing was one of the greatest minds of the |
" mean the time for a new, completed chunk of software development to be designed, coded and fully tested, end-to-end. The standard length for teams to start with iterations is two weeks; improvement beyond that generally means shortening the iteration.
How-to: 3 Ways to Be More Agile With Software Shipping Decisions
More: Can New Software Testing Frameworks Bring Us to Provably Correct Software?
Many teams use "sprint" or "iteration," only to insert waterfall concepts. Language such as "three architecture sprints, six coding sprints, two test sprints and two hardening sprints" is usually a clue that something's wrong.
But there's something else more sinister in the HealthCare.gov project.
2. The System Produced the Outcome, Not the Lack of Testing
If you've worked on a waterfall project with a defined test phase, you know it's not really a "test" phase at all. Once the first show-stopper bug is found, it's actually a fixing phase.
To state that Healthcare.gov wasn't fully tested implies that the test group either never found any show-stopper bugs or didn't have the ability to halt the project. Given the legally required go-live mandate, the second option seems realistic.
How-to: How to Adjust to the Changing Face of Software Testing
More: How to Deal With Software Development Schedule Pressure
One thing we do know for sure: The organization rushed ahead with coding before it knew answers to questions. That's no recipe for success.
We know because at go-live the JavaScript code itself was still full of filler text that a non-decision maker typically insert onto a page or pop-up. Programmers know that something goes wrong but need to get the language approved, so they write lorem ipsum and move on. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when people are under a deadline and can't get answers to their questions.
Mike Adams, editor of NaturalNews.com, found dozens of critical JavaScript errors by simply viewing the source and following links. Here's a small sample:
"TODO: add functionality to show alert text after too many tries at log in"
"make sure we don't try to do this before the saml has been posted if (window.registrationInitialSessionCallsComplete)"
"Attention: This file is generated once and can be modified by hand"
"Fill In this with actual content. Lorem Ipsum"
"TODO: maybe modify the below to use a similar method instead"
People in the organization must have known the site was not ready. Perhaps they spoke up and were overruled. We don't know.
The problem at Healthcare.gov wasn't a lack of testing. It was a lack of critical thinking. Still, the site did have a prime testing contractor. Sure, the testers didn't have months, but they did have weeks. What were they doing?
3. Testing Should Be Part of the Delivery Process
QSSI was the lead test contractor on Healthcare.gov, providing services it refers to as Independent Verification and Validation, or IV&V.
Here's what QSSI has to say about its own IV&V Process (links added):
Our IV&V services are consistent with the latest systems engineering and process improvement models, and are derived from industry standards, including the IEEE Standard 1012 -2004 Standard for Software Verification and Validation and the CMMI process maturity framework. QSSI provides an objective assessment of products and processes throughout the project life cycle in an environment free from the influence, guidance, and control of the development effort. Services include: criticality analysis, requirements analysis and tracing, software design analysis, milestone reviews and metrics, code review and analysis, document inspection [and] defect Investigation, plus training evaluation, planning, execution, reporting and witnessing.
Look at the QSSI careers site and you see a lot of focus on these standards, policies and procedures — in particular, that IV&V involves tracing requirements to implementation.
That's one aspect of product risk, but it's certainly not a whole-process look. The agile manifesto changed the focus of software from "processes and tools" to "individuals and interactions" back in 2001. That same year, Joel Spolsky suggested it was possible to pass every functional test yet still have a product that isn't usable.
The real reveal, however, comes from the 175 pages of war room notes from the early release of the website. The notes focus entirely on dealing with trouble tickets that occur in the field. There's no connection to testing. At no point in the document — nowhere — does anyone go back and say, "Here's the list of things deferred at go-live as known issues."
The entire process is firefighting. Testing wasn't seriously considered. If testing actually occurred — and real testing, not fake testing — it failed to make any meaningful connection to operations or support or project management. Testing failed to recommend a no-go decision.
News: Contractors: More Testing of Healthcare.gov Was Needed
More: Obamacare Exchange Contractors had Past Security Lapses
If testing can't impact the schedule or product in any way, it's just waste. Better to eliminate it altogether.
(After repeated phone transfers, no one from QSSI was available to comment on its testing of Healthcare.gov.)
4. Do It Manually Before You Automate
After a great deal of failure and public fallout from Healthcare.gov, customers started to use the paper application process as an alternative. Sounds reasonable — until you realize the paper applications would be mailed to a customer service center using the same Web-based technology to determine eligibility.
In other words: If you give up on Healthcare.gov because you can't purchase insurance, you can mail a paper application to a processing center where a human will try to enroll you manually in Healthcare.gov. That doesn't work.
News: U.S. CIO Sees Healthcare.gov Glitches as a 'Teachable Moment'
More: Officials Target End of November for Smooth Healthcare.gov
Neither the federal government nor any known contractor has any way of ensuring eligibility manually. If they had an 800-number to the IRS, and another to the Department of Homeland Security, the agencies could hire an army of temps to manage the order processing. (That idea's not that farfetched; it's essentially how the federal government conducts the census every 10 years.)
If you have a large-scale adoption and have to flip the switch, make sure you have a way to flip it back and can execute manually.
5. The System Had to Be Perfect, By Law, But It Wasn't
Healthcare.gov must verify a would-be applicant's eligibility from Homeland Security, IRS and Social Security systems, in real time, plus enroll members electronically to any registered insurance company in any of the 34 states that don't have their own state health insurance exchange.
Information needs to be completely accurate, so every request needs to run-submit information, over Web services, to an insurance company. That means users click Submit, then wait for a back-end Web services call, and wait and wait and …
News: Healthcare.gov Team Improves Site Response Times
Officials: We Warned of Security Risks Just Before Healthcare.gov Went Live
All this because the system had to work in "real time," or synchronously. Except it didn't.
Turns out that HHS created a spreadsheet with the basic rate table information. Healthcare.gov could have been a very simple process, then: Type in zip code, click Submit, select age and family factors, get quote and get number to call purchase insurance.
We know this smaller scope could have worked because it does work. A tiny company called Opscost took that spreadsheet and implemented a website doing just that in few than two person-weeks. The site is thehealthsherpa.com (shown below).
Go to theHealthSherpa.com, enter your Zip Code, hit Submit and see health insurance price quotes, Yes, it's that simple.
This comparison of six person-days to hundreds of millions of dollars is obviously unfair. HealthCare.gov had to do more, including end-to-end enrollment. Healthcare.gov customers were supposed to be able to sign up on a government Webform and have the transaction automatically flow into an insurer's system.
Instead of an 80 percent system for a fraction of the cost, the customer insisted on 100 percent by force of law. Lacking the capability to actually develop such a system, the contractors made their best attempts and shipped whatever they had on the end date. The results, while tragic, aren't exactly a surprise.
George Kalogeropoulos, customer support at OpsCost, says the company's biggest surprise while validating the market was that a huge number of customers wanted to window shop. They wanted a quote without giving up personal information such as phone number or Social Security Number.
Analysis: Why Healthcare.gov May Be a 'Black Swan'
More: Lawmakers Seek Answers on Obamacare Data Hub Security
At go-live, Healthcare.gov worked on the opposite model, forcing personal information before allowing users to see a quote. (This policy has since changed.) That allowed Healthcare.gov to force users to agree to terms of service, and to connect to backend servers at the IRS, Homeland Security and other agencies. Those are great features for the end of the process, but when your users want to window shop, perhaps less so.
6: Threat Modeling Matters
Ben Simo isn't a black-hat hacker. He doesn't spend his time trying to "crack" things. He's a developer/tester who knows how to view source code and use the developer tab to look at back-end Web transmissions, mostly RESTful services. That's exactly what Simo did with Healthcare.gov: Look at how his family's information was transmitted as he tried to sign up.
Simo didn't succeed in signing up — but he did find a site that transmitted his username and email in plain text, loaded insecure resources and could reveal user IDs and email addresses through login notification messages.
Perhaps worst of all, the password reset feature results in data combinations that could enable phishing attacks. An attacker logged in as you can get personal information from REST service responses, including name, address, date of birth and Social Security number. That's exactly the kind of information identity thieves can use to get false credit cards or gain access to bank accounts.
Related: Healthcare.gov Granted a Waiver to Launch Despite High Risk Levels
More: Scramble to Fix Healthcare.gov Site Heightens Security Risks
It appears that Ben Simo was more concerned about personal information appearing on the Web than the people who made Healthcare.gov.
Simo's analysis has been quoted in TIME, on CNN and during HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' Congressional testimony. Simo is a former president of the Association for Software Testing, and I've served on its board of directors. We're regular humans. How did one of us find not a single defect but a systematic mess?
It's likely that security testing was faked, overlooked or ignored for Healthcare.gov, just like functional testing. Don't let this happen on your watch.
Ultimate Lesson from Healthcare.gov: Take Incremental Approach
It's early in the Healthcare.gov lifecycle. We know the project's failure was systemic — multiple failures on multiple levels — but we don't know exactly what did happen. Identifying all the issues might make for a good book someday, but it's far too much for one article.Angular 2 and ASP.NET Core - A Webcast
I’ve been toying around with getting Angular 2 working in a simple ASP.NET Core app. There are some specific caveats with getting it to work in Microsoft’s new framework. Let me show you how.
Now Angular 2 is in early beta and ASP.NET Core is in RC1 so I am taking a risk. I’m going to have a live webcast and I’ll build an Angular 2 app in an ASP.NET Core application. Come watch me walk the tightrope. No promises.
UPDATE: The webcast went great and you can now view all hour and twenty minutes of it on YouTube. Wasn’t perfect, but I hope you can learn a bit from it. The source I used in the webcast was from my re-write of my blog in ASP.NET Core. You can find that here on GitHub:
The webcast will be on Google Hangouts On Air at 2pm ET on February 4th. No signup necessary!
Or you can watch it here directly:
Hope you enjoy it!Introduction and Background info
Operating Systems
An Operating System, abbreviated as OS, is a piece of software that controls the hardware components of a system, be it a phone, laptop or a desktop. It is in charge of the communication between the software and the hardware. Windows XP, Windows 8, Linux and Mac OS X are all examples of operating systems. The operating system consists of:
The bootloader: software in charge of the boot process of your device.
The kernel: the core of the system and manages the CPU, memory and peripheral devices.
Daemons: background services.
The shell: comprises a command process that allows manipulation of the device through commands entered into a text interface.
Graphical Server: the sub-system that shows the graphics on your screen.
Desktop Environment: this is what the users usually interact with.
Applications: are programs that perform the user’s tasks such as word processors.
Kernel space and Userspace
Kernel Space: the kernel is found in an elevated system state, which includes a protected memory space and full access to the device’s hardware. This system state and memory space is altogether referred to as kernel-space. Within kernel space the core access to the hardware and system services are managed and provided as a service to the rest of the system.
User Space: the user’s applications are carried out in the user-space, where they can reach a subset of the machine’s available resources via kernel system calls. By using the core services provided the kernel, a user level application can be created like a game or office productivity software for example.
Linux
Linux has gained in popularity over the years due it being open source hence, based on a UNIX like design, and ported to more platforms compared to other competing operating systems. It is an operating system, as indicated, that resembles a UNIX OS – a stable multi-user multi-tasking operating system, and that has been assembled as a free and open-source software for development and distribution. Meaning that any individual or company has the permission to use, imitate, study and alter the Linux operating system in any way they desire.
The Linux Kernel
From its first release on September 17, 1991, the Linux kernel has defied all odds to be Linux’s defining component. It was released by Linus Torvalds and makes use of the GNU/Linux to describe the operating system. Linux kernel-based Android OS on smartphones has made Linux beat its competition to be the largest installed OS base of all general-purpose operating systems. History of Linux Kernel can be found here.
A kernel can either be monolithic, microkernel or hybrid (like the OS X and Windows 7). The Linux kernel is a monolithic computer operating system kernel that resembles the UNIX system. The Linux line of Operating Systems commonly referred to as Linux Distributions are based on this kernel. The monolithic kernel, unlike the microkernel, not only encompasses the Central Processing Unit, memory and IPC but also has device drivers, system server calls and file system management. They are best at communicating with hardware and performing several tasks simultaneously. It is for this reason that processes here react at a fast rate.
However, the few setbacks are the huge install and memory footprint needed and inadequate security as everything operates in a supervisor mode. In contrast, a microkernel may react slowly to application calls as user services and the kernel are separated. They are thus smaller in size when compared to the monolithic kernel. Microkernels are easily extensible, but more code is needed to write a microkernel. The Linux kernel is written in the C and Assembly programming languages.
The Linux kernel relationship with the Hardware
The kernel can manage the system’s hardware through what is referred to as interrupts. When the hardware wants to interface with the system, an interrupt is issued that interrupts the processor that in turn does the same to the kernel. To provide synchronization, the kernel can disable interrupts, be it a single one or all of them. In Linux, however, the interrupt handlers do not run in a process context, they instead run in an interrupt context not associated with any process.This particular interrupt context exists solely to let an interrupt handler quickly respond to an individual interrupt and then finally exit.
What makes the Linux Kernel different from other Classic Unix Kernels?
Significant differences exist between the Linux kernel and the Classic Unix kernels; as listed below:
Linux supports dynamic loading of kernel modules. The Linux kernel is preemptive. Linux has a symmetrical multiprocessor support. Linux is free due to its open software nature. Linux ignores some standard Unix features that the kernel developers call “poorly designed.” Linux provides an object-oriented device model with device classes, hot-pluggable events, and a user-space device file-system The Linux kernel fails to differentiate between threads and normal processes.
Architechture
Components of the Linux Kernel
A kernel is simply a resource manager; the resource being managed may be a process, memory or hardware device. It manages and arbitrates access to the resource between multiple competing users. The Linux kernel exists in the kernel space, below the userspace, which is where the user’s applications are executed. For the user space to communicate with the kernel space, a GNU C Library is incorporated which provides a forum for the system call interface to connect to the kernel space and allow transition back to the userspace.
The Linux kernel can be categorized into three primary levels:
The system call interface; this is the topmost and undertakes the basic actions such as read and write. The kernel code; is located below the system call interface, it is common to all of the processor architectures supported by Linux, it is sometimes defined as architecture-independent kernel code. The architecture-dependent code; it is under the architecture-independent code, forms what is usually referred to as a Board Support Package (BSP) – this contains a small program called the bootloader that places the Operating System and device drivers into memory.
The architectural perspective of the Linux kernel consists of: System call interface, Process Management, the Virtual File system, Memory Management, Network Stack, Architecture and the Device Drivers.
System call interface; is a thin layer that is used to undertake function calls from user space into the kernel. This interface may be architecture dependent Process management; is mainly there to execute the processes. These are referred to as the thread in a kernel and are representing an individual virtualization of the particular processor Memory management; memory is managed in what are known as pages for efficiency. Linux includes the methods in which to manage the available memory as well as the hardware mechanisms for physical and virtual mappings. Swap space is also provided Virtual file system; it provides a standard interface abstraction for the file systems. It provides a switching layer between the system call interface and the file systems supported by the kernel. Network stack; is designed as a layered architecture modeled after the particular protocols. Device drivers; a significant part of the source code in the Linux kernel is found in the device drivers that make a particular hardware device usable. Device driver tutorial Architecture-dependent code; those elements that depend on the architecture on which they run, hence must consider the architectural design for normal operation and efficiency.
Interfaces
System calls and Interrupts
Applications pass information to the kernel through system calls. A library contains functions that the applications work with. The libraries then, through the system call interface, instruct the kernel to perform a task that the application wants. What is a Linux System Call?
Interrupts offer a way through which the Linux kernel manages the systems’ hardware. If hardware has to communicate with a system, an interrupt on the processor does the trick, and this is passed on to the Linux kernel.
Linux kernel interfaces
The Linux kernel offers various interfaces to the user space applications that perform a variety of tasks and have different properties. Two distinct Application Programming Interface (API) exist; the kernel-user space and the kernel internal. The Linux API is the kernel-userspace API; it gives access to programs in the user space into the system resources and services of the kernel. It is made up of the System Call Interface and the subroutines from the GNU C Library.
Linux ABI
This refers to the kernel-user space ABI (Application Binary Interface). This is explained as the interface that exists between program modules. When comparing API and ABI, the difference is that ABI’s are used to access external codes that are already compiled while API are structures for managing software. Defining an important ABI is majorly the work of Linux distributions than it is for the Linux kernel. A specific ABI should be defined for each instruction set, for example, x86-64. End-users of Linux products are interested in the ABIs rather than the API.
System Call Interface
As earlier discussed, this plays a more prominent role in the kernel. It is a denomination of the whole part of all existing system calls.
The C standard library
All the system calls of the kernel are within the GNU C Library whereas, the Linux API is comprised of the system call interface and the GNU C Library, also called glibc.
Portable Operating System Interface(POSIX)
POSIX is a collective term of standards for maintaining compatibility among the operating systems. It declares the API together with utility interfaces and command line shells. The Linux API, not only has the usable features defined by the POSIX but also has additional features in its kernel:
Cgroups subsystem. The Direct Rendering Manager’s system calls. A readahead feature. Getrandom call that is present in V 3.17. System calls such as futex, epoll, splice, dnotify, fanotify and inotify.
More information about POSIX Standard is here.
The modular kernel
Previous versions of the Linux kernel were in such a way that all their parts were statically fixed into one, monolithic. However, modern Linux kernels have most of their functionality contained in modules that are put into the kernel dynamically. This in contrast to monolithic types, is referred to as modular kernels. Such a setup allows a user to load or replace modules in a running kernel without the need of rebooting.
The Linux Loadable Kernel Module (LKM)
The basic way of adding code in the Linux kernel is through the introduction of source files to the kernel source tree. However, you may want to add a code while the kernel is running. The code added this way is referred to as a loadable kernel module. These particular modules perform various tasks but are specified into three: device drivers, file system drivers and system calls.
The loadable kernel module can be compared to the kernel extensions in other operating systems. You can put a module into the kernel by either loading it as an LKM or binding it into the base kernel.
The benefits of LKMs over binding into the base kernel:
Rebuilding your kernel often is not necessary, saving time and avoids errors.
They assist in figuring out system problems such as bugs.
LKMs save you space as you only have them loaded when you need to use them.
Give much faster maintenance and debugging time.
Uses of LKMs
Device drivers; the kernel exchanges information with hardware through this. A kernel must have a device’s driver before using it. Filesystem drivers; this translates the contents of a filesystem System calls; programs in the user space utilize system calls to acquire services from the kernel. Network drivers; interprets a network protocol Executable interpreters; loads and manages an executable.
Compiling the Linux Kernel
Unlike what most people say, compiling the Linux kernel is a simple task. The following is a step-by-step illustration of the process using one of the Linux distributions: Fedora 13 KDE. (It is advisable to backup your data and grub.conf just in case something goes wrong)
From http://kernel.org website, download the source. While in your downloads directory, extract the kernel source from the archive by entering the following command in terminal: tar xvjf Linux-2.6.37.tar.bz2 Use the command make mrproper to clear the build area prior to any compilation. Use a configuration say xconfig, These configurations are designed to make it easier to run any program in Linux. Specify the modules and features you wish your kernel to contain. After acquiring the.config file, the next step is to go to Makefile Run the make command and wait for the compilation to go through. Install the modules using the command make modules_install Copy your kernel and the system map to /boot. Run the new-kernel-pkg to build the list of module dependencies and stuff like grub.conf
Upgrading the kernel
It is possible to upgrade a Linux kernel from an older version to a more recent one, while retaining all of the configuration options from the earlier version. To achieve this, one has to first back up the.config file in the kernel source directory; this is in case something goes wrong when trying to upgrade your kernel. The steps are:
Get the latest source code from the main kernel.org website Apply the variations to the old source tree to bring it up to the latest version. Reconfigure the kernel based on the preceding kernel configuration file you had backed up. Build the new kernel. Now you can install the new build the kernel.
Downloading the new source; the Linux kernel developers understand that some users may not want to download the full source code for the kernel updates, as this would waste time and bandwidth. Therefore, a patch is made available which can upgrade an older kernel release. Users only need to know which patch applies to a particular version, since a kernel patch file will only update the source code from one specific release. The different patch files can be applied through the following ways;
Stable kernel patches which apply to the base kernel version. Base kernel release patches only apply to the previous base kernel version Incremental patch upgrade from a particular release to the next release. This allows developers avoid the hustle of downgrading then upgrading their kernel. Instead, they can switch from their current stable release to the next stable release.
Here are more detailed steps for the process to update your kernel from source on Debian, and from pre-built binaries on CentOS and Ubuntu.
Conclusion
The Linux kernel mainly acts as a resource manager acting as an abstract layer for the applications. The applications have a connection with the kernel which in turn interacts with the hardware and services the applications. Linux is a multitasking system allowing multiple processes to execute concurrently. The Linux kernel is popular due to its open source nature that allows users to alter the kernel to what is suitable for them and their hardware. Therefore it can be used in a variety of devices, unlike other operating systems.
The modular characteristic of the Linux kernel adds more thrill to its users. This is because of the wide variety of modifications that can be made here without rebooting the system. The flexibility gives its users a big room to actualize their imaginations.
Moreover, the monolithic nature of the kernel is a great advantage as it has a high processing ability than the microkernel. The main setback with the Linux type of kernel is that if any of its services fail, then the whole system goes down with it. Latest versions have been designed in a way that if a new service is added, there is no need of modifying the whole operating system. This is an improvement when compared to previous versions.
Sources
Wikipedia Linux Kernel
Wikipedia Linux Kernel Interfaces
Linux Loadable Kernel Module How To
linux.com beginners guide
https://www.quora.com/What-are-good-tutorials-to-learn-Linux-Kernel
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1003/linux-kernel-good-beginners-tutorial
http://www.linux-tutorial-tutorial.info/modules.php?name=MContent&pageid=82
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/31632//what-is-the-linux-kernel-and-what-does-it-do/Alison Rose
As we gear up for Brexit, the UK’s flagging productivity performance is continually in the fore of media headlines and economic analysis.
Following a further fall in productivity in the first quarter of 2018, policy experts and economists were quick to update their models and offer opinion over blame. However, this economic self-deprecation doesn’t actually make any difference. So what could?
It isn’t that British SMEs don’t have the drive and ambition. Nor is it that other countries, such as Germany, the G7’s most productive, are naturally better at enterprise. Britain has an impressive history and vibrant culture when it comes to entrepreneurialism. And yet the productivity puzzle persists.
Part of the problem may be the academic language of productivity which not only leaves businesses cold, but can feel meaningless, especially for SMEs. In theory, productivity is a simple equation: output divided by input. But businesses don’t run on theory; they are focused on the inherently practical.
At NatWest, we recently spoke to 2,000 SME leaders about their current business priorities. Raising productivity came at the bottom of the list, with only one in five placing it top.
It’s clear that there is a persistent disconnect between diagnosing the productivity gap as an economic contagion at the macro level, and the treatment which has to start with businesses – especially SMEs – on the ground.
We need to get better at focusing on the treatment side of things by coming up with a more practical perspective. Most business leaders I speak to understand the general problem, but what our data shows is that they don’t always see how it applies to them and what they could be doing.
This is where advisers and lenders of all shapes and sizes can step in, building partnerships of real value to SMEs. Excellent work is also underway by organisations like Be the Business, which are providing inspiration and tools to improve productivity.
But it also means understanding our customers’ businesses and their needs.
Most SME leaders are time-poor and have a vast range of roles and responsibilities – from finance director to the shop floor – and if we don’t make tangible suggestions, focus quickly returns to the day job. As I have learned, the key is to help businesses ask themselves two practical questions. First, can we cut out waste to become more efficient? And what are the steps we can take to become a better business?
This moves the conversation on from the theory of productivity to broader strategies that get to the heart of helping the majority of SMEs.
Discussions about productivity often centre on manufacturing. We talk about investing in technology and machinery to improve efficiency, so checking that the right tools are being used to produce and sell products is an obvious first step.
But for most businesses, their capacity to change, improve and innovate is interwoven with the performance and attitude of their people.
Innovation is not confined to the laboratory. It includes investing in staff, not just in terms of skills and development, but also their enthusiasm and satisfaction. Creating the right workplace culture and organisational structure, providing decent, tailored benefits packages, and focusing on employee health and wellbeing has the ability to improve individual performance, retain talent, and create value.
It is these intangible or knowledge-based assets, often inseparable from the people who work in SMEs themselves, which can add billions to the UK economy.
Getting better at business is made up of small steps, not silver bullets. It’s the people who run SMEs who know this best, so we’ve teamed up with business leaders across the country to create a Productivity Blueprint to outline straightforward, practical steps they can take to do more with less – helping them prioritise productivity and, ultimately, improve business performance. So, let’s put an end the real productivity gap by sharing what businesses can actually do.A woman who overheard a cashier at a New Orleans Family Dollar store loudly expressing homophobic sentiments to customers with a "hateful passion" said she was denied service after she identified herself as gay and asked the cashier to stop. Videos recorded by Melissa Langford, 34, capture the moments after her initial confrontation as the cashier clashed with another customer who defended her.
Langford's Facebook post explaining the incident has been shared 1,100 times since she published the video Friday evening. The video has been viewed more than 15,400 times as of Sunday afternoon.
"My mind was blown. I couldn't believe the things I was hearing this woman say," Langford said when reached by telephone Sunday. "It's one thing if it was a customer in line being ignorant with her friends, but this is the cashier."
Langford said she was a regular at the Family Dollar located at 2650 Canal Street. She lives nearby and stopped to purchase items almost every other day.
A woman who identified herself as the local store's manager declined to comment when reached by telephone Sunday. A request for comment from Family Dollar Stores Inc. had not been returned as of Sunday afternoon.
On Friday around 2 p.m., Langford visited the store to buy thank you gifts and other odds and ends for a relative who will be hosting her in Merida, Mexico. She said she was the fifth person in line when she overheard the cashier loudly discussing homosexuality.
In her Facebook post published later that evening, Langford described hearing the cashier say she hates gay people, that they've got something "wrong in the head," and she had the right to refuse service to anyone.
"I started to writhe away internally. I wanted to cry right then and there..." Langford wrote. "Y'all didn't hear the hateful passion in her voice."
When Langford could take no more, she said she told the cashier, "Excuse me, I happen to be very, very gay, and you're really offending me."
Langford said she told the woman she was free to her opinions but asked her to keep them to herself. The cashier said she didn't have to deal with Langford.
At that point a male customer called the cashier's views ignorant, Langford said. He can be seen in the white tank top in the video.
"He said, 'Why are you going to hate on people for who they are, and they're spending their money here just like everybody else," Langford recalled.
The cashier refused to ring up the male customer and Langford, instead checking out at least two other customers behind them.
Langford pulled out her cell phone to record the incident, prompting the cashier to tone down the volume and venom in her responses, Langford said. But the cashier and the male customer continued to argue with one another.
In addition to several obscenities, the customer called the cashier a "nincompoop."
Langford and the other customer refused to leave the store without being rung up. Eventually, another cashier handled their transactions. Langford tried to speak with a manager about the incident.
"Whether I'm right or wrong, (the cashier) shouldn't be treating a customer this way, and she can't deny people service just because she feels like it," Langford said.
Langford said the female manager told her she didn't have anything to do with the incident because she was in the back at the time it occurred.
"She said, 'I can't control nothing. She can say and do what she wants,'" Langford recalled.
Langford wanted others to know about her Family Dollar experience because she doesn't want it to happen to anybody else.
"You can feel any way you want to, as along as it doesn't impede on someone else's life," she said.Elizabeth Ann Pfeifer was last seen in the early morning hours of April 12, 1986. She left a party in Katy, Texas, with a man she didn’t know. Although she went to the party with several friends, she chose to leave with a stranger.
Hopgood’s Statement
Investigators have relied heavily upon James Wesley Hopgood’s statement. (Hopgood is the man she left the party with.) We are certain Hopgood took Elizabeth to his garage apartment on Telephone Road, in Southeast Houston. We know she spent time with Hopgood, partying and having sex. Hopgood alleges that sometime around 3 a.m. on April 12, he returned to Katy with my sister.
According to Hopgood, Elizabeth got out of Hopgood’s vehicle at a gas station on Mason Road. Hopgood said Elizabeth seemed familiar with another person at the gas station, a man driving a brown pickup truck. Elizabeth, Hopgood said, got into the brown pickup and left with the man.
Hopgood was interviewed in the early weeks after Elizabeth went missing, but because there was no evidence of a crime, only his statement was taken. I insisted that police search his vehicle and home, but police refused, stating “without evidence, there is no crime. Without a crime, we have no right to search Hopgood’s belongings.”
Police let a dangerous man run free, as you will see later in this story. It’s ironic how things play out, because had police investigated my sister’s case (probable homicide) properly in 1986, Hopgood wouldn’t have inflicted more violence upon innocent people.
The Problem
The problem with this account is twofold: Hopgood’s timeframes are incorrect when compared to those given by witnesses at the party, and Captain Dickerson says in 1986, the area on Mason Road was undeveloped and gas stations were not open that late. Elizabeth and her group of friends arrived at the party some time between midnight and 1 a.m., April 12, 1986. Elizabeth was seen leaving with Hopgood approximately an hour after the group arrived. If Hopgood indeed brought Elizabeth back to Katy from his apartment on Telephone Road in Houston, there is no way he and my sister could have made the journey to his apartment, had sex and did drugs, and then made the journey back by 3 a.m. Hopgood has been interviewed multiple times by the initial investigators and by Captain Dickerson. Hopgood either “doesn’t remember” or sticks with the initial statement he gave to police.
Hopgood’s in prison until 2035 for unrelated crimes. He is, however, a violent and dangerous man, and charged with four counts of aggravated sexual assault. Contrary to what was originally told to me by the first investigative group, Hopgood’s never taken a polygraph. In 2009, he refused investigators’ requests to take one.
My Feelings
It doesn’t add up. I know, in my heart of hearts, what happened. I feel that Hopgood murdered my sister, but I have no proof. Because I have no proof, and because the investigators have no proof, someone got away with murder.
I also do not want my sister’s lifestyle or family issues to cloud this case. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter whether Elizabeth was drunk, stoned or sober when she left with James Hopgood. What matters is a crime was committed. Every woman deserves to come home – and I feel certain my sister wanted to come home. She relied upon the goodness of a stranger, and that person took advantage of my sister. Her body was probably dumped somewhere, like a piece of garbage.
No one deserves that fate – no one.
Conclusion
It’s frustrating, for all parties, when law enforcement cannot solve a case. Without the cooperation of our witnesses and a suspect, we cannot close this case. I appreciate the information given by the witnesses that have come forward. When I receive news about my sister, it’s a breath of fresh air, even when the information is painful. You who are brave and forthcoming – thank you.
But we need more. My guess is that more people know what happened and more people know the truth. Please be proactive if you know anything about Elizabeth’s case — it goes without saying that I’d love to see the case close while my aging mother is still alive. We also need to know where Elizabeth’s body is – please help our family. Elizabeth deserves a proper burial, and my mother and I want to see the case resolved.
If you |
. “There are only two charges out there, but that’s because every single time we called the cops I covered for him. It’s manipulation. He was making me feel like I was the bad person.”
She then explained of the December 2016 incident, “Nate came in the side door. He’s yelling at me, screaming at me. He was on top of me. Then [my roommate] called the cops and finally reported it. I was so grateful she was home. It looks like he can’t control himself.”
PHOTOS: Nathan Allegedly Slams Fiancée Jenelle In Private Tweets To Actress
She then opened up about the night he locked her in his closet.
“I was in there the entire night,” she explained. “I acted like I was with him just to get out of the closet. I rejected him so he took his fingers and started throwing them down my throat. I lost my voice and felt like I had strep throat for over a week. I was really mind screwed. On the surface it looked good.”
She blamed his PTSD from the military and alcohol on his behavioral issues.
A clerk from Horry County Courthouse exclusively told Radar that the charges against Griffith are still pending. He has no upcoming court dates scheduled at this time.
PHOTOS: ‘Most Horrible Mother Ever’? Teen Mom Jenelle Lashes Out
His legal troubles are a reason his mother Doris Davidson filed an emergency request for full custody of Griffith’s son Kaiser, 3, with his ex-fiancé Jenelle Evans.
“The Plaintiff and Defendant [Nathan Griffith] are at this time not fit and proper persons to provide for the care custody and control of the minor child,” court documents obtained by Radar read.
She accused Evans and her fiancé David Eason of neglect and abuse in the court filing as well.
Do the abuse claims shock you? Tell us in the comments.
We pay for juicy info! Do you have a story for RadarOnline.com? Email us at tips@radaronline.com, or call us at 800-344-9598 any time, day or night.In healthy volunteers, the equivalent of two cups of coffee reduced the body's ability to boost blood flow to the heart muscle in response to exercise, and the effect was stronger when the participants were in a chamber simulating high altitude, according to a new study in the Jan. 17, 2006, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
"Whenever we do a physical exercise, myocardial blood flow has to increase in order to match the increased need of oxygen. We found that caffeine may adversely affect this mechanism. It partly blunts the needed increase in flow," said Philipp A. Kaufmann, M.D., F.A.C.C., from the University Hospital Zurich and Center for Integrative Human Physiology CIHP in Zurich,.
The researchers, including lead author Mehdi Namdar, M.D., F.A.C.C., studied 18 young, healthy people who were regular coffee drinkers. The participants did not drink any coffee for 36 hours prior to the study testing. In one part of the study, PET scans that showed blood flow in the hearts of 10 participants were performed before and immediately after they rode a stationary exercise bicycle. In the second part of the study, the same type of myocardial blood-flow measurements were done in 8 participants who were in a chamber simulating the thin air at about 15,000 feet (4,500 meters) altitude. The high-altitude test was designed to mimic the way coronary artery disease deprives the heart muscle of sufficient oxygen. In both groups, the testing procedure was repeated 50 minutes after each participant swallowed a tablet containing 200 milligrams of caffeine, the equivalent of two cups of coffee.
The caffeine dose did not affect blood flow within the heart muscle while the participants were at rest. However, the blood flow measurements taken immediately after exercise were significantly lower after the participants had taken caffeine tablets. The effect was pronounced in the group in the high-altitude chamber.
Blood flow normally increases in response to exercise, and the results indicate that caffeine reduces the body's ability to boost blood flow to the muscle of the heart on demand. The ratio of exercise blood flow to resting blood flow, called the myocardial flow reserve, was 22 percent lower in the group at normal air pressure after ingesting caffeine and 39 percent lower in the group in the high-altitude chamber. Dr. Kaufmann said that caffeine may block certain receptors in the walls of blood vessels, interfering with the normal process by which adenosine signals blood vessels to dilate in response to the demands of physical activity.
"Although these findings seem not to have a clinical importance in healthy volunteers, they may raise safety questions in patients with reduced coronary flow reserve, as seen in coronary artery disease, particularly before physical exercise and at high-altitude exposure," the researchers wrote.
Although caffeine is a stimulant, these results also indicate that coffee may not necessarily boost athletic performance.
"We now have good evidence that, at the level of myocardial blood flow, caffeine is not a useful stimulant. It may be a stimulant at the cerebral level in terms of being more awake and alert, which may subjectively give the feeling of having better physical performance. But I now would not recommend that any athlete drink caffeine before sports. It may not be a physical stimulant, and may even adversely affect physical performance," Dr. Kaufmann said. "It may not be as harmless as we thought before, particularly if you suffer from coronary artery disease or if you are in the mountains."
Dr. Kaufmann noted that this study was not designed to measure athletic performance.
Although the participants were all healthy, Dr. Kaufmann said that the results raise concerns about possible effects of caffeine in people with heart disease.
"Any advice would be based on results of healthy volunteers and would be a bit speculative; nevertheless, my advice would be: do not drink coffee before doing physical activities. We hope to be able to provide data soon on the situation of patients with coronary artery disease," he said.
The researchers noted that other studies of coffee and heart disease have produced mixed results.
Although this study included only 18 participants, the researchers said that the differences they saw were large enough for them to be confident that the effect of caffeine on heart muscle blood flow is real. They pointed out that longer studies of people with heart disease will be needed in order to understand whether the blood flow effects have important health consequences.
Thomas H. Schindler, M.D. from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, who was not connected with this study, said that if the results are confirmed, they could have important implications.
"In particular, this may play an important role in patients with obstructive coronary artery disease in the intermediate range between 50 percent and 85 percent narrowing of the epicardial luminal diameter. In this range of coronary artery disease-induced epicardial narrowing, the myocardial flow reserve (MFR) has been widely assumed to compensate for the epicardial narrowing and, thereby, to preserve the myocardial blood flow to the heart. A further reduction of the MFR, for example owing to caffeine intake, therefore could precipitate stress-induced myocardial ischemia, angina pectoris (reflecting an imbalance between myocardial oxygen supply and demand) or could also contribute to the manifestation of acute coronary syndromes. Consequently, as stated by Namdar et al., the current findings indeed raise safety questions in patients with already reduced MFR as seen in coronary artery disease, particularly before physical exercise and at high-altitude exposure," Dr. Schindler said.
Dr. Schindler said that further studies will be needed to answer the important questions raised by this study.
###
Disclosure:
Dr. Kaufmann was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.Inauguration Day was turned into Retribution Day as hordes of angry leftists set fires, smashed windows and clashed with police to protest President Donald Trump.
It was the kind of reaction I predicted in my new book, “The Deplorables’ Guide to Making America Great Again.”
Click here to get a limited edition hardcover edition of Todd’s new book.
Rampaging mobs caused mayhem across the fruited plain – but especially in our nation’s capital. In several instances, conservatives were attacked outside Inaugural balls.
Some were left bloodied and battered. Police were pelted with rocks and batteries. Many businesses were vandalized. Car windows were smashed and a limo was set ablaze.
One group of violent thugs spat on and assaulted a Gold Star widow and her sister. They were attacked as they tried to enter the Veterans Inaugural Ball.
It’s all part of an effort to destabilize the nation and delegitimize President Trump’s victory.
The following day scores of self-described “nasty” women, held profane gatherings across the country to protest the new president.
Madonna told a crowd of protesters dressed in pink hats and Birkenstocks that she dreamed of blowing up the White House.
“Yes, I’m angry. Yes I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House. But I know this won’t change anything,” she told a crowd of adoring feminists.
She later walked back the threat.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Madonna should’ve been arrested.
“What you have is an emerging left-wing fascism,” he told "Fox & Friends." “She’s part of it and I think we have to be prepared to protect ourselves. Frankly, the truth is she ought to be arrested for saying she has thought about blowing up the White House.”
I concur with Speaker Gingrich.
As I wrote in “The Deplorables’ Guide to Making America Great Again,” we are dealing with an alarming number of militant fascists.
Our public universities have been turned into training camps for far-left militants, hell-bent on silencing any speech they disagree with. And as they demonstrated on Inauguration Day, they will use any means necessary to accomplish that task.
We are facing a clear and present danger to our families and the Republic. And as I wrote in my book, we must prepare now to protect ourselves and our loved ones against these violent street thugs.
Conservatives are a peaceful and law-abiding people. But we will not be intimidated. We will not be bullied. And we will not be silenced.KADENA AIR BASE, Japan, April 26 (UPI) -- The last two U.S. Air Force MC-130P special mission aircraft in the Pacific have been transferred to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., and retired.
The Combat Shadow aircraft used by the 17th Special Operations Command at Kadena Air Base in Japan are being replaced by MC-130J Commando II planes outfitted with the latest technology.
"I have spent less time in the MC-130P than most, only 11 years, but these aircraft have executed every time we've truly needed them...," said Lt. Col. Nathan T. Colunga, the 17th SOS commander said at a ceremony at Kadena. "The MC-130P's legacy will not be forgotten as we mark this historic moment in the lineage of the 17th SOS, Air Force Special Operations Command and the Combat Shadow community at large."
The MC-130P Combat Shadow was introduced into service in 1986 and was used for the infiltration and exfiltration of special operations troops and for their resupply. They were also used for aerial refueling of special operations helicopters.
The Air Force said the MC-130Ps have participated in dozen named operations, including Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations in the Asia-Pacific region.Here’s how I put together the ground work for my ISM GB desert village diorama. It’s mostly made from pink insulation foam, polyfilla and sand so is really cheap to make. I wanted to be able to use it for both modern and WW2 vehicles after the GB so it’s in a generic north african / middle east style with inspiration taken from a number of sources.
Materials
Insulation foam.
You want extruded polystyrene not expanded. Either pink or the slightly denser blue foam will do. I buy mine from local building merchants and online. I started with a 6cm thick block of pink foam and carved most of the base from that.
You want not expanded. Either pink or the slightly denser blue foam will do. I buy mine from local building merchants and online. I started with a 6cm thick block of pink foam and carved most of the base from that. Polyfilla.
Ready mixed polyfilla in a tub. I water it down in the tub and apply it with a 1 inch throwaway household paint brush. Keep an eye out for stray brush bristles.
Ready mixed polyfilla in a tub. I water it down in the tub and apply it with a 1 inch throwaway household paint brush. Keep an eye out for stray brush bristles. Sand.
Budgy sand from my local pet store. It’s finer than regular play sand and has the odd bit of broken seashell in it. You can easily sieve those out if you don’t want them.
Budgy sand from my local pet store. It’s finer than regular play sand and has the odd bit of broken seashell in it. You can easily sieve those out if you don’t want them. Gravel, flocks n foliage.
I have built up quite an extensive stock of gravels and flocks, most are decanted into sealable tubs. For this dio, I used cat litter, tiny gravel pieces and sand. The foliage is a mix of offcuts of defoliated sea foam trees and static grass clumps. I sprayed the clumps using the same paint as the ground work to blend them in.
The Build
I started out with a block of 6cm insulation foam, and tried various layouts of the main components before setting on this slighly oblique view of the base. As the scratchbuild buildings are just fronts, the viewing angles for this diorama are limited.
Once I was happy with the positioning, I marked the locations of the buildings and carved out some rough rocks using a sharp craft knife. Using a dull blade will rip the foam (handy sometimes, but here I need it crisp). Rocks such as this are common in many of the north Africa photo’s so there’s plenty of reference material.
I continued to refine the rocks and road surface with the knife and finally gave the whole piece a going over with a rough piece of stone pressed into the foam. Keep altering which part of the stone is being used to imprint the texture, duplicate impressions stand out a mile.
Time to put some colour on the ground. When I’m painting groundwork, I literally start from the ground up. Rocks first, a preshade undercoat of black. Note, this is straight onto the foam, no undercoat and no polyfilla. The foam picks up the rock textures without any additional help.
The rest of the groundwork was sprayed in a dark sand and modulated with a few patches of lighter and darker areas to break it up a little.
Time to attach the buildings. White glue and polyfilla is used to hide the joins.
Next I sprinkled various grades of sand and grit using it to hide the joins and add interest to corners.
As this is a desert village, there’s not much call for vegetation. I started with some sea foam offcuts and removed most of their foliage. Static grass clumps sprayed to match the ground work were then pushed into corners.
I let it thoroughly dry. Now i used acrylic washes to add tonal variation to the rocks and sand. A dark wash over the rocks really brought out the detail nicely.
Finally, weathering pigments were brushed around to simulate dirt built up and again to give a little tonal variation.
I also extended the washes and pigments to the building to help tie them into the scene.
Now all that was left was to paint up some figures for the GB and take a few photographs.
Works for modern vehicles too 🙂
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Subscribe and get email notifications whenever new content is added.Google and Lenovo have shown off experiences that use the Tango technology to provide augmented reality-guided tours in museums and odd experiences like Woorld, but there are more-practical applications. For example, Lowe's has an app that it says will allow homeowners to remodel by virtually envisioning how appliances or furniture will look in their space. Lenovo VP Jeff Meredith envisions the technology becoming "pervasive, just like GPS."
Despite shrinking from 7 inches to a 6.4-inch size usable by human hands and coming with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, each Phab2 packs a large 4,050mAh battery, along with Dolby Atmos audio features, including the ability to record in 5.1 surround sound. But the similarities end there. The Pro elevates things to the stratosphere with premium specs and sensing abilities that trump any phone we've seen before -- all with a price of $500, unlocked.
The Pro also adds on a specially designed eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor, 64GB of built-in storage (expandable via microSD), 4GB of RAM and a 2,560 x 1,440 pixel "assertive" display. All of these phones are scheduled to arrive globally in September, while the Tango-enabled Phab2 Pro will be sold at Lowe's and Best Buy stores and online by the end of the year.
Get all the news from today's Lenovo and Motorola event right here!Quizzed about T-Mobile’s interest in 2.5 GHz spectrum, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray said he has “huge interest” in the 3.5 GHz block and said the 3.5-4 GHz range is the most formative block of spectrum emerging globally for 5G.
“I don’t think about 2.5 that much,” he said during the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call, at which executives clarified their thoughts on 2.5. (Any spectrum is good spectrum but they’re not that into it.) “I don’t think about Dish spectrum that much, it’s tough spectrum to come after and to secure. We will make sure we have a great future with the assets we have.”
“If you want to talk about where is the most formative block of spectrum emerging globally for 5G, it’s in the 3.5 to kind of 4 gig range,” he added. The FCC will consider a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) at its August meeting that asks detailed questions about three specific midrange bands, including the 3.7-4.2 GHz band.
Mobile World Congress 2019 Attend the 2-Day Executive 5G Panel Series FierceWireless is returning to Barcelona, Spain, during Mobile World Congress 2019 with a two-day Executive 5G Panel Series at the Fira Congress Hotel, conveniently located across the street from the MWC Convention Center. The panel events will take place on Feb. 25-26 and will cover 5G and The Fixed Wireless Access Opportunity, Taking 5G Indoors, and Making 5G Ubiquitous. Attendees will have the opportunity to network and hear from 5G leaders including Verizon, Vodafone, Orange, Sprint, NTT Docomo, Boingo Wireless, Qualcomm, and more over the course of two days.
Secure your spot at the event today! Now is your chance to join fellow industry professionals for networking and education. Registration information and the schedule can be found on the website here. Register today
T-Mobile is so interested in the 3.5 GHz band, which is also known as the Citizens Broadband Radio Services band, that it filed a petition for rulemaking with the FCC to amend the CBRS rules so that it’s more attractive to mobile carriers. In particular, the “uncarrier” would like to see the commission initiate a rulemaking proceeding to auction all 150 megahertz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band as PALs, or Priority Access Licenses, with General Authorized Access use offered opportunistically throughout the band. It would also like to see the FCC authorize PALs—which are the licenses wireless operators would obtain—on a standard 10-year licensed term and make all PALs available at auction.
RELATED: T-Mobile joins CTIA in pushing FCC to reform rules for 3.5 GHz
Others have argued that the commission should leave the rules alone and speed up the whole certification process for the CBRS band so that stakeholders—of which there are many—can get on with their business.
In its June 19 FCC filing, T-Mobile said 5G in the 3.5 GHz band is a global race and other regions and countries have already begun to act to make spectrum in the band available for 5G, including the United Kingdom, which initiated procedures to auction parts of the 3 GHz band; Japan, which has already allocated and licensed to three carriers spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band for mobile broadband; and China, which recently issued a public consultation request seeking comment on plans to use the 3300-3600 MHz and 4800-5000 MHz bands for 5G.
As for small cells, Ray said during the conference call that T-Mobile has been very active on that front. It picked up about 13,000 DAS nodes, or small cell equivalents, through its acquisition of Metro PCS, and it’s got more than 2,000 traditional small cell and new small cells in the ground, with plans to hit about 8,000 by the end of this year.
In the Los Angeles market, it now has more than 1,000 small cells turned up and it’s starting to see the benefits of macro network offload, speed enhancements and “really good numbers coming through when you get a material volume of small cells on the ground in a key urban and metro environment.”
The goal is to make every small cell that it deploys by the fourth quarter of this year be leveraging unlicensed LTE in the 5 GHz band.
T-Mobile has been burning the midnight oil on the 600 MHz front as well. Thanks in part to some early preparations the operator made on 600 MHz, it expects spectrum covering more than 1.2 million square miles to be clear in 2017, with actual deployments in many areas by year-end. Several compatible devices are expected by the holiday season, CEO John Legere said during prepared remarks, and it’s not wasting any time, with plans to light up the first 600 MHz site in August.Genres don't have to be comfortable old pairs of socks. Genre storytelling can be thrilling and unexpected — and one major way to seize the element of surprise is to bust out of genre boundaries, like a rocket sled crashing through the walls of dreamland. Drop some nanotech into that literary story. Nuke the fairy kingdom. Or screw mash-ups — just create something that nobody can taxonomize.
Here are nine totally exhilarating ways to shatter genre boxes, and dance on the pieces.
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Images via Micky the Pixel and Jamie Anderson.
Before we get started, let's first acknowledge that of course, there's something immensely satisfying about a well done example of a particular genre. There's nothing wrong with a book or movie or comic that does things you've seen before, but brings new life to them. But at the same time, creative destruction is the way that genres thrive and grow.
1. Find the unquestioned assumption at the heart of your favorite story — and then explode it
Every story makes assumptions and builds on ideas that you're not supposed to think about or notice. This is just as true for big, genre-defining works as it is for everything else — maybe even more so. Sometimes, authors are aware they're making certain unwarranted assumptions, sometimes they're not. But either way, if you want to find a fresh take on a type of story that you love, try and find the thing you're not supposed to be looking at, and stare at it. To some extent, this is what Alan Moore and friends did to superheroes back in the 1980s. To celebrate your favorite subegenre, find all the ways it doesn't make sense, and exploit them. Expose what the magician is doing with the other hand.
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2. Tap into the yearning that created a genre, and follow it a different direction.
Siegel and Schuster didn't set out to invent an archetype that would spawn (no pun intended) a million imitators. They were a couple of nerdy guys who just fantasized about being ridiculously powerful, strong enough to stand up to bullies. Over time, the original reason why someone might dream about a boy wizard or a Civil War veteran on Mars tends to fade away, leaving just a shiny archetype that everybody recognizes. But if you can ignore the final result for a bit, and try to tap into the emotion, the ideas, that originally gave rise to those icons, you can come up with something totally different and yet connected to the source.
3. Create characters who don't know they're in a genre story.
This is harder than it looks, because in real life, most of us are aware when we're living inside a particular genre. Like if you fall in love, and suddenly it feels like you're in a chick flick. Or when you're taking a shower at a spooky motel, and you feel like you could be in a slasher movie. (Looper director Rian Johnson explained this to us back in 2008.) In real life, we're all absurdly genre-conscious — and yet, the more powerfully we're in the grip of something, the less that awareness of genre is likely to come to the fore. Not only that, but being unaware of what genre of story you're in also means you're less likely to behave like a genre character. In real life, if you find out a family secret, you probably won't go on a road trip — that's just something that happens in a lot of literary stories. In real life, you'd probably just obsess over it and maybe go clubbing.
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4. Be a tease.
A murder mystery is just like any other type of story, until someone is murdered. An erotic story is just like any other, until it gets overtly sexy. You can play with expectations by teasing that something is going to happen that will cast your story in a particular genre mold — and then not having it happen, or having it happen in a very different way than people expect. Pull a bait and switch. Not necessarily by misleading the reader, or by building up to something that doesn't happen — that would just be sloppy and boring. But if you introduce a character who seems like a dashing rogue and smuggler, you can reveal a few pages later that she's actually a solidly reliable landscape gardener. You can have your characters notice things in their surroundings, in a way that reveals something about how paranoid your characters are — while also setting up an unwarranted expectation in your readers' heads.
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5. Genre can be a setting rather than a plot
Something can be set in the future, without being about any futuristic elements to the core story. You can have a love story after the apocalypse. Treating your genre elements as a backdrop for the story you're actually telling might feel like you're demoting or belittling them at first — but a great setting is worth just as much as a great plot. Maybe more. The best stories are often ones in which the setting feels like a character in the story. Which brings us to...
6. Make a particular genre element into a character in your story.
Have a detective wandering around, even if nobody gets murdered. Have a cyborg randomly show up, even if your story isn't about cybernetics. This might sound like a gimmick — but these characters will have a very different perspective on the events in your story than other people would, and that can add an extra dimension. And sometimes the easiest way to do a genre mash-up is to bring together characters who belong in different types of stories.
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7. Have A.D.D.
Genre is in the details. Obsessive attention to detail is often the hallmark of a particular genre — you know you're reading a military thriller when there is careful description of every piece of hardware, even down to the brand of coffee the guy who last repaired the big honking gun drinks. You know you're reading a particular sort of fantasy story when there are lengthy descriptions of rituals — or of sumptuous banquets, dish after dish. So one easy way to break out of genre expectations is just to have A.D.D.: describe something just enough so the reader gets it, and then move on. Or spend three paragraphs describing someone's shoes and then one paragraph describing their handheld antimatter gun. Like a lot of the other things on this list, this requires a certain amount of skill and care, but if you pull it off, you can have a really fun, oddball take on a well-worn genre.
8. Write a story where nothing happens to anybody.
Instead, every event in your story is something your characters instigate. Instead of witnessing a murder, your characters murder someone. Instead of having her baby stolen by fairies, your main character tries to foist her baby onto some fairies (only to find that they already have enough babies, thanks anyway.) And so on. If every genre element in your plot arises out of your characters' honest motivations, you'll very quickly find yourself driving off the map into the unknown. Sure, in real life, stuff happens to people — but you're not writing real life, you're writing stories.
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9. Totally commit to a genre trope, to the point of madness
The Avengers didn't feel like a superhero movie — because it committed to the superhero thing in a way that nobody else had before. Part of the "old sock" comfort of genre is that you don't have to commit to something 1000 percent, because everybody already knows and understands superheroes. I've lost count of how many novels and comics I've read where there's a Batman analogue, and the writer just throws in a few little touches so the reader knows, "Oh, they're doing Batman." And then the story can go on. But what if you go to the opposite extreme, and commit to the tropes of the genre with all your heart and soul, until they burst open with the force of your conviction? Feed them until they explode.[Stride]-Stride Step-[Choose one or more cards with the sum of their grades being 3 or greater from your hand, and discard them] Stride this card on your (VC) from face down.
[AUTO](VC) Unite (Active if you have called two or more units to (RC) or (GC) during this turn):[Counter Blast (1) & Choose a face down card named "Golden Dragon, Glorious Reigning Dragon" from your G zone, and turn it face up & Choose two of your rear-guards, and put them on the bottom of your deck in any order] When this unit attacks, you may pay the cost. If you do, look at seven cards from the top of your deck, search for up to the same number of cards from among them as the number of face up cards in your G zone, call them to separate (RC), shuffle your deck, and if you called three or more cards, Counter Charge (1)/Soul Charge (1).WATCH: Witnesses who saw police shoot and kill a 51-year-old man in East Vancouver on Saturday are wondering if officers did all they could. The suspect was wandering the streets waving a two-by-four before the deadly shooting. Julia Foy reports.
The Independent Investigations Office is looking into the death of a 51-year-old man who was shot by police in East Vancouver Saturday night. He has now been identified as Vancouver resident Phuong Na (Tony) Du.
The shooting happened around 5 p.m. near E. 41st and Knight St. after police received a report of a man waving a two-by-four. Witnesses say the man was clearly agitated.
According to a statement from the Vancouver Police Dept., the man confronted officers who tried to disarm him using non-lethal force. The victim was eventually shot and sent to hospital, but did not survive.
No officers were injured.
Now that the IIO is heading up the case, Vancouver police are limited in what they can say. They are not commenting on what efforts were made to negotiate with the victim before lethal force was used.
“The decision to use force that is potentially deadly is never an easy decision on our officers,” said VPD spokesman Brian Montague. “Less lethal rounds were used and our officers have to make very split-second decisions, decisions that are made under very stressful circumstances sometimes.”
The incident is the fourth police-involved shooting in the past seven weeks under investigation by the IIO.0 PHOTOS FBI seeks man after explosion near Colorado Springs NAACP See Gallery FBI seeks man after explosion near Colorado Springs NAACP Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- Authorities are looking for a man who may have information about a homemade explosive that someone set off near the Colorado Springs chapter of the NAACP.
The blast happened Tuesday outside a barber shop next door to the group's building, which is about an hour south of Denver. There were no injuries and only minor damage, police said.
An improvised explosive device was detonated against the building, but it was too soon to know whether the nation's oldest civil rights organization was the target, FBI spokeswoman Amy Sanders said. The agency sent members of its Joint Terrorism Task Force to help investigate.
Sanders said investigators were looking for a balding white man in his 40s who may be driving a dirty pickup truck. It could have an open tailgate or a missing or covered license plate.
Investigators Tuesday were examining a red gasoline canister with a yellow nozzle that had been placed next to the explosive device but did not ignite. They also were checking pieces of duct tape and metal lying 40 to 50 feet away from the explosion site.
Residents living nearby said they heard a single, loud "boom" but saw no fire. One neighbor, Gregory Alan Johnson, said he was unaware of prior problems near the NAACP building.
Chapter President Henry Allen Jr. told The Colorado Springs Gazette the blast was strong enough to knock items off the walls. He said he was hesitant to call the explosion a hate crime without more information but said the organization will move on.
"This won't deter us from doing the job we want to do in the community," Allen said.
The organization's national office issued a statement saying it was looking forward to a full and thorough investigation.
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Zsa Zsa's only child, Francesca Hilton, dies
Ex-Virginia gov sentenced for corruption
House votes on Boehner's future as SpeakerTONY Blair has given his unequivocal, 14 per cent backing to Ed Miliband.
The ex-Labour leader said his successor was ‘everything he expected him to be’ and that ‘only some parts of Britain would be totally destroyed’ if Miliband was in charge.
Speaking in his former Sedgefield constituency Blair said: “I like the name Miliband. That part of his name is good.
“At some point there may have been some confusion about the rest of the name and a mistake was made, but here we are.”
He added: “The part of me that vaguely believes in the NHS and tackling climate change is fully behind Ed, which I think is, at most, about 14 per cent, but probably closer to nine.”
Blair then launched a scathing attack on prime minister David Cameron, saying: “If it wasn’t for Europe, I’d vote for you.”Alongside the expansive Infinity event, Marvel is publishing an equally apocalyptic tale in Uncanny Avengers, given shape by the twisted imagination of writer Rick Remender. Therein the Avengers Unity Division, a group comprised of both human and mutant superheroes, must face the terrible judgment of Uriel and his twin sister Eimin, the time-displaced progeny of Archangel and the Horseman named Pestilence.
In addition to their genetic gifts of energy razors and acid production, the Apocalypse Twins have been bestowed with other skills by their future-warping benefactor, Kang the Conqueror. While Uriel can create pockets of artificial, accelerated time, Eimin presents time-space synesthesia, enabling her to see the future in the tones of organ music.
From Uncanny Avengers #8
Remender has become known for his off-the-wall concepts and strange storytelling ideas, but perhaps the most bizarre thing about the abilities endowed to his new antagonists — is that one of them is real.
The Many Become One
The word “synesthesia” comes from the Greek roots that mean “together” and “sensation,” and describes a condition in which normal sensory stimuli produce reactions of other, additional senses in those affected. Recent estimates hold that as many as 1 in 23 people may have some form of synesthesia, which covers over 60 specific types of plural perceptions.
Check out this video by Richard Cytowic, the neurologist who brought synesthesia back into the public consciousness during the 1980s, that illustrates some of the different types.
In one of the most common manifestations, inherent in up to 1 in 90 of us, the written forms of individual letters and numbers take on particular colored hues when read, even if the text itself is black. Other kinds of synesthesia can produce colors from sounds (a mental plane Dazzler?), put numbers into spatial positions (where, for example, “1” might be closer than “2”), and, in rare cases, cause every spoken word to have its own taste.
There is limited commonality between grapheme-color synesthetes, as most perceive “A” to be red and “S” to be yellow, for instance, but the differences are greater. Most individual synesthetic perceptions don’t match those of others.
Synesthesia vs. Psi
It’s important to note that synesthesia is not a type of hallucination, as neurologist Oliver Sacks has pointed out, as it is a constant, physiologic happening based on a stimulus, whereas a hallucination is not regular and isn’t usually caused by outside perception. Synesthesia is a 100% genuine phenomenon the reality of which has been proven. Have you ever done that test where someone shows you the word “blue” in red text, then asks you to name the color of the text without taking too long to think about it or blurting out “blue”? Turns out synesthetes have the same problem when the word is colored differently in their heads. That’s a measureable effect.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty f-----g incredible. Of course no one’s been shown to predict the future using synesthesia like Eimin can, which begs the question – why not? There are lots of so-called psychics out there making fantastic claims and boasting impressive success, so why haven’t their abilities been similarly documented? All kinds of different types, too – remote viewing, precognition, clairvoyance, psychometry – and not one can meet |
will stop being as troublesome without a good party.
For now, it is possible to complete Earth Tower by just having Peltasta C1 on your build.
4.- "I heard this is THE BEST build on kTOS right now"
People love to just blindly follow these kinds of trends.
Players on the Korean server are experimenting and working around their builds just as much as many people will on our international server.
Many kTOS players still are using inefficient builds because they are trying stuff out. Just like them, don’t be afraid to experiment with your build. And a lot of them are using what I consider terrible Swordsman builds, but they are still learning, just like everyone else is or had to at one point.
While they have their own regional meta as for popular builds, I highly expect this to change in our version as better and more refined builds are crafted by our community.
My advice is to not just blindly follow a “this is THE BEST build” advice. There are many ways to play this game and it comes down to the skill and creativity of players to figure out the best build for themselves.
A build that might be bad on the hands of one player, might shine on the ones of another.
Choose what YOU want to play.
[As a note, it is true that the Swordsman tree is perhaps the weakest when it comes to PvP, but hopefully it will get balanced in a soon future.]
#What classes should I pick for my build?
I like to think that building a character in this game is like going to Subway and getting a sandwich.
There are some ingredients that you might like, and others that you might not. The idea is picking the ones you like the most, and while there might be some “recommended builds”, there is always room to customize them by adding or removing components of it.
In the end, no matter what ingredients you pick, you will always end up with a sandwich, there is no way to go wrong and you will get to eat.
So don’t be afraid to pick classes that are interesting to you, just because they are not to other people.
My only advice is to aim to move always forward, either going deeper into a class or choosing a higher rank class. Try to not mix multiple low rank classes because overall higher ranked classes will result in a better build.
Classes
In this section I will provide a general description of each class, as well as reasons for which you might or might not pick them for your build and the general playing style you can expect with them. Advice for what skills to level up will also be detailed where necessary.
Now, I have to say that I am going to be mean to some of these classes, not because I hate them or anything, but because the game is still in development and it is the sad true that some classes are extremely underwhelming or lack an identity to make them a good choice.
Don’t let my words discourage you from playing one class, IF that is what you want to do with your build. Only you know what will be the most fun build for yourself. Don’t let your memes be dreams, or your dreams be memes, or whatever it is.
Also, I am not going to cover the description of every skill, it is highly advised to consult this guide while having the skill information at hand. You can find that from several sources, here is one of them: TOSBase Skill Simulator
http://s.nx.com/s2/game/tos/obt/common/1001.png
#Swordsman
The base class of our tree. The first circle is mandatory and luckily it is a good one. It provides good skills and attributes that will complement the classes you pick later on.
Overall it is advised to not get more than C1 of this class, unless you want to go for a very gimmicky Shinobi build (more explained on that class’ section).
You will also hear that C2/C3 are for PvP builds, due to Restrain. And while that is true, it is also exaggerated.
Choosing C2/C3 is NOT the best way to build for PvP. It has it’s pros and cons, just like everything else.
Restrain allows you to have another form of CC on your kit, but your build turns into an “all-in” one trick pony. It is very lineal and leaves no room for additional playing styles that you could use by choosing other classes. For example, manually blocking with Peltasta or Highlander allows you to deal easier with opponents who deal physical damage.
Not to even mention that your build suffers even more as it loses better tools to help on PvE, not only for leveling but for group content such as dungeons as well.
###Circle 1
Skills
Gung Ho (Level 5): This buff increases your physical attack while lowering your defense. Don’t worry too much about the defense reduction as it is barely significant. I recommend leveling this skill up first as it provides the best damage for SP at early levels.
This buff increases your physical attack while lowering your defense. Don’t worry too much about the defense reduction as it is barely significant. I recommend leveling this skill up first as it provides the best damage for SP at early levels. Bash (Level 3): Getting level 3 of this skill allows you to acquire the Knockdown attribute, which makes this a realiable CC skill with 3 Overheat.
Getting level 3 of this skill allows you to acquire the Knockdown attribute, which makes this a realiable CC skill with 3 Overheat. Thrust (Level 0~1): This is skill only useful at level 1 as a reliable source of Pierce damage, but not a good one. If you are a Hoplite or a Fencer, you can skip this skill.
This is skill only useful at level 1 as a reliable source of Pierce damage, but not a good one. If you are a Hoplite or a Fencer, you can skip this skill. Concentrate (Level 5): While Gung Ho remains as a better buff later on, during early levels I recommend leveling the attribute for Concentrate first, as it provides the best damage at the beginning.
While Gung Ho remains as a better buff later on, during early levels I recommend leveling the attribute for Concentrate first, as it provides the best damage at the beginning. Pain Barrier (Level 1~?): The main use of this skill is to deal with staggering. Level 1 should be enough on most builds; however, if you want to specialize in PvP then you can take points off from Concentrate and put them into this skill. Your early game PvE will suffer, but you will have a better buff for PvP at higher levels.
Bash and Thrust are not damage skills, so I don’t recommend you to level up their attributes to increase their damage as you will soon replace them with better skills from other classes.
###Circle 2
Skills
Restrain (Level 5) : The only reason why you are going into this circle. Get it as high as possible as you need the highest possible chance of it’s effect activating.
: The only reason why you are going into this circle. Get it as high as possible as you need the highest possible chance of it’s effect activating. Pain Barrier (Level 10) : If you decided to take on this circle for PvP, then you will also want to max this skill for a longer duration.
: If you decided to take on this circle for PvP, then you will also want to max this skill for a longer duration. Pommel Beat (Level 0~1) : It provides you with a Strike skill, so level 1 should be enough.
: It provides you with a Strike skill, so level 1 should be enough. Gung Ho (Level 9~10)
Get the attributes to add more effects to your skills.
###Circle 3
Skills
Restrain (Level 10)
Pain Barrier (Level 15)
Double Slash (Level 0~5): A decent damage skill that deals more damage to Bleeding targets (from Thrust), which also has a higher chance of landing a critical hit thanks to it’s attribute. I recommend getting level 5 of this skill and level up it’s damage attribute if it is a source of damage in your build. However, if your build has better damage sources from other classes then I would spend these points into other skills like Gung Ho or Concentrate.
#Highlander
For now we are still waiting on confirmation on whether or not we will get the changes to Sky Liner. As soon as this is confirmed I will add the necessary changes to this section, as well as the possible builds emanating from it.
Regardless of whether the changes to Sky Liner actually go through or not, there are a few aspect that make this class interesting for a build.
A Highlander prides itself on the ability to apply negative status to enemies, including Shock, Bleeding, Armor Break, Staggered, etc.
While people usually link this class with the word “DPS” for builds, it is not entirely accurate. It does have more damage than it’s counterpart, Peltasta, at Rank 2. However, in the overall picture of a build, Highlander brings more combat-effectiveness rather than straight up damage, which are often more useful as they provide different playing styles to use against different opponents; something valuable in an environment like PvP.
Highlander is a good class to choose for people who like to rush straight into battle for fast-paced combat, staying on top of enemies and not letting them breath.
Keep in mind that choosing Highlander over Peltasta will mean that you won’t have Swash Buckling, the AoE taunt skill of the Swordsman tree, and might have an impact when you do PvE content with other players. While it is more laborious to perform the job as a “tank”, it is not impossible, you just need a comprehensive party.
###Circle 1
The first circle ins’t particularly impressive, as most of the class’ potential comes at later circles. The main benefit it gives is the ability to use Two-Handed Swords and the ability to block incoming attacks with them.
Skills
Wagon Wheel (Level 1) : This skill remains as a CC source rather than damage, so level 1 is more than enough to fulfill it’s role.
: This skill remains as a CC source rather than damage, so level 1 is more than enough to fulfill it’s role. Cartar Stroke (Level 0~5) : This skill isn’t as strong as it was on the past. If you plan on taking a class with reliable Strike damage (like Barbarian, Cataphract, Rodelero, etc), then I would suggest skipping this entirely or getting level 1 for the CC effect, but it is not necessary. For a PvP build, I would also recommend skipping this skill to better spend those points elsewhere.
: This skill isn’t as strong as it was on the past. If you plan on taking a class with reliable Strike damage (like Barbarian, Cataphract, Rodelero, etc), then I would suggest skipping this entirely or getting level 1 for the CC effect, but it is not necessary. For a PvP build, I would also recommend skipping this skill to better spend those points elsewhere. Cross Guard (Level 1~5) : This is a pretty great and sometimes overlooked skill. It has nice scaling and I would recommend getting Level 5 of it regardless of what build you are planning to end up using. However, at least get level 1 if you would rather spend points on the damage skills of the next circles.
While it requires to use a Two-Handed Sword to block, it can still be used with other weapons such as Rapier or Spear by using weapon-swapping. This way you can take advantage of the Staggering effect, which makes opponents vulnerable to Pierce-type attacks (Hoplite, Fencer, Dragoon, etc).
: This is a pretty great and sometimes overlooked skill. It has nice scaling and I would recommend getting Level 5 of it regardless of what build you are planning to end up using. However, at least get level 1 if you would rather spend points on the damage skills of the next circles. While it requires to use a Two-Handed Sword to block, it can still be used with other weapons such as Rapier or Spear by using weapon-swapping. This way you can take advantage of the Staggering effect, which makes opponents vulnerable to Pierce-type attacks (Hoplite, Fencer, Dragoon, etc). Crown (Level 5): This is skill is often overlooked because of the lack of details as to how much INT/SPR the Shock effect reduces. To this day, there is still no clear formula for it, but it can go as far as to potentially reducing the INT/SPR values to 1, extremely weakening any magic user.
While this skill doesn’t scale up that well in terms of damage, adding more skill points to it significantly increases the duration of the Shock effect and with a cool-down of 30 seconds, then the up-time becomes an important aspect of it. Definitely pick this skill if you are planning on using a PvP build, and also if you plan on picking Doppelsoeldner C2 later on your build.
###Circle 2
The skill distribution for Circle 2 and Circle 3 is heavily dependent of the changes to Sky Liner. Once there is a confirmation, this section might change.
Moulinet (Level 0~5) : If Sky Liner remains as a 0 CD skill, then I would just skip this skill and spend points elsewhere. Otherwise, I would get level 1 to have an additional damage skill.
This skill doesn’t particularly scale that well into later levels in terms of damage, it is the reason why I prefer to leave it at level 1, sacrificing some damage at early levels to end up with a better skill set at later levels, as Moulinet will get replaced by stronger damage skills, while the points you spend on other utility skills from Highlander will remain as effective.
: If Sky Liner remains as a 0 CD skill, then I would just skip this skill and spend points elsewhere. Otherwise, I would get level 1 to have an additional damage skill. This skill doesn’t particularly scale that well into later levels in terms of damage, it is the reason why I prefer to leave it at level 1, sacrificing some damage at early levels to end up with a better skill set at later levels, as Moulinet will get replaced by stronger damage skills, while the points you spend on other utility skills from Highlander will remain as effective. Sky Liner (Level 5) : Regardless of what cool-down this skill ends up with, it still deals some significant damage to Bleeding enemies and the damage can be increased by other modifiers, like the Attribute, even if it doesn’t particularly scale that well by itself.
: Regardless of what cool-down this skill ends up with, it still deals some significant damage to Bleeding enemies and the damage can be increased by other modifiers, like the Attribute, even if it doesn’t particularly scale that well by itself. Cross Cut (Level 1~5) : This skill will remain mostly as an enabler for Sky Liner or other skills that rely on the Bleeding effect of it, so level 1 is enough to get the most out of it. You could spend more points on it to increase it’s damage, but same as other skills, it doesn’t particularly scale that well and it will be replaced by other damage skills at later ranks, so while it provides some decent damage at early levels, in my opinion it is not worth to spend more points in this skill to end up with a stronger build at higher levels.
: This skill will remain mostly as an enabler for Sky Liner or other skills that rely on the Bleeding effect of it, so level 1 is enough to get the most out of it. You could spend more points on it to increase it’s damage, but same as other skills, it doesn’t particularly scale that well and it will be replaced by other damage skills at later ranks, so while it provides some decent damage at early levels, in my opinion it is not worth to spend more points in this skill to end up with a stronger build at higher levels. Crown& Cross Guard (Remaining points): All your remaining points should go into these two skills. If you follow my advice for later levels, then it means you will get both to level 10.
###Circle 3
Skull Swing (Level 1~5) : This skill applies Armor Break (reduces defense to 0), which makes it a great utility skill. While it’s damage scales off decently, I would simply keep this skill at level 1 as you will soon get more damage skills from other classes.
The Armor Break effect lasts for 10 seconds at level 1, and goes up to 30 seconds at level 5. You might want to consider spending more points on it for the extra duration, useful for longer fights (like bosses) and to keep a higher up-time on it. Each additional level increases the duration by 5 seconds, so you can decide how many points you want to spend on this skill.
: This skill applies Armor Break (reduces defense to 0), which makes it a great utility skill. While it’s damage scales off decently, I would simply keep this skill at level 1 as you will soon get more damage skills from other classes. The Armor Break effect lasts for 10 seconds at level 1, and goes up to 30 seconds at level 5. You might want to consider spending more points on it for the extra duration, useful for longer fights (like bosses) and to keep a higher up-time on it. Each additional level increases the duration by 5 seconds, so you can decide how many points you want to spend on this skill. Vertical Slash (Level 0~5) : Another skill based around dealing damage, and like Sky Liner it also deals extra damage to targets. If Sky Liner remains at 0 cool-down, I would simply skip this skill. Otherwise I would get at least level 1 of it, and consider spending more points depending on how valuable this skill is as a damage source in the overall build (whether or not it gets replaced by other skills from other classes on the build).
: Another skill based around dealing damage, and like Sky Liner it also deals extra damage to targets. If Sky Liner remains at 0 cool-down, I would simply skip this skill. Otherwise I would get at least level 1 of it, and consider spending more points depending on how valuable this skill is as a damage source in the overall build (whether or not it gets replaced by other skills from other classes on the build). Crown, Cross Guard, Moulinet, Sky Liner, Cross Cut (Remaining points): The rest of your points will go into any of these skills, depending on how valuable they are to your overall build and playing style.This is a desktop version of the original Pixel Dungeon for Android, which can be downloaded from Google Play. The porting is done by @Arcnor.
Pixel Dungeon is a traditional roguelike game with pixel-art graphics and simple interface.
Explore the depths of Pixel Dungeon, collect useful items, fight fierce monsters to find Amulet of Yendor (surprise!) - the ultimate artifact of this game world.
Many people consider this game very difficult and luck-based. Anyway, you will die often. You are warned! :)
You can get the latest news about Pixel Dungeon on Temple of the Roguelike forum, RLGClub forum (russian), official facebook page, Google+ page and dedicated Tumblr blog. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Pixel Dungeon Wiki is a perfect source of information about the game itself (including things like items and monsters descriptions, tactics and mechanics etc), run by a community.
Features
Pixel-art graphics
Music by Cube_Code
Basic sound fx
Simple mouse-based interface
25 randomly generated levels (sewers, abandoned prison, caves, dwarven metropolis & demon halls)
Various dungeon features (incl. hidden and locked doors, traps, chasms, chests etc.)
25 types of monsters + 5 bosses
80+ types of items (incl. armor, weapons, potions, wands, scrolls etc.)
4 character classes (Warrior, Mage, Rogue & Huntress)
Specializations (sub-classes), 2 for each class
Enchanted weapons & inscribed armors
Alchemy
Shops
NPCs and simple quests
Rankings (high scores)
Badges (achievements)
Written in vanilla JavaEarth Day is April 22nd, and to get prepared for the big day, here are a few Earth Day facts that you may not know. Founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in, the first ever Earth Day was held on April 22nd, 1970. Earth Day not only marks the beginnings of moving toward a more sustainable world, it’s a time to come together and contemplate our global environmental situation, as well as participate in community and global “green” activities. Read on to find out all about this important eco-holiday.
Earth Day is one of the most widely celebrated environmental events across the globe. The first Earth Day was focused on protesting an oil spill off the coast of California, but today, the focus is on increasing awareness of the planet and all the issues around its health, from fracking and water pollution to rainforest depletion and animal extinctions.
More than 20 million people and thousands of local schools and communities participated in the first Earth Day of United States that took place on 22 April 1970, and one of the results of that first celebration was the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act. It became an international event in 1971, when UN’s Secretary-General U Thant spoke about it at a Peace Bell Ceremony at the United Nations in New York City. On that first celebration, NYC’s mayor shut down Fifth Avenue for use on Earth Day, and allowed it to be celebrated in Central Park. Today, over 1 billion people celebrate Earth Day around the world.
Earth Day is celebrated in 192 countries. This day is a time dedicated to increasing awareness about the Earth, its issues and its problems, and people in different countries take action that will benefit their region the most. For example:
On Earth Day 2011, the Earth Day Network planted 28 million trees in Afghanistan.
On Earth Day 2012, more than 100 thousand people in China rode their bikes to save fuel and reduce CO2 emissions from motor vehicles.
In Panama, in honor of Earth Day, they planted 100 species of endangered orchids to prevent their extinction.
In 2014, NASA participated in Earth Day with the agency’s #GlobalSelfie event, asking people to take a photo of themselves outside and post it to social media using the hashtag #GlobalSelfie.
We can all use Earth Day as a time to reflect on our personal impact on the environment. Simply implementing something that promotes sustainability, such as a weekly recycling regimen, can truly make a difference. Let’s use today as a starting point for great change, and make every day an Earth Day.
+ Vangel
The article above was submitted to us by an Inhabitat reader. Want to see your story on Inhabitat? Send us a tip by following this link. Remember to follow our instructions carefully to boost your chances of being chosen for publishing!EISENSTADT, Austria, Nov 26 (Reuters) - An Austrian investigator on Thursday urged politicians and others who dismiss refugees as criminals or economic migrants to remember the 71 dead people abandoned in a meat lorry on an Austrian motorway.
The discovery of the decomposing bodies in an airtight truck on Aug. 27 shocked the world at a time when the biggest migrant wave since World War II was moving through Europe.
The migrant crisis has given a boost to anti-immigrant parties across the continent.
Speaking on Thursday of the symbolic power of the case, Hans Peter Doskozil took aim at those seeking to demonise migrants who risk their lives to flee war and destruction.
"One must always keep in mind how these people feel and what pressure they are exposed to when one casually suspects them of criminality or says they are only economic migrants," Doskozil told a news conference.
"I hope and I wish that this incident will stay in the minds of people and decision makers."
Austria's far-right and Islam-critical Freedom Party has seen its popularity soar since the summer, regularly scoring more than 30 percent in opinion polls despite xenophobic gaffes by its representatives.
Investigators in the eastern city of Eisenstadt are turning the case over to Hungary, from where the truck entered Austria and which has arrested five men in a probe into trafficking.
Prosecutor Johann Fuchs described how the Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians and Iranians died.
"The people just sank down, dying. We could see no traces of a fight or of panic," Fuchs said. (Reporting by Shadia Nasralla Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.Here is your utterly insane stat for the weekend:
According to the Chicago Tribune, the median price for a home sold in the month of December 2008 in Motor City is Seven Thousand, Five Hundred dollars.
I had to write it out that way because I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the numeral $7,500 for a home.
Granted, its in one of the most economically devastated regions of the country, but still — that data point is amazing.
The Trib:
“It may be tough to get financing for a new car these days, but in Detroit you can buy a house with a credit card. The median price of a home sold in Detroit in December was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a listing service. Not $75,000. Remove a zero—it’s seven thousand five hundred dollars, substantially less than the lowest-price car on the new-car market. Among the many dispiriting numbers that bleakly depict the decrepitude of this onetime industrial behemoth, the steep slide of housing values helps define the daunting challenge to anyone who wants to lead this shrinking, poverty-pocked city of about 800,000 people... On a positive note, Detroit’s homicide rate dropped 14 percent last year. That prompted mayoral candidate Stanley Christmas to tell the Detroit News recently, “I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but there just isn’t anyone left to kill”... John Mogk, a professor at Wayne State University Law School: “A thousand people are leaving the city every month and the city does not have the financial resources and the economic base to solve its own problems.”
Wow, those are just unbelievable numbers...
>
Source:
Detroit’s outlook falls along with home prices
Tim Jones
Chicago Tribune, January 29, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-detroit-housingjan29,0,5435392.story
Previously:
Detroit Housing = ~$0 (February 27th, 2008)
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/02/detroit-housing-0/
Detroit Houses = $1 (August 13th, 2008)
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/08/detroit-houses-1/
Looking at the 1980 Chrysler Bailout (November 2008)
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2008/11/looking-at-the-1980-chrysler-bailout/Everyone knows fall ball scores mean next to nothing, especially when those games are played early in the fall, but when the Falcons Lacrosse Club from Japan comes over for a tour of games, and they beat a D1 US college team, it’s still news, even if the game wasn’t an official contest.
So how does that work? How can a team come over to play scrimmages, which we all agree to be less than meaningful, and still make headlines?
When it’s international lacrosse vs North America, it’s news!
It’s news because there has always been a huge gap between lacrosse in North America and Japan. Lacrosse has been played in Japan for around 25 years now, and teams from Japan have made the trip to the US to play before, but wins have been extremely rare, at least when the Japanese clubs play D1 schools, so this game is a very interesting barometer for the top level strength of Japanese lacrosse.
In the past, many of the Japanese teams that come over have been University squads, made up of guys who had only been playing for 3-5 years, at most. Results are often predictable. But this Japanese team is different, because they are the best club in Japan, and almost all of their players have some national team experience, or are current national team members
To give you some idea of how good they are, the Falcons Lacrosse Club has won TEN consecutive national titles in Japan. Some even say the club is as good (or better!) than the actual national team… and Japan’s national team is VERY good! Either way, it’s clear that the Falcons are the team to beat in Japan.
Now, with a 9-8 win over Wagner, they’re putting a nice stamp on the US college scene.
To be clear, this game was NOT an official game. The Falcons players are also older than the Wagner guys. Wagner also played a lot of different guys. But all of that aside, it’s great to see a team from abroad come over and play D1 level lacrosse. THAT is what’s great here, and should be celebrated.
Congrats to the Falcons, and HUGE props to Wagner for playing this game, running a lot of guys through the rotation, and hosting a club from Japan. WELL DONE all around! The result is the headline, but the actual story is much better. Huge props to Wagner coach, Matt Poskay, for being so gracious in his interview as well. Superb stuff all around!
The Falcons will play Monmouth in NJ on the 23rd of September. Tokyo and Keio Universities’ teams are also in the USA, playing other college teams. Keio has been over before, playing UMBC multiple times, but this is the first trip for Tokyo and the Falcons Lacrosse Club. Clearly, it’s going pretty well! LOVE to see all these Japanese teams coming over to play lacrosse!Node.js, one of the leading JavaScript runtime is capturing market share gradually. When anything becomes popular in technologies, they are exposed to millions of professional including security expert, attacker, hacker, etc.
A node.js core is secure but when you install third-party packages, the way you configure, install and deploy may require additional security to protect web applications from the hacker.
Just to get an idea, 83% of Snyk users found one or more vulnerabilities in their application. Snyk is one of the popular node.js security scanning platforms.
And another latest research shows ~14% of whole npm ecosystem was affected.
In my previous article, I mentioned how to find security vulnerabilities in a Node.js application, and many of you asked about remediating/securing them.
So here you go…
1. Sqreen
Get it started in less than 5 minutes, Sqreen is deployed within your code to protect your application and users from intrusions, attacker.
Sqreen is lightweight agent built for performance to provide complete security including the following.
SQL/No-SQL/Code/Command injections
Owasp Top 10
Cross-site scripting attacks
Zero-day attacks
Not just Node.js but it supports Python, Ruby, PHP as well.
Sqreen uses collective intelligence to detect an early attack by taking advantage of data coming from other applications.
2. Snyk
Snyk can be integrated into GitHub, Jenkins, Circle CI, Tarvis, Code Ship, Bamboo to find and fixes the known vulnerabilities.
You can gain visibility of your application dependencies and monitor real-time alerts when risk is found in your code.
On high-level, Snyk provides complete security protection including the following.
Finding vulnerabilities in the code
Monitor code in real-time
Fix the vulnerable dependencies
Get notified when new weakness impact your application
Collaborate with your team members
Snyk maintains their own vulnerabilities database, and currently, it supports Node.js, Ruby, Scala, and Python.
3. Templarbit
Templarbit support integration with Node.js, Django, Ruby on rails, Nginx to protect an application from malicious activities.
It mainly focuses on protecting from XSS attacks by using content security policy.
4. Cloudflare WAF
Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) protect your web applications from the cloud (network edge). You don’t have to install anything in your node application.
There are three types of WAF rules you get.
OWASP – to protect application from OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities
Custom rules – you can define the rule
Cloudflare specials – Rules defined by cloudflare based on application.
By utilizing Cloudflare, you just don’t add security to your site but also take advantages of their high-speed CDN for better content delivery.
Cloudflare WAF is available in Pro plan which cost $20 per month.
Another cloud-based security provider option would be SUCURI, a complete site security solution to protect from DDoS, malware, known vulnerabilities, etc.
5. Jscrambler
Jscrambler takes an interesting, unique approach to provide code & web page integrity on the client side.
Jscrambler makes your web application self-defensive to fight with fraud, avoid code modification in run-time, data leakage and protect from reputational loss and business.
Another exciting feature is application logic and data is transformed in such a way that it’s hard to understand and hidden on the client side. This makes it difficult to guess the algorithm, technologies used in the application.
Some of the Jscambler featured include the following.
Real-time detection, notification & protection
Protection from code-injection, DOM-tampering, man-in-the browser, bots, zero-day attacks
Credential, credit card, private data loss prevention
Malware injection prevention
So go ahead and give a try to make your JavaScript application bullet-proof.
6. Lusca
Lusca is a security module for express to provide OWASP best practices secure header.
Another option would be Helmet to implement headers like CSP, HPKP, HSTS, NoSniff, XSS, DNS Prefetch, etc.
7. Immunio
A real-time security protection for node.js, Java, Python and Rails platform. Immunio is a runtime application self-protection (RASP) solution to identify and protection from unacceptable and vulnerable traffic.
Some of the key features are:
Block bots, spammer, hacker, attacker
Secure web application assets
Real-time visibility & report
Protection against OWASP runtime threats
No source code changes needed
Immunio is an agent-based software which can be installed on your server. You can get it started in less than 5 minutes.
I hope above list of Node.js security protection solution help you to secure your web application. Most of the listed offer FREE trial so give a try to see what works for you.If it weren’t clear already, it has to be by now. Last week, polling conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald showed that:
A strong majority of Australians, 60 per cent, (also) want the Abbott government to “increase the severity of the treatment of asylum seekers.”
It has confirmed everything many have thought for a long time. Australians are clearly just a bunch of racists who want to punish asylum seekers for the sake of punishing them. No matter how harsh we are, whether it is denying asylum to anyone who comes by boat, or locking people up in cruel conditions in detentions centres, all we want to do is hurt people more and more. We clearly hate asylum seekers.
Clearly the question we need to answer is ‘why’? It is the question I, amongst many others, have been asking for ages. Why are we so disposed to hate people whose only crime is to come to Australia by boat? Why are we so determined to treat people so cruelly? Why is this such a defining issue for Australian politics?
Looking into it however, I cannot help but think that we’re asking the wrong question. Because when I ask the question, ‘why do we hate asylum seekers’, the only response I can come up with is ‘we don’t’.
Let’s just have a look at some evidence. Because if you look around you can see that whilst of course racism exists in Australia, it is hard to find it to be the only or even the overwhelming cause of our policies directed towards asylum seekers. Richard Cooke explains it like this (a long quote I know, but Cooke explains it better than I could):
Take Europe as a control group – it’s often favourably featured in those infographics – and the contrast is telling. Political parties far to the right of a One Nation wet dream hold serious political sway in Austria, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, Hungary and the Baltic states. In many of these places they have the power to make or break governments, or even challenge for presidencies. Cynics might say Australia’s political system dealt with the lunar right by incorporating its ideas, but there is little in the Liberal or Labor platforms that would placate supporters of the Front National.
There’s a simple reason that other Western countries have more anti-immigration political parties than Australia – their populations are significantly more racially intolerant. In Italy 94% of people say immigration is a ‘big problem’. Three-quarters of the French say Islam is incompatible with their values. In 2003, at the height of ‘we will decide’ fever, Australia was the country polled second most favourably disposed to immigration, behind only Canada. More than 60% of us said we wanted immigration to increase or stay the same. In Germany that figure was 22%. These are not cherry-picked figures, but representations of a long-standing and broad trend. For a bunch of racists, we are unusually tolerant.
This ‘toleration’ can be seen in anecdotal evidence around the country. For example, a petition to stop the deportation of Pakistani man Ali Choudhry last week amassed over 140,000 signatures within a matter of days, whilst organisations such as the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre have amassed so much non-Government funding that they can hire 45 staff members. Clearly there is some compassion out there. The recent concern for ‘deaths at sea’ is the mainstream expression of this compassion. Whilst many (including myself) have seen it as simply a cover-up of real reasons for new policies, it has clearly captured the emotions of many – emotions I simply cannot argue are fake.
This is not to say that racism doesn’t occur in Australia, nor is it to deny the experiences of racism that immigrants often face. Racism and just general hatred are clearly part of the picture. But I just don’t think it paints a full picture at all.
So what is the answer then? If we are so tolerant, why do continue to treat asylum seekers with such cruelty, and then demand even more. Well, to quote Bill Clinton, “it’s the economy stupid.” Tad Tietze explains it like this:
Those reasons (for the continued asylum debate) are defined primarily by the political needs of elites to create scapegoats and |
29 Jan. 2012, Extra, p. 4.
[8] Alison Gopnik, The Weekend Australian, 11-12 Feb. 2012, Inquirer, p. 17.
[9] SMH, 15 March 2012, p. 1.
[10] SBS One, Lost Worlds, WGBH production, 11 March 2012.
[11] “Battle of the Brains”, ABC1 TV, 27 Feb. 2012, produced for Horizon by the BBC in 2007.
[12] Salter, F. K. (2008). Class mobility, environment, and genes: A Darwinian conflict analysis. In The new evolutionary social science: Human nature, social behavior, and social change. Edited by H.-J. Niedenzu, T. Meleghy and P. Meyer. Boulder, Colorado, Paradigm: 159-171.
[13] Judith Sloan, Weekend Australian, 17-18 March 2012, Inquirer, p. 17.
[14] Lynn, R. and T. Vanhanen (2002). IQ and the wealth of nations. Westport, Conn., Praeger.
[16] Richard Glover, SMH, 3-4 March 2012, Spectrum p. 5.
[17] See Richard Dawkins interview Steven Rose: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdvj1r_steven-rose_tech.
[18] Salter, F. K. (2008). "Misunderstandings of kin selection and the delay in quantifying ethnic kinship." Mankind Quarterly 48(3): 311-344.
[19] Frank Carrigan, SMH Review, 18-19 Feb. 2012, pp. 18-19.
[20] Peter Hartcher, SMH, 31 Jan. 2012, p. 11.
[22] Norton, M. I., M. F. Mason, et al. (2012). "An fMRI investigation of racial paralysis." Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience.
[23] Degler, C. (1991). In search of human nature: The decline and revival of Darwinism in American social thought. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Segerstråle, U. (2000). Defenders of truth: The battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond. New York, Oxford University Press. Kaufmann, E. (2004). The rise and fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
[24] Caton, H. P. and F. K. Salter (1988). A bibliography of biosocial science. Brisbane, St. Albans Press.
[25] Caton, H. P., F. K. Salter, and J. van der Dennen (1993). The bibliography of human behavior. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press.
[26] Caton, H. P. (2001). ‘Biopolitics? Never heard of it’: A report from Australia. Evolutionary approaches in the behavioral sciences: Toward a better understanding of human nature. S. A. Peterson and A. Somit. Amsterdam, JAI-Elsevier Science: 247-269.
[27] Caton, H. P. (1982). Biosocial science: Knowledge for enlightened political leadership. Paper prepared for the American Political Science Association annual convention, Denver, Colarado, 2-6 September.
[28] On the ABC’s The Science Show and Ockham’s Razor (http://currawong.net/s-a-barnett/).
[29] Rosenberg, A. (1981). Sociobiology and the preemption of social science. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
[30] See the references on race in Barnett, S. A. (1988). Biology and freedom: An essay on the implications of human ethology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
[31] Barnett, S. A. (1983). "Humanity and natural selection." Ethology and Sociobiology 4(1): 35-51, p. 35.
[32] Barnett, S. A. (1988). Biology and freedom: An essay on the implications of human ethology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 91-3.
[33] This number was coincidentally the same as Caton’s.
[35] Wilson, E. O. (1978). Academic vigilantism and the political significance of sociobiology. The sociobiology debate: Readings on the ethical and scientific issues concerning sociobiology. A. L. Caplan. New York, Harper and Row: 291-303.(sth) Police are calling for witnesses after a bus driver was attacked by a man in Bonnevoie on Wednesday evening around 10pm.
The woman driving the bus had reached her terminus in the rue Demy Schlechter in Bonnevoie shortly before 10pm and was getting ready for her pause, when her arm was grabbed by a man asking her to hand over money.
The aggressor was pulling her arm, but the woman managed to wriggle herself free and step out of her driver cabin. This was when she realised that the man was pointing a gun at her. When he pulled the trigger, the gun luckily only made a clicking noise. Without hesitation, the bus driver charged the assailant and was able to make him drop his weapon.
During the following scramble, the man pulled a small knife and began to wield it at the victim. She tried to avoid the knife but suffered several injuries. When the man was close to the door, the bus driver again reacted quickly and threw him out of the bus. She quickly closed the door and began driving away.
The driver was able to see in the rear-view mirror that the suspect fled into the rue William Turner. Afterwards, she alerted police and the bus company. The gun was still in the bus and was discovered to be a pneumatic weapon.
Police are now searching for the suspect according to the description given by the bus driver: A male, about 1.85m tall, wearing a dark blue jacket with a hood and a scarf. As the scarf was partly covering his face, the woman could merely make out his distinct eyebrows, which almost met in the middle. He also wore black trousers and blue “Allstars” shoes. He spoke some words in German and later on cursed in a different foreign language.
All information can be communicated to the Luxembourg central police office by phone: 4997-4500Doctors in Navi Mumbai have successfully replaced a 35-year-old factory worker’s lost thumb with a toe.
In April, Rishi Kurne lost the thumb of his right hand when it got caught in a machine at the factory where he works.
After the injury, he feared that he would lose his job and his family of five was staring at a financial disaster.
But doctors came to his rescue. They told him that his thumb was crushed beyond repair and had to be amputated. The wound had to be covered with skin to prevent infection.
“Initially, when the patient approached us we used some skin from the abdomen to graft the thumb,” said Dr Vinod Vij, a Navi Mumbai-based cosmetic surgeon who treated Kurne.
While the surgery provided some immediate relief, Kurne was unable to work as he couldn’t handle machines or hold equipment without a functional thumb. “It was a difficult phase to manage without a thumb. I used to eat with my left hand and was not able to do many other activities,” he said. Kurne lives with his three-year-old son, wife and parents at Kalamboli and started panicking as he was the only breadwinner.
Eventually Dr Vij suggested a thumb reconstruction with a toe, as a reconstructive surgery. “Since the toe is part of the same anatomy, it’s possible that it can replace the thumb,” he said.
Doctors called it an ultra-rare procedure. “The surgery took about six hours as it’s complicated. In this process, you lose your toe as well. There are very few like Kurne who would agree for such a loss,” said Dr Vij.
“I agreed with the hope that I’ll resume work and support the family again,” Kurne said. But a month after the surgery, Kurne can now see the silver lining as he can eat with his right hand and hold things. “Although I am waiting for the thumb to regain strength, the surgery has made my tasks easier,” said Kurne. Doctors said that with time, he will be able to use it effectively. Dr Vij said that while dissecting the toe, they secured all veins and arteries.
First Published: Aug 25, 2017 01:51 ISTPresident Hassan Rouhani has said that Iran can never be bullied into permitting the inspection of its military sites.
Rouhani, who made the remarks during a live broadcast on Tuesday night, noted that Washington’s demands from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over the inspection of Iran’s military sites would probably not be accepted by the UN body.
"The International Atomic Energy Agency is very unlikely to agree to the US’s demands over inspecting our military sites," he stressed.
The Iranian president referred to the Friday statements by US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley who urged the IAEA to request access to Iranian military sites, in what is regarded as an attempt by the US to undermine the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
The deal was reached between Iran and the P5+1 countries — namely the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany — in July 2015 and took effect in January 2016.
US President Donald Trump has called the JCPOA — which was negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama — “the worst deal ever” and repeatedly threatened to tear it up.
Separately, the European Union’s foreign policy chief voiced strong support for the deal with Iran.
Read More:
Rouhani further stressed that regulations determine the framework of Iran’s relation with the IAEA not Washington and its pressure.
He also noted that EU countries continue to support the JCPOA despite pressure from their ally, the US.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley addresses a session of United Nations Human Rights Council on June 6, 2017 in Geneva. (Photo by AFP)
“As you know, the EU’s stance on the JCPOA is clear; all 28 countries in the bloc have announced that they are committed to the nuclear agreement,” he added.
Reiterating that Iran will not be the first party to violate the deal, Rouhani noted that violations by other parties will be responded to in kind.
On the topic of relations with Saudi Arabia, Rouhani noted that Tehran and Riyadh must solve their disputes via talks.
The president added that Iran has always called for establishing friendly ties with its neighboring countries and has good ties with almost all of them.Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested 27 foreign nationals in a day-long operation in West Michigan, federal agents announced Friday.
ICE claimed that 21 of the 27 nationals had prior criminal convictions, according to MLive.com. Among those arrested were a Mexican national who had a prior conviction for assaulting a police officer. Others had convictions including larceny, assault and battery DUI, domestic violence, as well as retail and welfare fraud. Five of those arrested will face felony prosecutions for re-entering the country after being deported, which carries a 20-year sentence.
“Operations like this one demonstrate ICE’s continued focus on the arrest of dangerous criminal aliens as well as those who enter the United States illegally,” said Rebecca Adducci, an ICE field office director based in Detroit.
The arrests come after ICE has ramped up its arrests under President Donald Trump’s administration. The agency has conducted several mass arrests throughout 2017.
A four-day operation in August reaped 650 arrests. The ICE operation, called “Operation Border Guardian/Border Resolve,” was designed to target immigrants who entered the country illegally as minors who are now over 18, and minors over 16 who are suspected of being gang members.
The agency nabbed another 500 in a similar operation in September. Dubbed operation “Safe City,” ICE and Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) teams took 498 individuals into custody on federal immigration charges. The operation targeted areas where ICE agents are “denied access to jails and prisons to interview suspected immigration violators or jurisdictions where ICE detainers are not honored,” ICE said in a statement.
A nationwide anti-gang operation in November also bagged more than 250 members of MS-13, an infamous international drug cartel. Dubbed “Operation Raging Bull,” the gang sweep netted a total of 267 MS-13 members in the U.S. and overseas, officials said. The operation is the latest nationwide initiative against MS-13, which the Trump administration has made a priority immigration enforcement target.
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But on Thursday, deep divisions over what to do about one of those issues — the rising violence in Syria — spilled into public view for the first time in a blunt exchange between Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and the leaders of the Pentagon.
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. But it was ultimately vetoed by the White House, Mr. Panetta said, although it was developed by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state.
“How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Mr. McCain asked Mr. Panetta on Thursday, noting that an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed in the fighting.Whether you are a Pygmy in the Congolese rain forest or a hipster in downtown Montreal, certain aspects of music will touch you in exactly the same ways. A team of researchers from McGill, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Montreal arrived at this conclusion after travelling deep into the rain forest to play music to a very isolated group of people, the Mbenzélé Pygmies, who live without access to radio, television or electricity. They then compared how the Mbenzélé responded both to their own and to unfamiliar Western music, with the way that a group of Canadians (in not-so-remote downtown Montreal) responded to the same pieces.
The researchers explain, in a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology, that although the groups felt quite differently about whether specific pieces of music made them feel good or bad, their subjective and physiological responses to how exciting or calming they found the music to be appeared to be universal.
Emoticons help measure emotions
The researchers arrived at this conclusion by playing 19 short musical extracts (11 western and 8 Pygmy) of between about 30 and 90 seconds to forty Pygmies in the Congo and then to forty Canadians in Montreal. Because all the Mbenzélé Pygmies sing regularly for ceremonial purposes, the Canadians who were recruited for the study were all either amateur or professional musicians.
The music from western culture was designed to induce a range of emotions from calm to excited, and from happy to anxious or sad, and included both orchestral music and excerpts from three popular films (Psycho, Star Wars, and Schindler's List). The Pygmy pieces were all polyphonic vocal pieces that are fairly upbeat and tend to be performed in ceremonial contexts to calm anger, or express comfort after a death, for example, or to bid good fortune before a hunting expedition leaves the village, or even to pacify a crying child.
The researchers used emoticons with smiling or frowning faces at each end of a continuum to get people to identify whether the music made them feel good or bad. They also asked participants to rate whether the music made them feel calm (close-eyed emoticon) or excited (open-eyed face). As the participants listened to the music, various measurements were taken (such as heart rate, rate of respiration, and quantity of sweat on the palms) to give researchers a more complete picture of the participants' responses to what they were hearing.
"Our major discovery is that listeners from very different groups both responded to how exciting or calming they felt the music to be in similar ways," says Hauke Egermann, who is currently based at the Technische Universität in Berlin but did part of the research as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill. "This is probably due to certain low-level aspects of music such as tempo (or beat), pitch (how high or low the music is on the scale) and timbre (tone colour or quality), but this will need further research."
Purpose music serves may influence our emotional response to it
The main difference between Pygmy and Canadian listeners was that the Canadians described themselves as feeling a much wider range of emotions as they listened to the Western music than the Pygmies felt when listening to either their own or Western music. This is probably attributable to the varying roles that music plays in each culture.
"Negative emotions are felt to disturb the harmony of the forest in Pygmy culture and are therefore dangerous," says Nathalie Fernando of the University of Montreal's Faculty of Music, who has been collecting and documenting Mbenzélé music-making for 10 years. "If a baby is crying, the Mbenzélé will sing a happy song. If the men are scared of going hunting, they will sing a happy song -- in general music is used in this culture to evacuate all negative emotions, so it is not really surprising that the Mbenzélé feel that all the music they hear makes them feel good."
"People have been trying to figure out for quite a while whether the way that we react to music is based on the culture that we come from or on some universal features of the music itself," says Stephen McAdams, from McGill's Schulich School of Music. "Now we know that it is actually a bit of both."Irish Water said it plans to install more than one million water meters outside homes before the end of 2016.
The company said that it will put 27,000 meters in place, starting next week.
The new utility company said it will start in Co Kildare and will expand its installation into Kerry, Meath, Wexford, Dublin city, Limerick, Mayo and then Fingal.
People will be given notice before a meter is installed and the company said the installation should not cause more than a few hours' disruption to supply.
Households should expect their first water bill at the start of 2015.
Those who have not received a meter at that stage will be billed on their estimated usage.
The three regional contractors appointed are GMC/Sierra Ltd, J Murphy and Sons Ltd and Coffey Northumbrian Ltd.
The company said the metering programme will create 1,600 jobs. Recruitment starts immediately and details are available at www.water.ie.
Irish Water Managing Director John Tierney has said that most of the 1,600 jobs would last for three-and-a-half years.
Speaking to RTÉ News, Mr Tierney said one quarter, or around 400 of the new positions, would be retained for those on the Live Register, as well as small to medium companies, school leavers and graduates.
He said he was sure there will be some protests, but he hoped that people will accept that contractors should not be interfered with when carrying out their work on the public thoroughfare.
The contractors are not required to enter people's houses to install the meters.
Mr Tierney said around 1,400 of the jobs announced will be sub-contractors hired by the main contracting firms.
This is broken down by setting aside 10% of all jobs for the unemployed, a further 10% for SMEs and the remaining 5% for graduates and school leavers.
Mr Tierney said the jobs reserved for the unemployed would be restricted to those residing in Ireland only. He said this was neither illegal nor discriminatory.Noisy USB Problem
Hello everybody,
I recently found a very interesting problem I had in my sound system.
As I told you in one of my reviews, I got a power regenerator for my system in which I plug my Burson Conductor and Audiobyte Hydra-X. It only has 500 W and I thought not to overload / stress it with my computer and other electronics.
A month ago I got a new DAC for testing. I used the Conductor just as amplifier and the external dac was connected on RCA in to it.
First I used Hydra with the external DAC and everything went well. When I inserted the usb from the computer into the external dac, I got noise into my headphones, even though the rca input wasn’t selected on conductor yet. And it wasn’t subtle noise, it was like on the radio between two channels. I tested it with 3 usb cables but with same results.
I thought it was something wrong with the DAC. Well…last week I got another DAC and got the same result. I have tested other DACs in the past without this problem. I realized it was a problem in my system. I immediately thought it was the Conductor. I panicked and did a fast test on my laptop to find out that the problem was just with my desktop. I was relieved. This is one of the few hobbies where when something breaks people say “thank God it’s just the computer” :)).
Ok but this was a recent problem, so something changed in my system. I realized that my old Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS passed away almost one month and a half ago and I started using my HD4000 from my I7.
My 2 monitors were now inserted directly into the motherboard. Maybe they induced the noise into the usb.
OCD kicked in and I wanted to find out the cause of the noise issue so I started to perform some tests.
1. Tested every cable inserted in my computer
I started taking out every component from the motherboard. I remained just with the usb from the external dac, the power cord and the 2 monitors.
I said…ok.. what now? I took out the power cable and the noise was reduced to 50% but still very present and annoying. I took out the power from the external dac as well. So now, only my Burson Conductor was plugged in but still I had very present noise in my headphones.
It was already 4 in the morning and I couldn’t believe my ears:
I then took out the 2 monitors out of my motherboard and the noise stopped completely. This is how I reached the conclusion that there must be something that the monitors and the computer power cable must have in common. So this is how I got to phase 2 of the test.
2. Started pulling out every component from the power outlets in my extension cords.
The annoying part here was that every time I pulled out a component from the outlet I heard it clearly in the headphones…and that just because of the usb input.
Solution
I had 2 extension cords that I used with my computer and my electronics, so I reconfigured the monitors and computer to be in the other extension cord and and switched the wall socket for the extension cords and … surprise, almost all the noise was gone!
This really showed me what influence can a usb port have in your entire system. Remember that my Burson Conductor and the external DAC were inserted in the power regenerator. This didn’ stop the noise from USB though and this ruined the whole sound.
Somehow the other electronics inserted in the same extension cord interfered with each other and that had a very powerful impact in my system.
Hydra made me ignore this issue for a month as it has the USB completely isolated from the computer as it doesn’t use the 5V from the computer and it takes the power from it’s clean battery. I cannot help wondering if the data line was affected in any way.
The sound seems more clear now overall and I listen to lower volumes now, but I cannot say with certainty yet.
I will try to find a power conditioner for my computer and the monitors and see how that goes.
This may be just a ground loop but I never thought the impact would be so big just because of the USB port.Like paper, graphene twists, folds into nanoscale machines
(Nanowerk News) A research collaboration led by Paul McEuen, the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science and director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science (KIC), is taking kirigami down to the nanoscale. Their template is graphene, single atom-thick sheets of hexagonally bonded carbon, famous for being ultra thin, ultra strong and a perfect electron conductor. In the journal Nature July 29 ("Graphene kirigami"), they demonstrate the application of kirigami on 10-micron sheets of graphene (a human hair is about 70 microns thick), which they can cut, fold, twist and bend, just like paper.
Graphene, like the paper models, is strong but flexible, and can be stretched or pulled with forces comparable to those exerted by motor proteins.
Graphene and other thin materials are extremely sticky at that scale, so the researchers used an old trick to make it easier to manipulate: They suspended it in water and added surfactants to make it slippery, like soapy water. They also made gold tab handles so they could grab the ends of the graphene shapes. Co-author Arthur Barnard, also a Cornell physics graduate student, figured out how to manipulate the graphene this way.
The researchers tested their graphene kirigami designs on laser-cut paper. They found that a graphene soft spring behaved similarly to the paper model.
The study's first author, Melina Blees, a former physics graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, said she received an enthusiastic welcome from the Department of Art, where the researchers spent time in the library studying paper and fabric designs and dreaming up ways to translate them to graphene.
They borrowed a laser cutter from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning shop, creating paper models of their designs, before hiking over to the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility to fabricate them out of graphene.
It was really true exploration, cutting things out of paper and playing with them, trying to imagine how a 'hanging kirigami mobile for kids' could become a nanoscale spring for measuring forces or interacting with cells, Blees said.
With one sheet of graphene, for example, they made a soft spring, which works just like a very flexible transistor. The forces needed to bend such a spring would be comparable to forces a motor protein might exert, McEuen said. Entering the realm of biological forces, the experiments open up a new playground of ideas for, say, flexible, nanoscale devices that could be placed around human cells or in the brain for sensing, McEuen said.
The researchers also demonstrated how well graphene bends in a simple hinge design, quantifying the forces needed. Opening and closing the hinge 10,000 times, they found that it remains perfectly intact and elastic - a potentially useful quality for foldable machines and devices at that scale.
Building on the principles from the paper, a related research team at Cornell has just received Department of Defense funding to continue developing technologies around flexible materials like graphene, using some of the kirigami principles demonstrated.
Blees added that over the course of the project, she was able to get an intuitive grasp of graphene's properties - rare for nanoscale scientists.UPDATE 2: Looks like Mark Rubin wasn’t confirming anything to EuroGamer. He’s unsure if they are releasing a Wii U version, and he can’t talk about it at this time. From GamesIndustry (via DW247):
“Ha! You know that’s funny, because I don’t even know the answer to that. I swear to God, I don’t. I was trying to say in the interview [that] I really don’t know and I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m not supposed to talk about the fact that I don’t know,” said Mark Rubin
“I imagine [it could], yeah. If you look at the hardware specs, I think it would be more in line with 360 and PS3, but I’m not sure. There could be some things [in the hardware] that bump it up a little higher than that. I haven’t played with it enough to know. I have one at home, and I think it’s cool; I can’t stop playing ZombiU,” said Mark Rubin
EuroGamer’s interview with Mark Rubin has further revealed that there is, in fact, a Wii U version of Ghosts coming. Back in April, there was a box art leaked for Ghosts – as seen in the feature image, but then Activision quickly denied it. Activision CEO said, “No announcements today [on Wii U for Ghosts], stay tuned,” at GameTrailer today.
Meanwhile, Rubin teased a Wii U version of Ghosts is indeed in the works, despite Nintendo’s console being absent from the game’s list of announced platforms. “Stay tuned,” he said.
UPDATE: Few updates from Mark Rubin on GameSpot live stream on Wii U: They don’t want to talk about it yet because they “want to be mysterious” and PR won’t let him; probably not launching November 5th. Will launch when next-gen versions launch.
SOURCE: EuroGamerDURHAM, NC—In what scholars are hailing as a landmark finding that reshapes their understanding of early Christianity, a newly discovered first-century text made public Friday by researchers at the Duke School of Divinity revealed that God first sent Jesus Christ to save elk as practice. “This ancient document clearly explains how, a number of years before He sent Jesus to save humanity, God sent His son down to earth for a dry run with elk so that Jesus could hone his skills at preaching compassion and teaching about God’s eternal kingdom,” said theology professor Paul Charow, adding that passages in the text reveal that God dispatched Jesus to western Canada, where he ministered among groups of elk using early versions of several parables, miraculously fed an entire herd from the bark of a single tree, and learned how to comfort and heal the sick and infirm members of the antlered ruminant species. “Though Jesus achieved only mixed results in his practice run with elk, it appears the exercise was vital in allowing him to identify problems in his methodology that he ironed out before returning as the savior of humankind. For example, while he wasn’t able to convince any elk to become his disciples and go out to spread the word of God, he did succeed in his primary goal of granting elk everlasting life when he was eventually trampled to death for their sins.” Charow noted that the text further suggests Jesus will one day return to earth to judge the living and the dead elk as a warmup for the actual End Times.
AdvertisementWith all the mobile technology that’s available today, sometimes it’s easy to overlook the lowly desktop web browser. But that big, nimble rectangle of connected, glowy goodness has continued its course as an indispensible tool over the years.
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There’s nothing quite like the unbridled exhilaration of setting up a new computer, no? Just me? But getting all your favorite apps set up can take forever. Thankfully Ninite helps you automate most of the process by way of a slick click-and-pick interface that packages all your goodies together into a giant installer that can run while you sleep. Conversions “R” Us
Despite us living in 2016, it’s still surprisingly cumbersome to convert files from one format to another. Zamzar lets you convert more than 1,200 file types up to 50 megabytes in size for free. Just upload your source file, choose which format you’d like, and the site will email you once your converted file is ready. Gigabytes To Go
File-transfer site WeTransfer offers a dead-simple way to send large files to other people. Enter your email address, your recipient’s email address, and an optional short message, then shuttle up to two gigabytes of files between your respective machines. Simultaneous Socializing
Even if you’re doing the bare minimum from a marketing standpoint, you should be posting to popular social networks. Postfity kills four birds with one stone–Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus–with the free version, letting you connect up to five unique accounts. Send updates immediately or schedule up to 10 posts in advance, giving your followers the impression that you never sleep.
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The once-lowly animated GIF has been enjoying quite a resurgence lately. Don’t let not having any idea how to create one stand in your way. The easy-to-use Giphy Gif Maker pulls in video clips from popular sites such as YouTube, or enables you to upload your own video files. Then, just pick your soon-to-be GIF’s start point, end point, and wait as the site works its magic. Hey, Free Gibberish
Need a big block of dummy text to help you shape your next presentation? Check out the Lorem Ipsum Generator. Copy and paste the available text or generate a specific amount by number of paragraphs, words, list items, or by file size. You’ll eventually have to go back and... you know... actually write stuff, but this provides a good start if you’re concerned with visual presentation. Leave Me Alone! Mask Your Mailbox
Your poor, poor email address. You’ve given it out to everyone, traded it for free stuff, and used it to sign up for service after service online. Keep your primary address private from now on by using MailDrop for your necessary-evil mail. No signup, no password; just use whatever@maildrop.cc and you’re good to go. MailDrop Opt Out And Out And Out
Closing unused accounts tends to range from simple to impossible. Instead of going site by site and hunting around for cancellation links, give Just Delete Me a try. It’s a directory of a seemingly endless number of services that tells you how easy (or hard) it is to quit each, along with quick links for quitting the easy ones. Digital Estate Planning
We all die, so why not leave some important info (usernames, passwords, and the like) for your loved ones from beyond the grave? Dead Man’s Switch lets you craft a secure email to be sent out if you don’t respond to a message that periodically gets emailed to you asking if you’re still alive. Turn Down The Marketing
Unroll Me rounds up all your email newsletters in an attempt to declutter your inbox. Instead of receiving marketing emails at random times throughout the day, the service sends you a once-daily summary of all of them and helps you quickly unsubscribe to the ones you no longer want.
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Mail That Goes Poof
Conventional email isn’t overly secure, and while nothing’s 100% foolproof, (Privnote lets you send secure messages that self-destruct either after being read or after a certain period of time. You can also password-protect your messages for an added layer of security. Money Minders Don’t Overpay Jeff Bezos
Save big on Amazon purchases, or at least see how much you’re not saving on those so-called sale items. CamelCamelCamel can look up just about any Amazon item and tell you what it usually sells for and how low it’s gone in the past. CamelCamelCamel Empty That Pantry
You may think you need to make a grocery run, but plug the food you have on hand into MyFridgeFood to get a list of recipes you can make without going to the store. There are several product categories with a broad array of options that send you to a sizeable collection of easy-to-follow recipes. Play Handyman (Or Handywoman)
Before sinking meaningful money into repairing or replacing your roughed-up gadgets, swing by iFixit, where you’ll find straightforward repair guides and spare parts you can order. There’s also a bunch of handyman-style projects to help you save money around the house. Info Ingestion Headline Attraction
If you’re a news junkie, put a spare monitor to work with Newsmap. The site showcases a big, bold, comprehensive grid of headlines from around the world. The hotter the story, the larger the font. You can customize the categories you’d like to see as well. Newsmap Netflix Sans Stinkers
Metacritic’s super-handy What to Watch Now on Netflix gets updated each month to show you which new movies and TV shows have made their way onto the popular streaming service, and which ones are about to get killed off. Only content with a Metacritic score of 61 or higher makes the list, ensuring you’ll actually watch something slightly more than halfway decent.
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Have Fun, Then Sleep
If you’re heading out on a road trip of any meaningful length, make sure to visit Roadtrippers first. Input your starting point and your destination, and the site will then map out cool attractions and affordable hotels along your route. YouHugeTube
Hook your computer up to your TV and enjoy YouTube from your couch with YouTube TV. The site sports a big-screen-friendly interface with gigantic fonts and thumbnails to make for easy navigation from across the living room. What’s News Now?
NewsNow is like a pretty, thoughtful digital newspaper that links to interesting articles found all over the web. It’s a great periodic stop throughout your day if you need to get quickly caught up, or leave it open in a browser tab and watch as it auto-refreshes to pull in the latest news every few minutes. Figure It Out Decaf Fans Need Not Apply
If you’re going to suck down liquid uppers all day, you might as well figure out how much caffeine you’re ingesting. Caffeine Informer is a helpful, straightforward site with an enormous database of jitter-inducing stimulants that you can search for, filter, and sort with a few clicks. Caffeine Informer Connectivity Reality Check
Down For Everyone Or Just Me helps you figure out whether a site you’re trying |
separate dwelling.
He said tiny houses could be “the silver bullet” politicians were looking for — a solution to increasing urban density without destroying neighbourhood character.
Several Australian companies specialising in tiny houses, including Contained and Wagonhaus, have expressed interest in the Melbourne display site.
Wagonhaus, a Tasmanian manufacturer of tiny eco-homes with wheels, has only been in business for a year but has received “massive, massive interest”, according to director Kylie Bell.
Ms Bell said she was fielding enquiries every day from a diverse range of people.
“You get single mothers with children, through to people looking for short-term accommodation and couples who are tired of renting and want to go off grid,” she said.
For Anatoly Mezhov, director of Contained, his products are geared towards short-stay accommodation, such as holiday homes or luxury cabins that can provide additional streams of income for property owners.
He said a display in the inner-city would allow the tiny house movement to reach more people.One man remains behind bars after a bizarre crime spree in Indian River County.
Julian Gonzalez was charged with grand theft auto, burglary, criminal mischief, and fleeing from law enforcement.
Gonzalez began his crime spree by stealing a county vehicle from the county compound yard. He then drove the vehicle, while under the influence, and proceeded to break into the Animal Control Office.
The manager of Animal Control told deputies that when he entered the office at 7:45 a.m. Tuesday, he noticed that the fire extinguisher has been tampered with.
Deputies said that the manager also led them to a freezer where they store dead animals. The animals were removed from plastic bags, and placed on the floor of the freezer. Deputies were able to test fingerprints and shoe imprints in the white powder sprayed from the fire extinguisher.
The sheriff's office had a suspect already in custody before the investigation began at Animal Control. Gonzalez was arrested by deputies after a slow speed chase in a stolen county vehicle just before 5 a.m. Tuesday.
Investigators say that crime scene detectives processed the scene at animal control and later tested Gonzalez's shoe prints and fingerprints. They determined that Gonzalez was the person that broke into the Animal Control Office.
Gonzalez is in the Indian River County Jail."Hillary Clinton has campaigned on the platform of having worked for decades to protect America's children. During the presidential debates Mrs. Clinton repeatedly brought up her work focused on children. I decided to investigate exactly what Mrs. Clinton defines as helping to "protect America's children" and what laws the Clinton's were involved in to enforce the protection she claims to have worked for.
Here is what the Clinton's consider helping America's children:
Under Bill Clinton's Administration he signed a law which gave cash incentives to CPS for every child taken from their parents and placed up for adoption. Clinton's law gives CPS $4,000 per child with an additional $2,000 added for special needs children that are taken from their parents and put up for adoption.
On November 19, 1997 President Bill Clinton signed the law - The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA, Public Law 105-89) after having been approved by the United States Congress in early November of 1997."
http://www.usmessageboard.com/threads/clintons-law-cash-bonuses-to-cps-for-taking-children.540951/
The President Clinton's Announcement on Welfare Legislation http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/01/us/text-of-president-clinton-s-announcement-on-welfare-legislation.html
Hillary Clinton's Forgotten Scandal http://www.resistancemedia.org/2016/10/hillary-clintons-forgotten-scandal.html
Adoption Bonuses: The Money Behind the Madness http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2000/5_May/mayds4.htm
On Child Protective Services, Part 4: Follow the Money http://politicaloutcast.com/on-child-protective-services-part-4-follow-the-money/
‘USA CHILDREN used as CURRENCY’ (w/Footnotes) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/usa-children-used-as-currency-wfootnotes_us_59406854e4b03e17eee087bb
"CPS agencies need children in their foster care to meet their federal mandates.1 The federal funding is distributed to local communities, meaning the more children in the foster care system, the higher the paychecks for those involved. These funds extend to foster parents, teachers, attorneys, doctors, judges, therapists, caseworkers and coaches, as well as to several sub-agencies like Family First and Head Start.2
This creates a conflict of interest and has resulted in unintended consequences, including corruption. Over the years, communities have learned how to manipulate the system for financial gain. Thousands of communities around the U.S. are using ‘children as currency.’3"
"Because this abuse is occurring in the comfort of the foster parents homes, the majority of the abuse is gone unreported. Pedophiles and predators are drawn to the CPS industry and are acutely aware of the loopholes that allow abuse to go unchecked, protecting the perpetrators. Many foster parents even have criminal backgrounds9, CPS supervisors have personally told me, “If we did not allow foster parents with criminal records, we would have no foster parents.” The decision to accept such foster parents is left up to the discretion of CPS caseworkers. The same caseworkers also benefit from legal immunity, meaning they cannot be held accountable for poor judgment or bad decisions that may lead to a missing child, child abuse or even a child’s death while in foster care.10"
Why Family/CPS Courts Target ‘Fit’ Parents favoring ‘Unfit’ Parents http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-familycps-courts-target-fit-parents-favoring_us_594afbe0e4b062254f3a5b58
Cook County Circuit Court family court, called “the model for the nation” https://familycourtinamerica.org/family-law-practice-state/illinois-rep-bob-biggins-rep-dan-brady-judge-souk/dr-shelia-mannix-cook-county-family-court/
"An April 10, 2010 certified report produced by the Illinois Family Law Study Committee [formed under the authority of House Resolution (HR1101) on May 19, 2008] was obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request which report stated: “(T)he effect of the present system, in practice, has created cottage industries of GALs/child representatives, custody evaluators and others…”
Mannix attached the report to a grand jury motion in her case against the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (U.S.D.C. Case No. 10 C 3849). On September 14, 2010, Chief Judge William Holderman of the federal court in Chicago deferred alleged “direct evidence of federal funding fraud underlying the ‘cottage industries’ operating in the State of Illinois’ family court system” to District U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, stating in a written order, “The United States Attorney may exercise the full prosecutorial authority of the Executive Branch of the United States Government in bringing the matter to the attention of the grand jury.”
How much of this "jackpot" keeps flowing back to Clinton Foundation and similar money making machines to fund the corrupt officials political campaigns though such "cottage industries"?
Clinton Foundation Announces Partnership Focused on Strengthening Support for San Diego’s Children and Families https://www.clintonfoundation.org/press-releases/clinton-foundation-announces-partnership-focused-strengthening-support-san-diegos
Child protective services has over stepped their bounds and are fudging up number to make it look like they are needed, by lying about the amount of abuse cases. Child protective services break so many constitutional laws and laws written to back the constitution just to steal children and break up families. Children are being ripped away from loving families because people claim their is abuse, with out proof, and Child protective services with out due process take children form their homes. When a crime has been committed it show be left up to the police department to investigate, and give parents their due process. There is no need for child protective services to in existence. They make laws which some how has ignored what the constitution says, we reserve our rights of not being harassed and be accused of a crime in which they fabricate. They court system they use is a kangaroo court with no real justice, and they use threats and intimidation to kidnap children from loving homes, merely because they can, it has to stop. They aren't suppose to exist, they do not protect children once they get them they put them in hellish foster homes, with people who only care about the money they get for each child taken. When a parent stands up for their rights they fight back with fabricated evidence to take their children away.
Better laws need to be in place so that the small percentage of children being abused are protected. But a branch of government call child protective services needs to go, they don't look out for the best interest of the children, they look out for their best interest.Server Deployments week 48
As this is Thanksgiving week in the USA, it is a code freeze week with no scheduled deployments for the grid. Deployments will resume in 49.
SL Viewer
There are no planned RC releases or updates for week 48, again because of the Thanksgiving code freeze.
Oz Linden is, however, working on getting another maintenance RC together in the near future, although it’s not clear exactly what this will contain at this point in time.
There have also been reports of issues with test versions of viewers built using the latest Sunshine External repository (the SSA “polish” code and AIS v3). The exact cause of the problems is not known, but it is leading to a high number of Current Outfit Folder mismatch issues on Windows. A request has been passed to the Lab to check the automated build process in order to help ascertain if there is a problem in the code, or whether an issue in merging the code is causing problems. These issues don’t affect any released versions of viewers, only those using the latest SAA / AIS v3 code for testing purposes.
Default Object Permissions
A number of TPVs include the ability to specify the default permissions applied to a new prim object (cube, cylinder, torus, etc.) on creation. A similar capability is being developed for the LL viewer (STORM-68) by Jonathan Yap, a long-time contributor to the viewer. However, this work also requires updates to server-side capabilities, and Andrew Linden is now looking into this, and at the moment is specifically trying to figure out how to propagate the default perms through teleports and region crossings.
Other Items
Region Crossing Issues
The three RC channels are all running the same simulator version, which includes a fix for “Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full.” (BUG-4152). Describing the issue at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday November 26th, Simon Linden said, “The server was doing a parcel check at the wrong location … you’d cross, and at one point it would check a parcel based on the new region coordinates in the first region. If that happened to be a full parcel, it failed.” This issue has been reported as occurring on Main channel regions as well, under a variety of reports including SVC-8007. As such, it is hoped that when the package currently on the RCs is promoted to the Main channel in week 49, these issues may also be rectified.
In the meantime, and to test whether the fix may work for SVC-8007, the mainland region of Epirrhoe has been moved to the Magnum RC to allow vehicle crossings to be tested between it and the neighbouring region of Jodis, which has been a crossing which has experienced repeated issues with SVC-8007 for the SLRR.
llSetCameraParams([CAMERA_DISTANCE, x])
Many vehicles of all types in SL use llSetCameraParams to establish a “follow camera” which allows the vehicle to be effectively guided by the driver / pilot. However, there has been a long-standing issue the CAMERA_DISTANCE rule, which is clamped to distances far shorter than draw distance. This can make it next to impossible to create a scripted follow camera for very large vehicles such as realistically sized spacecraft, airships and ships.
The original JIRA (SVC-3499) was closed as “Won’t finish”. However, commenting on the matter at the Simulator User Group meeting, Andrew Linden said:
If we were to expand the clamp limits then some poorly written scripts will change behaviour. How much do we care about breaking such poorly written scripts? And… I wonder why it was clamped so tight? It would be nice to ask around to see if anyone remembers why some limits were set … Well, it would be possible to expand the distance limit and test to see how it works with different limits. If nothing breaks too bad, then perhaps we could ship it.
A new BUG report has been filed as a feature request for this to be looked at (BUG-4594), which is likely to be looked-at the next time feature requests are sorted, and quite possibly passed to Maestro Linden.
Region Restart and Visibility Issues
An unusual issues has been reported which appears to be related to region restarts and visibility, but it only noticeable on regions which have multiple neighbours, all of which are restarted at more-or-less the same time (within about a minute of one another). The problem can be broken down into a number of related points:
Observers are standing in region A, which is surrounded by regions B, C, and D – all of which are restarted at pretty much the same time
Following the restart, there is a high probability that some or all of regions B, C, and D will not be visible to those observers on region A (which was not restarted), and they show-up as red on the mini-map – something which has been confirmed on both the SL viewer and Firestorm
However, anyone entering region A after the restart will see all of regions B, C, and D as expected. Similarly, anyone on region A at the time the other regions restarted can resolve problems by relogging
the restart will see all of regions B, C, and D as expected. Similarly, anyone on region A at the time the other regions restarted can resolve problems by relogging Those observers who were in region A at the time the surrounding regions were restarted are able to fly into any of them which are showing as red on the mini-map, and although nothing physically renders for them, they will experience object collisions. Furthermore, it is possible to exit the “red” regions on the mini-map and fly into the void where no regions actually exist.
In tests with a specific set of regions, the above issues occurred in 8 out of 12 tries. That there is a unique problem with the regions on which the tests were carried out has been pretty much discounted. Whirly Fizzle, who has been poking at the issue with a number of people, provided a screen capture show how her alt managed to fly through a “red” zone and into the void where no region exists.
Commenting on the matter, Simon Linden said, “It sounds like it’s getting confused and not realizing the old connection went away … I’d bet on the timing.”
Agreeing with this point of view, Andrew added: “If Region A thinks your viewer can already see into Region B, it wouldn’t initiate the connection,” hence why relogging would appear to fix the issue for those experiencing the problem and those arriving in the region after those around it have been restarted: as you arrive in the region, it (re-)initiates the connection between the viewer and the surrounding regions. This is also why people encountering the situation can enter void areas where no regions exist, as Andrew also explained: “The region you’re on expects the other region to inherit your avatar, o it lets you walk beyond the region boundaries until the other region picks you up. But if the exchange never completes, you get to walk around outside of the region boundaries for a while.”
This can be seen in the image Whirly supplied: while she is clearly in a void space where no regions exist, the title bar of her viewer still reports her as being in Mote (her “region A” during the test), because the “hand-off” between Mote and Droom (shown in red on her mini-map) never completed.
Andrew recently fixed another issue related to connections to neighbouring regions, and has offered to look into the matter himself to find out what is going on and how it can be rectified.
AdvertisementsIt's easier than you think to make a software package installable via Homebrew. If you depend on a very specific version of a software package (say, Postgres 9.5.3 with readline support), I highly recommend creating a Homebrew repository and publishing recipes to it. Then your team can install and update packages as easily as:
brew tap mycompany/packages brew install mycompany/packages/postgresql
You can use the existing formulas as a jumping off point, and modify as you see fit. (Obviously this won't work for Linux folks on your team, however in my experience people running Linux in a Mac software shop have more experience building dependencies on their own).
Anyway, I wanted to describe how to install Go binaries via Homebrew. One way to do this is to compile binaries, upload them to Github releases, and install from there. However, the Homebrew core team requires that packages are buildable from the source code. (This helps check that a binary wasn't tampered with, and avoids compatibility problems with e.g. 32 bit and 64 bit systems).
If you vendor dependencies, and check in the vendor folder to Github, installation is super easy.
# Classname should match the name of the installed package. class Hostsfile < Formula desc "CLI for manipulating /etc/hosts files" homepage "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile" # Source code archive. Each tagged release will have one url "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile/archive/1.2.tar.gz" sha256 "cc1f3c1cb505536044cbe01f44ad7da997e6a3928fac1f64590ef69d73da8acd" head "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile" depends_on "go" => :build def install ENV [ "GOPATH" ] = buildpath bin_path = buildpath /"src/ github. com /kevinburke/ hostsfile " # Copy all files from their current location (GOPATH root) # to $GOPATH/src/github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile bin_path.install Dir[" * "] cd bin_path do # Install the compiled binary into Homebrew's `bin` - a pre-existing # global variable system " go ", " build ", " - o ", bin/" hostsfile ", ". " end end # Homebrew requires tests. test do # " 2 >& 1 " redirects standard error to stdout. The " 2 " at the end means " the # exit code should be 2". assert_match "hostsfile version 1.2", shell_output ( " #{ bin } /hostsfile version 2>&1", 2 ) end end
Basically, download some source code, move it to $GOPATH/src/path/to/binary, build it, and put the compiled binary in $(brew --prefix)/bin.
If you don't vendor dependencies, the story gets a little more complicated because you need to download a version of all of your dependencies. Say for example I had one dependency in my project, I would add a go_resource line for each dependency, and then call stage_deps to download/install all of them in the correct places.
require "language/go" # Classname should match the name of the installed package. class Hostsfile < Formula desc "CLI for manipulating /etc/hosts files" homepage "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile" # Source code archive. Each tagged release will have one url "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile/archive/1.2.tar.gz" sha256 "cc1f3c1cb505536044cbe01f44ad7da997e6a3928fac1f64590ef69d73da8acd" head "https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile" go_resource "github.com/mattn/go-colorable" do url "https://github.com/mattn/go-colorable.git", :revision => "40e4aedc8fabf8c23e040057540867186712faa5" end depends_on "go" => :build def install ENV [ "GOPATH" ] = buildpath bin_path = buildpath /"src/ github. com /kevinburke/ hostsfile " # Copy all files from their current location (GOPATH root) # to $GOPATH/src/github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile bin_path.install Dir[" * "] # Stage dependencies. This requires the " require language /go" line above Language::Go.stage_deps resources, buildpath/ "src" cd bin_path do # Install the compiled binary into Homebrew's `bin` - a pre-existing # global variable system "go", "build", "-o", bin /"hostsfile", "." end end # Homebrew requires tests. test do # "2>&1" redirects standard error to stdout. The "2" at the end means "the # exit code should be 2". assert_match "hostsfile version 1.2", shell_output(" #{ bin } / hostsfile version 2 >& 1 ", 2) end end
And that's it! You can test your new package by creating a symlink from /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew to wherever you keep your homebrew-core checkout:
ln -s ~/code/homebrew-core /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core
Then you can just use brew install commands and they'll work just as you expect.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire.Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came to New York City to deliver a speech outlining what’s next for his campaign. Despite seemingly impossible odds, his plan doesn’t include giving up.
In the remarks, Sanders suggested he’s still a long way from conceding and that there is still a chance he could contest the Democratic National Convention next month — even though the party’s presidential primary ended with Hillary Clinton coming out ahead and earning enough delegates to secure the nomination.
Before the speech, Sanders and his team spent the day fending off questions about when he plans to give up his quest for the White House and when, if ever, he’ll endorse Clinton.
Sanders’ comments included little to soothe his supporters who believe the primary process was rigged in Clinton’s favor. He said he will be pushing for a change to the Democratic super delegate system and an end to closed primaries, two things his team has repeatedly suggested unfairly benefited Clinton.
“Never, ever lose your sense of outrage!” Sanders urged supporters in the speech.
On Wednesday night, there was widespread speculation that Sanders might be preparing to concede. This was fueled by his speech being titled “Where We Go From Here” and his recent CSPAN interview in which he admitted, “It doesn’t appear that I’m going to be the nominee.”
Shortly after Sanders arrived in New York on Thursday afternoon, he headed to a Manhattan diner, where his top spokesman, Michael Briggs, was peppered with questions about whether the day’s speech would be a concession.
“No,” Briggs said, adding, “For the five-thousandth time on this speech alone.”
Sanders’ next stop was a taping of the “Late Show” with Stephen Colbert, where the host asked Sanders at least five times when and if he was giving up. During the interview, Sanders acknowledged he doesn’t have enough delegates to win, but suggested he would be remaining in the race through the Democratic convention next month to ensure the more than 12 million people who voted for him are “heard” and have input on the party’s platform.
“Look, I’m very good at arithmetic. … I understand that Secretary Clinton has a lot more,” Sanders said. “We have 1,900 delegates going to Philadelphia for the convention. That’s pretty good. She has more, which is not so good for me … but 1,900 delegates is actually quite a lot of people.”
Sanders said his team was “talking” to Clinton and her campaign to ensure she “is going to come out very strongly” for some of his core issues, including fighting income inequality and establishing free tuition at public colleges and universities. Colbert mockingly pressed Sanders for more specific demands he might have before agreeing to drop out of the race.
“As you said, you are negotiating with the Clinton campaign right now to get something from them of your agenda before you endorse the secretary. Is there anything else? Like do you want to be ambassador to Narnia or anything?” Colbert asked.
Colbert also asked Sanders if he would be endorsing Clinton on Thursday. Sanders flatly said, “No.” Though he wasn’t ready to embrace Clinton, Sanders dismissed the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, as a “bigot.”
After the “Late Show” taping, Sanders briefly stopped at his Times Square hotel, which was about two blocks from the site of his speech. When he was ready, Sanders opted to walk to the venue. En route, USA Today reporter Nicole Gaudiano attempted to clarify Sanders’ position on Clinton. She asked if he planned on endorsing Clinton later in the campaign even though he would not be doing so in his speech.
“I’m going to endorse you!” Sanders said to Gaudiano.
Yahoo News tried a slightly different approach and asked Sanders who his supporters should vote for if the election “comes down to Clinton and Trump.” Sanders made an audible expression of distaste.
“Eh!” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Inside, some of Sanders’ supporters were clearly not interested in backing Clinton. When Yahoo News began asking nearby audience members if they could eventually get behind Clinton, Lauren Lindenbach interrupted with a shout of “Never!”
Lindenbach, a 35-year-old Californian, cited allegations of “voter suppression” in her home state, Nevada, and New York. She suggested she would go “Bernie or bust” and vote for Sanders or another likeminded candidate if he does eventually concede.1993 soundtrack album by various artists
Judgment Night is the soundtrack to the 1993 film of the same name. It was released on September 14, 1993 through Immortal Records and Epic Soundtrax and was produced by many of the album's performers. Every song on the soundtrack was a collaboration between hip-hop artists and rock artists. The album peaked at #17 on the Billboard 200 and spawned four singles, "Fallin'" by Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, "Another Body Murdered" by Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., "Just Another Victim" by Helmet and House of Pain, and "Judgment Night" by Biohazard and Onyx.
Production and release [ edit ]
Billboard explains that the soundtrack album "paired hip-hop artists with modern rock acts,"[1] and The A.V. Club wrote that its musical pairings were "designed to capitalize on the burgeoning popularity of rap-rock."[2] A.V. Club further opines that although there had been "sporadic successful mergers" between individual artists in the metal and rap genres by 1993, "no one had yet thought to do an entire album based on getting established rap and rock artists in the same studio to hash something out. That revolutionary concept in doubling your market share fell to Happy Walters."[3] According to Rolling Stone, "it is largely due to the initiative of [soundtrack producer] Happy Walters... that so many leading hip-hop and alternative rock artists were assembled for the soundtrack," with Walters bringing in groups such as Pearl Jam, Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., Sonic Youth, Cypress Hill, and Faith No More as collaborators on new material.[4] The Judgement Night soundtrack album was released by Immortal Records with distribution by Epic Records.[4] A collaboration between Tool and Rage Against the Machine on the song "Can't Kill the Revolution" was attempted for the album, but neither band was happy with the results. The song has never been officially released, but has spread through fan bootleg networks.
Reception [ edit ]
Rolling Stone said of the soundtrack, "Judgment Night's bracing rap rock is like the wedding of hillbilly and 'race' music that started the whole thing in the first place....It's an aspiring re-birth". Entertainment Weekly said they "can't vouch for the film, but the album is a MUST".[7] Q Magazine said the soundtrack "suggests that the future for both metal and rap as a kind of agit prop soapbox style is secure".[8]
Score album [ edit ]
Intrada released a CD of Alan Silvestri's score for the film. Musician said of the score, "Tear down a few walls and it's amazing what tumbles out".[10]
Track Listing [ edit ]Image copyright EPA Image caption Bodies have been moved from the crash site after three days of being left in the open
The EU will widen its sanctions against Russia to include more individuals and consider targeting the defence sector, the Dutch foreign minister says.
Frans Timmermans said "unanimous" and "forceful" decisions had been taken on enhanced sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict.
The UK has pushed for the Russian arms sector to be targeted.
Western leaders accuse Russia of arming rebels in eastern Ukraine, and believe they shot down an airliner there.
There is widespread anger over the Malaysia Airlines crash in eastern Ukraine, in which 298 people died.
The sanctions are aimed at forcing Russia to help defuse the Ukraine conflict and put pressure on the rebels to disarm.
A new sanctions list naming individuals and organisations will be drawn up by EU ambassadors by Thursday, Mr Timmermans told reporters after meeting his EU colleagues in Brussels.
He said there was also agreement that the European Commission would look at further measures to be taken against Russia in the fields of defence, concerning "dual-use goods in the field of energy", and in financial services.
But the BBC's Europe editor Gavin Hewitt says it is still unclear if EU leaders will be prepared to accept harm to their own economies in order to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The UN has called for a full international investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17
'Putin's cronies'
The EU and US have imposed asset freezes and travel bans on some top Russian officials, military commanders and companies since Moscow's annexation of Crimea in March.
The US has gone further than the EU in targeting members of President Putin's inner circle.
Commenting on the EU's enhanced sanctions, UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said "the word is 'cronies': the cronies of Mr Putin and his clique in the Kremlin are the people who have to bear the pressure".
"If the financial interests of the group around the leadership are affected, the leadership will know about it."
Earlier UK Prime Minister David Cameron urged the EU to extend sanctions to the arms sector - a call echoed by Lithuania.
A statement after the talks said that by Thursday the EU would prepare "proposals for taking action, including on access to capital markets, defence, dual-use goods, and sensitive technologies, including in the energy sector".
International experts are now examining plane wreckage at the disaster scene in eastern Ukraine and most of the bodies have been moved in refrigerated train carriages to Kharkiv, outside the rebel-controlled area.
The Netherlands lost 193 nationals in the flight MH17 disaster - more than any other country.
The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, said attitudes towards Russia had fundamentally changed since the airliner was shot down last Thursday.
Pressure over warships
Earlier Mr Cameron condemned France's sale of two Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia - a deal also criticised by the US.
France hinted that it could suspend delivery of one of the warships to Russia, depending on Russia's attitude to the Ukraine conflict.
Mr Cameron has said there is a "reluctance" among some European countries to take more decisive action against Russia.
Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said the French warship deal was like the 1930s appeasement of Nazi Germany.
Many EU countries, including Germany and Italy, are heavily reliant on Russian gas.
Image copyright AP Image caption France is completing the first Mistral warship, but its assembly started in St Petersburg - the stern is shown here
When asked about the Mistral warship deal with Russia, French President Francois Hollande said the first of two ships "is almost finished and must be delivered in October".
The rest of the contract would depend on Russia's attitude over Ukraine, he said.
"But at this point no sanctions have been agreed that would force us to abandon [the contract]," he said. "We're not at that stage yet - we'll see if the Russians behave badly," he said, quoted by French news website Europe 1.
A source close to Mr Hollande said: "France, for now, wants the sanctions to be financial, targeted and swift."How to use Bitsquare - the Decentralized Exchange Antonio Madeira 24 Oct 2016
Part 1 - What is Bitsquare?
Bitsquare is a decentralized open-source exchange that brings back the trustless nature of Bitcoin. It allows users to buy and sell Bitcoin for cryptocurrencies and national currencies without the need to entrust funds to a third party or middleman, meaning that the transactions occur directly between the buyer and seller. This approach makes trading Bitcoin much safer as the exchange is not vulnerable to hacks or thefts and since the software is completely peer-to-peer it is also impervious to DOS attacks.
Using Bitsquare is not only safer than using a centralized exchange, it is also much more private. Centralized exchanges require users to verify their identity, while Bitsquare will only require you to reveal your identity to the person you're selling Bitcoin to, which is anonymous and untraceable like you since the Bisquare network operates using Tor hidden services, and all the private data sent over the wire is end-to-end encrypted.
However, not everything in Bitsquare is superior, as advanced trading features are not available and since everything is decentralized, order books are hosted by the user. This means that both parties must be online for the exchange to begin. Furthermore, both the buyer and seller have to signal certain actions within the trade for it to be successful, meaning that not only the computer must be turned on, but the trader must also be online.
The Bitsquare application is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and can be downloaded here
Part 2 - How does it work?
Unlike centralized exchanges, Bitshares does not store any of your funds. Instead, the software provides you with a wallet that is stored locally on your computer. Altcoins and fiat currencies are stored externally on your local wallet or bank account.
When someone wants to sell Bitcoin, he deposits it into his Bitshares wallet and creates an offer that is broadcast to all the peers (alternatively he can also take an order that has been previously created by a buyer). Once someone accepts the offer, the trade will begin.
In order to trade, both the buyer and seller are required to make a security deposit of 0.1 btc that is used as collateral if any of the parties misbehaves. The seller and buyer will also be required to pay the transaction fees and arbitrator fees regardless of how the transactions play out.
Now that the transaction has started, both the security deposits and the bitcoins that are going to be sold are allocated to a 2-out-of-3 multsig wallet. The three signature holders are the seller, buyer and a randomly selected arbitrator. These arbitrators are not "staff" per se, but are instead regular users that can participate in the process by making a large security deposit themselves. This ensures that the arbitrators have an economic incentive to behave honestly, other than the fees that are allocated to them by both parties.
The buyer can now make a national or cryptocurrency payment through the regular channels such as a Bank deposit or a SEPA transfer (methods like Paypal and credit cards are not available due to their reversible nature). He then signals the exchange that he has made the transaction, this automatically signs a transaction to the buyer, which needs to be signed by one more person, the seller or the arbitrator.
If the seller receives the payment, he signals the exchange which automatically signs the transaction to the buyer. Since the wallet is a 2-out-of-3 multi-signature address, the transaction will be sent and the trade will be complete. This transaction will also include the security deposits, which will be returned to both the seller and buyer.
If the seller, however, does not receive payment or claims to have not received it, the arbitrator will step in and act as a mediator based on the evidence that both parties provide. The trade is then settled and the mediator signs off on the transaction that is sent to the person that behaved honestly. The security deposit of the malicious party will be kept by the arbitrator has a punishment to the perpetrator and a reward to the arbitrator for his service. In extreme cases, both the parties can lose half the security deposit.
To learn more you can read the whitepaper, which can be found here.
Part 3 - How to install and use Bitsquare
Step 1: Click here to go to the Bitsquare download page
Step 2: Choose the version that best fits your O.S and download it. We're using Windows 64bit
Step 3: Install the Bitsquare setup
Step 4: Click "I agree" to accept Bitsquare's user agreement
You will be taken to the Bitsquare market. Here, you are able to access offers on various pairs (BTC/USD, BTC/EUR, etc) and you can buy and sell Bitcoin.
In order to change pair, click on the "Currency" field, where you'll be able to choose between multiple national and digital currencies
To add relevant information about yourself, you should visit "Account", which will allow you to add fiat and cryptocurrency accounts, change your Bitcoin wallet password, back up your wallet and more.
To add funds to your Bitcoin account, you can visit "Funds"
Don't worry, we are going to dive into these in more detail below!
Part 4 - Configure your accounts
It is very important to configure your account properly. This is where you'll be able to protect and back up your account, as well as set the details needed to buy BTC with fiat or digital currencies.
Step 1: Click "Account"
You'll be taken to your account page. The first step is to add one or more national currency accounts (If you are not planning to use fiat, you can skip Step 2 to 4)
Step 2: Click "Add new account"
Step 3: Select your payment method
Step 4: and enter your personal details and preferred settings and click "Save new account"
Your fiat account will be added
If you |
__wakeup() and later destroyed via __destruct(), and hence already existing code placed inside these[wakeup,destruct] magic function gets executed.
Ref:http://www.nds.rub.de/media/nds/attachments/files/2011/02/RUB2011-SecurityProblemsInWebApplicationsExceptInjectionVulnerabilities.pdf
So we need to find existing usable code defined inside _destruct or _wakeup, and then hijack the flow of the application.
In our vulnerable program we have destruct with a function file_put_contents:
So our payload looks like:
O:3:%22foo%22:2:{s:4:%22file%22;s:9:%22shell.php%22;s:4:%22data%22;s:5:%22aaaa%22;}
O:3{: [ Object, takes 3 parameter with name foo] ”foo”: 2:{ [Parameter foo takes 2 values] S:4:”file”;s:9:”shell.php”; [String, 4 chars long, value “file”, string 9 chars long, value shell.php] s:4:”data”;s:5:”aaaa”;} String, 4 chars long, string 5 chars long, value”aaaa”
So when our above input string is un-serialized it allows controlling the properties of the class “foo”. An already existing code that is inside a magic method “ _destruct ” gets executed with our controlled values, in our case file_put_contents, creating a file “shell.php”.
Exploitation:
Since in our case, the input to Unserialization is the file read from file_get_contents.
$file_name = $_GET['session_filename'];
unserialize(file_get_contents($file ));
One of the things we were trying out was to find a method to put up the exp.txt on the server. For this we had to find a file/image upload feature. And then uploaded the file with the serialized payload. Then all we had to do was trigger, the following way.
http://vul-server/unsearilize.php?session_filename=images/exp.txt
Alternately system level RCE is possible using CVE-2014-8142 and CVE-2015-0231
“Use-after-free vulnerability in the process_nested_data function in ext/standard/var_Unserializationr.re in PHP before 5.4.36, 5.5.x before 5.5.20, and 5.6.x before 5.6.4 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted Unserialization call that leverages improper handling of duplicate keys within the serialized properties of an object.”
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=68710
The above bug affects core php unsearilize function. The poc was released by Stefan Esser, we tried to optimize and make a code execution possible with the bug. Since its possible to attain system level RCE if successfully exploited.
PHP + Apache Security Architecture:
These diagrams are good enough to explain php architecture in detail.
1) So if we could execute code in context of PHP, we would be able to break out of many restrictions.
2) Should be able to get shell access to hardned PHP Hosts.
I am still working on this. And I have found that “Tim Michaud” from innulled is working on the same http://www.inulledmyself.com/2015/02/exploiting-memory-corruption-bugs-in.html. We will update this blog soon.
http://[IP]/unserialize_rce_poc.php?s=O:8:"stdClass":3:{s:3:"aaa";a:5:{i:0;i:1;i:1;i:2;i:2;s:50:"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA11111111111";i:3;i:4;i:4;i:5;}s:3:"aaa";i:1;s:3:"ccc";R:5;}';
Contact us to discuss more about our pentest/code review service.
References:Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Around 25% of women give birth by Caesarean section in the UK
There are wide variations in Caesarean section rates across Europe, indicating a lack of consensus about the best way of delivering babies, a study suggests.
Around one in four births in the UK is by C-section, while in Cyprus the figure is 52% and in Sweden 17%.
The study of 26 European countries, published in the journal BJOG, said more research was needed to find out why the differences existed.
The Royal College of Midwives said health systems had a role to play.
We need a comparative review of national policies and guidelines and further research to ensure that clinical practice is based on evidence Prof Alison Macfarlane, City University London
The study, led by researchers at City University London said that Caesarean section rates in most EU countries have shown "a continuous rise", although in a few countries there are signs they are flattening out.
It said there could be several possible explanations for this - "including a fear of litigation, financial incentives, women's requests for Caesarean section and the perception that Caesarean section is a safe procedure".
The study also said there were consequences to the rise, which included potential raised risks for mothers and babies - such as stillbirth - in future pregnancies.
Continuing debate
Caesareans are more likely when babies are born to first-time mothers, when women have multiple births or when the woman in question has already had a Caesarean.
However, there is continuing debate, the study said, about the use of Caesarean section for babies who are breech (feet first), for multiple births and women who have had a C-section already.
In the study, the highest rate of Caesarean sections planned before labour started was in Cyprus at 38.8% and in Italy at 25%.
The lowest rates were found in Finland (6.6%), the Netherlands (7.7%) and Norway (6.6%).
In the UK, planned Caesarean rates are 9% in England, 11% in Wales and Scotland and 14.6% in Northern Ireland.
Emergency C-section rates were highest in Romania at 33% and lowest in Sweden at 8.6%.
In all four countries of the UK, emergency rates are around 15%.
Emergency op
Prof Alison Macfarlane, professor of perinatal health at City University London, said: "Given that people are supposed to be practising according to evidence, it is surprising there are such wide variations between countries.
"We need a comparative review of national policies and guidelines and further research to ensure that clinical practice is based on evidence."
She said it was important that the health of mothers and children was also prioritised.
Gail Johnson, professional advisor for education and research at the Royal College of Midwives, said the disparities were likely to be due to differences in health service models and the overall health of different populations.
She said the percentage of women giving birth by Caesarean in the UK was still "a bit too high".
"A Caesarean is an emergency procedure, done when a normal birth isn't going to work.
"It's not a lifestyle choice, and although it's a safe operation, it does carry more risks than a vaginal birth."BHAKTAPUR, Nepal — Near the main gate at Bhaktapur Durbar Square sits an artificial pond named Siddha Pokhari, or Ta Pukhu, with an impressive view of mountains in the distance.
Boss Nepal provides additional context on Siddha Pokhari:
It is also known as IndraDaha and every year, on the day of AshwinKrishnaDwitiya (the next day of IndraJatra festival), a large fair takes place here. The devotees take holy dips in the pond and worship goddess Indrayani afterwards with a belief that the goddess will be pleased and give family happiness and her blessings. It is decorated with oil lamps all around its boundary during this festival. There are idols of Shaiva, Shakti, Buddhist and Baishnav sects from Lichhavi to Malla times around the temple and there is a tradition of worshiping Basuki Nag (serpent god) with tantric methods in droughts asking for rain.
While I was there at least, the pond also offered a spot for personal calm reflection.Res Gestae by Augustus: What Sort of Emperor Was He?
|||Lewis, N., & Reinhold, M. Roman Civilization: Selected Readings: The Empire (vol. 2) (third edition. p. 688). Columbia University Press.|||
At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I liberated the Republic, which was oppressed by the tyranny of faction. For which reason the senate, with honorific decrees, made me a member of its order in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, giving me at the same time consular rank in voting, and granted me the imperium.
In his old age Augustus left his will with the Vestal Virgins in which he instructed his accomplishments to be inscribed on two bronze pillars outside his tomb. The pillars, whose inscription came to be called the Res gestae, do not survive. Copies of the inscription, however, have been found across the empire, including a complete text in both Latin and Greek at the temple of Rome and Augustus in Galatia. Augustus divides the work into two parts, that of his political career and when he gave money to the public. We might add to that a third division in which Augustus recounts what honors he received. But we should not read the Res gestae as simply an accounting of deeds or a description of events. It should mean little to us that Augustus built this temple rather than that temple, or that he was consul in this year rather than that. Historians, after all, are not bean counters–it is the goal of the historian not simply to recount facts, but to explain the causes and circumstances of those facts, from which we come to understand the interconnectivity of human affairs. Or, to put it differently, historians wish to understand the motivation behind each event; they want to know why the event is important. Therefore, even if the text “has a multiplicity of models and many purposes, all of them propagandist in nature,” still when we engage the text we should concern ourselves less with the particulars than with what motivated them, and, since the work is autobiographical, with why Augustus felt compelled to record each event in just such a manner.
There are many questions about passages and phrases within the Res gestae from which we might gain insight into what sort of man Augustus was, how he ruled, and whether he was well-liked or not. These questions are like so many pieces of a larger puzzle which must be arranged through a critical reading and organized thought, the answers of which, when put in their proper context, will allow us also to determine what Augustus thought of himself, what his motivations were, and, perhaps, why he so ambitiously sought to establish himself as emperor.
When Augustus introduces the subject of the Res gestae to us he states that the motivation behind his actions was to bring the world under Roman rule. He says that what he did was “orbem terrarum imperio populi Romani [subicere] ([to subject] the world to the power of the Roman people).” The questions we might draw from this are twofold: first we might ask what Augustus meant by bringing the world under the power of the Roman people, and second, we might ask why it is important for Augustus to be recognized as one who subjected the world to Roman rule. It is tempting when answering to tend toward extremes. Some would say that Augustus subjected the world in order to bring about the Pax Romana and to gain glory for Rome in the same way that Scipio Africanus did when he fought the Carthaginians. Others would say that he wished simply to increase his own power at whatever cost. As with complex questions, the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. It is not unlikely that Augustus sought glory, perhaps more so than those who came before him, but glory and the highest honors do not imply tyranny. It was well founded in the western mind, and particularly in the Roman mind, that the best and most excellent should rule, and it is by such rule that one gained glory. It was on account of his daring at such a young age, we must remember, that Scipio gained the armies with which he defeated Hannibal. Augustus, it could be argued, did the same but on grander scale.
It seems unfair to claim that Augustus wished simply for power, since he spent so much energy on restoring Rome and her provinces. He left marble where he found brick, as he is purported to say. And his moral reforms seem to indicate that he wished to correct rather than control Rome. Suetonius even suggests to us that Augustus had intended to restore the Republic but did not do so because he thought such an action would lead to instability and another civil war, which, considering the previous century, seems a reasonable fear. We are assured in the same passage by Suetonius that while Augustus knew his form of government was not the traditional Republic what Augustus aimed at when he took over was “to make the state stand safe…so that I may be called the author of the very best government.” Such a government will be called simply a monarchy by Dio Cassius, and although he attributes some ambitious motives to the emperor, still he sees the process of Augustus ruling as more prudential than oppressive: “Augustus did not enact all laws on his sole responsibility,” “he encouraged everybody whatsoever to give him advice,” and lastly
Although he left the election of others in the hands of the people and the plebs, in accordance with ancient practice, yet he took care that no persons should hold office who were unfit or elected as the result of factious combinations or bribery.
This last trait which Dio Cassius highlights, that he allowed elected officials to stand unless the election process was manipulated, seems especially to suggest that while Augustus maintained authority over all political matters, he did so in an attempt to promote good rule. Such a sentiment seems paralleled by Augustus when he says at the outset of the Res gestae, “I liberated the Republic, which was oppressed by the tyranny of faction.” It seems safe to say that while Augustus held what was essentially a kingly role over Rome, he did not see himself as a Tyrant. Instead he thought of himself as a protector of a people who could not manage to rule themselves well in his absence, regardless of whether such a sentiment was true or not.
Tacitus, on the other hand is much more skeptical about why Augustus sought rule. He tells us that Augustus ruled because “no one opposed him, for the most courageous had fallen in battle or in the proscriptions,” and that “Augustus enticed the soldiers with gifts, the people with grain, and all men with the allurement of peace.” But what Tacitus does not ask is whether Augustus ruled rightly, only that he altered very consciously the division of power throughout the Roman government. He does, however, make a point of saying that Rome in general was not unsatisfied with Augustus’ rule, since “they distrusted the government of the senate on account of the struggles of the powerful” since “the laws were repeatedly thrown into confusion by violence, intrigue, and finally bribery.” But the sentiment is intended more as an insult to the people than as a commendation to Augustus. It is worth noting as an aside, however, that Suetonius describes Augustus’ rule similarly to how Tacitus praises Agricola, namely for his methodical and insightful command.
Augustus talks at length about what monies he spent, both through distribution of grain and other public works. He says that “impensarum…in rem publicam populumque Romanum fecit (he incurred expenditures for the republic and the roman people).” This he puts on par with subjecting the world to Roman power, for it is the second of the two things which he calls his ‘works’. When confronted with the fact that Augustus controlled Rome partly at least because of his popularity which he gained because of the money he spent, it is interesting to ask ourselves in what way his distribution of monies was a subiectum populorum. It is also interesting to ask whether such a subjection was intentional or accidental, and further, whether it was malicious or not.
It may not be possible to accurately get at whether Augustus used his money in order to help the people or to control them. But it is worth noting that most instances of abused power result in the exploitation of the people for their money, and not the expenditure of monies for the people. But be that as it may, whatever motivation we ascribe to Augustus’ exercise of imperium will reflect directly upon his exercise of wealth; if his motivation to become emperor was to gain power then his expenditures are simply a tool to convert and manipulate the masses. If, however, his motivation for gaining power was stability and glory, then his wealth was an indication of his generosity and that he put Rome before himself.
Continuing with the discussion about how and what purpose Augustus used his money, we come to an interesting passage in which Augustus says that he reimbursed magistrates for lands he seized for his army. He tells us, “Pecuniam pro agris quos in consulatu meo quarto…adsignavi militibus solvi municipis…Id primus et solus omnium…feci. ( I gave back the money to the municipalities for the lands which I took for the military…I was the first and only of all to do this.)” While it is not uncommon for those who gained power to seize lands, in Rome and elsewhere, it is unusual for the previous owners to be compensated. More often the lands are seized and the previous owners are exiled or worse, executed, such as the earlier proscriptions of Sulla and the later more blatant seizures of Caligula, Claudius and Nero. The fact that Augustus was not obsessed with increasing his wealth, or of exploiting the wealth of others for his his own end, says something positive, in my opinion, about him. He may very well believe that he could arbitrate who ought to have land, and where, or how to spend public funds as he saw fit, but such a sentiment was guided by an internal sense of fairness and a desire to reward and not exploit. To claim that Augustus used his money maliciously to control the people is, it seems, speculative; Suetonius provides an interesting anecdote which illustrates Augustus’ simultaneous indifference to money and obsession with Roman glory:
When Livia asked for citizenship for a taxpaying Gaul, he refused her but offered a tax exemption, saying that it was easier for him to have the imperial purse deprived of revenue than the privilege of Roman citizenship cheapened.
The whole discussion of money and Augustus’ use of it segues nicely into a discussion about Augustus’ clemency. Augustus recounts to us that when “victor[que] omnibus [veniat] petentibus civibus [pepercit]. Externas gentes, quibus tuto ignosci potuit, conservare quam excidere [maluit]. (and when [he] was victorious [he] was sparing to all citizens who sought pardon. The outsiders, those to whom it was possible to safely pardon [he] chose to preserve them rather than to cast them away.” Our first and most obvious question about this is whether it is true. We are told by Suetonius that Augustus disapproved of proscriptions, but that when he finally allowed them he was all the more thorough in its execution: “they [Lepidus and Antony] could often be moved by special considerations or petitions…while he [Augustus] alone insisted that no one be spared.” But this behavior could be explained away by his distaste for purchased positions. For it seems likely that since the proscriptions were more a way to raise money than to punish disloyalty since Lepidus and Antony would grant “special considerations” to those who would pay them off. Augustus, however, put his foot down about such a thing. Such speculation is tempered by his dislike of proscriptions in the first place, along with his later clemency, since “no one ran into trouble by expressing himself freely or by displaying a defiant attitude.”
In any case it seems that on the whole Augustus was not warlike. “He did not make war on any nation unless it was just and unavoidable.” Suetonius supports the assumption, for
his reputation for fairness and moderation won over even the Indians and the Scythians…[who] took the initiative of sending emissaries to seek pledges of friendship with him and the Roman people.”But what is most interesting is that he thought of himself as fair and reasonable man.
If Augustus was so careful and sparing when he waged war it would make sense that he was sparing in how he conducted pardons. A hurdle to such an argument would be the radical hostility of Augustus which Suetonius describes. He tells us of how Augustus had men killed for no more reason than they seemed like spies. The two descriptions seem too antithetical to reconcile. Put perhaps they are not so separate as we might presume. For often men who seem gentle turn out later to be vicious, and men who seem vicious turn out later to be gentle. And besides, there is nothing to prevent us from recognizing that men as they age generally become less aggressive and more thoughtful. Therefore, while descriptions of Augustus’ early hostility are certainly disturbing, it would not be surprising that he became more cautious and prudential in conflicts in general as he matured; for as Hephaestus says to Kratos as he binds Prometheus to a rock: all are cruel whose power is so newly won.
So far the discussion has revolved around interpreting the actions of Augustus and attempting to supply them with a motive. From that motive and action we would work out what it was that Augustus hoped to accomplish by that action. But the next few passages are of interest not because they represent any specific action, but because of their psychological value and insight into the mind of Augustus and his character.
One of the tasks which Augustus set himself to was the reestablishment the mos maiorum. “Legibus novis me auctore latis multa exempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostro saeculo reduxi et ipse multarum rerum exempla imitanda posteris tradidi. (Through the introduction of new laws, I brought back many customs of our ancestors, which had fallen out of use in our age. Also, I established many customs to be imitated by posterity.)” He did this largely through moral reforms, many of which would be decried as too punitive for an increasingly hedonistic Senate. These are not actions aimed at gratification like of those of the next few generations of emperors. Instead they indicate a specific and intended desire to return the Roman character to what it was previously. Even if he had no intention of restoring the Republic, Augustus seems intent on restoring what it was that made the Republic so viable, namely the Roman character. One could even argue that the reformation of the Roman character was the first step of many that led the Roman Aristocracy into a conditioned mindset through which they could rule without forming factions and lusting after power. It is perhaps on account of such an idea that Augustus feels obligated to establish new laws which he hopes will one day become old and traditional. Cicero himself would agree, it seems, since he sees the law as a vehicle for doing whatever is best for Rome.
The last and most perplexing passage which we will discuss is, “Post id tempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti, potestatis autem nihilo amplius habui quam ceteri qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt. (after this time I surpassed all in authority, but of power I had nothing more than the rest who were also colleagues in the magistracy.)” The most obvious question which the above phrase brings to mind is what is the difference between auctoritas and potestas. Secondarily, we must ask ourselves in what way did Augustus have authority, but not power, and thirdly, we must ask ourselves how it is that others are considered to have an equal measure of power.
When confronted with this phrase most contrast the legal power which Augustus had held from his rise to consul in 31 B.C. until 19 B.C. with the the consular power he obtained afterward, without actually holding the consulship. But this does not give us an account of what it was that prompted Augustus on the one hand to give up the consulship and on the other for the senate to reinstate the consular powers, but not the consulship. The answer to this, I think, is the difference between auctoritas and potestas. But to answer this, first we need to determine what exactly auctoritas is, and to explore how it relates to potestas.
When a Roman spoke of his auctoritas he meant his standing within Roman society; auctoritas was measured by one’s ability to inspire others to follow you. potestas, on the other hand, is simply the legal right to assert one’s will. When Augustus tells us that at the end of 19 B.C. he had more auctoritas than any one else he does not simply mean that he had gained the right to exercise the powers of an office without actually holding an office, what he means is that the senate and the people preferred that he had such power, even without the office. What I think Augustus is getting at when he made the statement so generally in his autobiography is that it is auctoritas which gave him such potestas, the two being being abstractly different but nearly inseparable in reality. The Senate conferred powers upon Augustus so that he could rule. They did this outwardly because they wished to adhere to the form of legal power, but they were motivated to do so because they recognized a strength in Augustus which they were committed to follow, even if legally they were of the same status.
Now that we have tackled and explicated some of the passages of the Res gestae we are more capable of answering the set of our original questions, which were what Augustus thought of himself, what his motivations were, and why he so ambitiously sought to establish himself as emperor. Because of the way in which Augustus sought moral reforms through law, that he attempted to restore certain traditions, but also, simultaneously was prudent and worked out legislative problems with trusted advisors, it seems reasonable to state that Augustus thought of himself as a good statesmen who put the Res publica first. He seemed to think that the best way in which he could help sustain and improve Rome’s greatness was by controlling the political machine so that the Senate would not fall again into faction and civil war. What motivated him to do this was probably twofold: he was motivated primarily by personal glory and pride but also by a genuine belief in Rome’s greatness. This second motivation is why he expended so much money to beautify Rome and to secure her people, and why he guarded citizenship so dearly. As for the last question, Augustus sought to become emperor because he thought that the only way he could secure the continuity and glory of Rome was by establishing himself as her ruler so that he could prevent faction and unify Rome’s powers, since otherwise it seemed Rome would destroy herself.
We should conclude by pointing out that the above motivations are not selfless; they are founded on some internal assumption by Augustus that he is the man most capable of bringing renown and glory to Rome. Nevertheless it seems careless to presume that his selfish need for greatness is at the expense of Rome. Rather, it seems that Augustus saw his own greatness as intertwined with that of Rome, the one reflecting the other.If you plan on fighting crime this weekend, don’t do it in a ski mask like some amateur, 3D print yourself a Batman cowl instead.
This design, created by Carmelo Nazario and uploaded to MyMiniFactory, seems to be based off of the latest itteration of the character portrayed in live action by Ben Affleck. The short ears seem to be the biggest sign pointing to that but you can make your own decision.
While the pictures make this design looks like it might not fit on your head, YouTube channel Uncle Jessy printed himself one out and it seems to fit perfectly. If you have the skill, you can always resize and customize it as you see fit.
To complete the look we recommend another 3D printable design in the grenade launcher Bats used to fight Superman in Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
More, free 3D printable designs:U.S. President Barack Obama greets the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 46th Annual Legislative Conference on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Pool photo by Olivier Douliery/UPI | License Photo
U.S. President Barack Obama waves after he speaks to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 46th Annual Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner on Saturday in Washington, D,C. Pool photo by Olivier Douliery/UPI | License Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton receives the Phoenix Award from Jim Clyburn, U.S. representative for South Carolina, during the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 46th Annual Legislative Conference Phoenix Awards Dinner on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Pool photo by Olivier Douliery/UPI | License Photo
U.S. President Barack Obamaand first lady Michelle Obama arrive to address the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Foundation's 46th Annual Legislative Conference on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Pool photo by Olivier Douliery/UPI | License Photo
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- President Barack Obama told the Congressional Black Caucus gala it would be "an insult to my legacy" if African-Americans don't vote for Hillary Clinton and reject Donald Trump.
Obama, addressing the gala for the last time as president Saturday night, said it's a referendum on everything he has accomplished the last seven years. He drew frequent applause for this declaration:
"If you care about our legacy, realize everything we stand for is at stake," he said. "All the progress we've made is at stake in this election. My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration -- that's on the ballot right now!"
He criticized Clinton's opponent, Trump, the Republican nominee.
"You may have heard Hillary's opponent in this election say that there's never been a worse time to be a black person. I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery and Jim Crow and -- but we've got a museum for him to visit. So he can tune in. We will educate him.
"He says we got nothing left to lose, so we might as well support somebody who has fought against civil rights, and fought against equality, and who has shown no regard for working people for most of his life. Well, we do have challenges, but we're not stupid. We know the progress we've made, despite the forces of opposition, despite the forces of discrimination, despite the politics of backlash. And we intend to keep fighting against those forces."
Obama began his speech with humor in addressing the "birther" controversy.
"There's an extra spring in my step tonight. I don't know about you guys, but I am so relieved that the whole birther thing is over. I mean, ISIL, North Korea, poverty, climate change -- none of those things weighed on my mind -- like the validity of my birth certificate. And to think that with just 124 days to go, under the wire, we got that resolved. I mean, that's a boost for me in the home stretch. In other breaking news, the world is round, not flat Lord."
Obama was talking about Trump's admission Friday that the president was born in the United States. Trump has raised questions about Obama's birthplace and demanded that the president present his birth certificate as proof of his origin.
Trump did not issue an apology.
Obama, during his speech, noted the struggles of black people and efforts to suppress votes.
"In 2016, there are those who are still trying to deny people the right to vote, we've got to push back twice as hard. Right now, in multiple states, Republicans are actively and openly trying to prevent people from voting. Adding new barriers to registration. Cutting early voting. Closing polling places in predominantly minority communities. Refusing to send out absentee ballots. Kicking people off the rolls, often incorrectly.
"This should be a national scandal. We were supposed to have already won that fight. We're the only advanced democracy in the world that is actively discouraging people from voting. It's a shame."
He applauded efforts to get people to vote.
"And I am reminded of all those folks who had to count bubbles in a bar of soap, beaten trying to register voters in Mississippi, risked everything so that they could pull that lever. So if I hear anybody saying their vote does not matter, that it doesn't matter who we elect -- read up on your history. It matters. We've got to get people to vote."
Obama said it was a historic event when America elected its first black president and he and his family have worked to serve as role models for the nation
"When we began this journey coming on 10 years now, we said this was not about us. It wasn't about me. It wasn't about Michelle. It wasn't just to be a black president, or the president of black America. We understood the power of the symbol. We know what it means for a generation of children, of all races, to see folks like us in the White House.
"And as Michelle says, we've tried to be role models, not just for our own girls, but for all children, because we know they watch everything we do as adults. They look to us as an example. So we've taken that responsibility seriously. And I've been so blessed to have a wife and a partner on this journey who makes it look so easy. And is so strong answer so honest and so beautiful and so smart. But we're all -- we're just thankful because you guys have lifted us up every step of the way."
He said recently visited with his family work on the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
"And it made us proud," he said. "Not because we had arrived, but because what a road we had to travel. What a miracle that despite such hardship, we've been able to do so much. And I know everybody in this room understands that how progress is not inevitable. Its sustainment depends on us. It's not just a matter of having a black president or first lady. It's a matter of engaging all of our citizens in the work of our democracy."
Clinton spoke before the president, praising Obama's work in office.
"Even when hateful nonsense is thrown their way, Barack, Michelle, their two beautiful daughters have represented our country with class, grace and integrity," said the Democratic Pary nominee, who served as Obama's secretary of state."
She added, "Mr. President, not only do we know you are an American, you are a great American."
Clinton accepted the group's "Trailblazer Award" on Saturday night for becoming the first female presidential candidate for a major political party.
"We can't let Barack Obama's legacy fall into the hands of someone who doesn't understand that, whose dangerous divisive vision for our country will drag us backwards."
She didn't mention Trump's name.August 2017 (III)
Welcome again, fellow Nxters! The IGNIS ICO is underway with Round 1 finishing up last week. Last week was an eventful one and we have much to catch you up on. Regardless of whether you are a new reader, welcome, or a long time reader, welcome back, we are happy you are here.
The in-progress IGNIS ICO has been eventful, with whales showing up and consuming entire batches but minnows finally bought in too. This week we report on the highlights of Round 1 of the ICO, report on the Bitswift token swap, inform you how to start developing for the platform, and much more.
NXT COMMUNITY
NXT AE
DEVELOPMENT
NXT IN THE MEDIA
PRICE EVOLUTION
This week’s newsletter is put together by James, apenzl, jose, rubenbc.
NXT COMMUNITY
IGNIS ICO
The most important news of the week is the successful completion of the first Round of the IGNIS ICO. We have an ongoing series of reports with the most current info available HERE.
With last week’s release of version 1.11.7 of the NRS client, minnows were able to buy into the IGNIS ICO. A whale ate most of the first three batches of 5M tokens each – 3 percent of the tokens available in Round 1 of the ICO were purchased in a matter of seconds by the user, “MAAC”. He accomplished this by spamming phased JLRDA buy orders into the blockchain ahead of time, with high transaction fees – some at 10 NXT and others as high as 20.
The first Round was a success for Jelurida – all 60 M JLRDA tokens were purchased for 24 M NXT. Almost 14% of the ICO tokens have been purchased and Jelurida is well on their way towards their goal of raising €50 M. Round 2 of the ICO begins later in the month, Aug 26, at 0,55 NXT per JLRDA – a rate 1.82 Jelurida : 1 NXT – 80 M tokens will be available for purchase in Round 2 at this price.
News from Kristina
Kristina Kalcheva, on behalf of Jelurida:
Dear Nxters, the first round of IGNIS ICO is now over, 60 M JLRDA tokens were sold and 24 M NXT collected! Thank you all for your contribution! The second round will start on August 26. And please be careful and remember that JLRDA tokens are not transferable or tradable! If someone sends you small amounts of similarly named tokens or even NXT this has nothing to do with the IGNIS ICO and can very likely be a scam attempt!
Update your NRS Client to Participate
To participate in the IGNIS ICO, the Nxt Client 1.11.7 is highly recommended.
The availability schedule of the 4 Rounds left (380M IGNIS) are as follows:
Buy JLRDA with Scheduled Transactions
Lior Yaffe, going by his handle – Riker, explains how to participate in the IGNIS ICO by scheduling transactions ahead of time. This is how the whale, MAAC, purchased in excess of 14 M JLRDA tokens – by scheduling ahead of time the transactions for purchases |
a request was raised in preparatory talks with Palestinian officials and three Republican senators urged a halt to such payments in a letter to Trump that reflected widespread opinion in Congress.
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While Abbas will be challenged on the payments, Trump will also use their meeting to recommit the United States to helping the Palestinians improve their economic conditions, said the U.S. officials, who weren’t authorized to publicly preview the talks and demanded anonymity. They said Trump will reiterate his belief that Israeli settlement construction on land claimed by the Palestinians does not advance peace prospects.
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The peace process has been stalled since 2014 when former Secretary of State John Kerry’s effort to lead the sides into peace talks collapsed. Since then, there have been no serious attempts to get negotiations restarted. The Obama administration spent its last months in office attempting to preserve conditions for an eventual resumption.
‘‘We hope this will be a new beginning,’’ Abbas told Palestinians at a meeting in Washington on the eve of the talks.
He blamed the lack of dialogue in recent years on the Israeli government, saying its leaders ‘‘have no political vision,’’ and reiterated his demands for an independent Palestinian state along pre-1967 lines, with east Jerusalem as its capital.
‘‘Without this we will not accept any solution,’’ said Abbas, who touted an Arab League peace plan that offers Israel diplomatic relations with the Muslim world for a Palestinian state. ‘‘There is no alternative.’’
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Israel rejects the 1967 lines as a possible border, saying it would impose grave security risks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t outlined an alternative demarcation.
Abbas also criticized ideas for a ‘‘one state’’ peace agreement, saying it could mean ‘‘racial discrimination’’ or an apartheid-like system. Left unspoken was the apparent reference to Trump.
In a February news conference with Netanyahu, Trump broke with longtime U.S. policy by raising the one-state idea and withholding clear support for an independent Palestine, though officials quickly stressed he would support any arrangement agreed by the two sides.
Another contentious issue: Trump’s campaign promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The symbolic relocation would essentially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Abbas and other Arab leaders have said doing so would inflame already simmering tensions.
Since taking office, Trump has backed away from the pledge while saying he’s still discussing it. On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence said the White House was giving ‘‘serious consideration’’ to the idea.
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Pence also said Trump was making progress toward peace, though he didn’t elaborate. He stressed that Israel’s interests would be protected.
‘‘Thanks to the president’s tireless leadership, momentum is building and good will is growing,’’ Pence said at an event commemorating the anniversary of Israeli independence. ‘‘And while there will undoubtedly have to be compromises, you can rest assured: President Donald Trump will never comprise the safety and security of the Jewish state of Israel. Not now, not ever.’’Students went back to school in Plainfield and Danville Monday, after more than two weeks of winter break and despite online threats of violence.
The threats, posted on Facebook, indicated today was the day that an attack would happen at Plainfield High School. In fact, nothing violent happened, but there were extra police officers on hand and students had to follow new rules.
FBI involved in investigation of overnight threats that closed Plainfield, Danville schools Thursday
Monday morning, students walked the halls at Plainfield High School, books in hand because backpacks weren't allowed. All students also had to be checked for weapons as they entered the building. An online threat posted hours earlier indicated a massacre at the school that "no amount of extra security will be enough."
"Information I've received is that these threats are not credible," said Plainfield Police Captain Jill Lees.
Just before winter break, violent threats made on Facebook led to the closure of both Plainfield and Danville Schools for one day. Another threat days later prompted the evacuation of Perry Crossing Mall in Plainfield. But despite overt threats of detailed violence, nothing happened. Then another taunt: "Police succeeded in buying me more time to take out more people on January 4th". The day came and went peacefully.
Community stunned by Plainfield threats
"This is probably not going to be anything but I can't let go of that 'what if'...'what if',” said Lora Duncan-Terrell, the mother of two Danville High School freshmen. She was upset the school didn't take the kind of precautions in place at Plainfield, although officials say some safety measures in Danville weren't visible.
"Nervous, anxious, we all picked a small town to live in to have that small town security and safety and it's gone. We don't have it anymore," said Duncan-Terrell.
Authorities, including a special FBI Cyber Crimes task force, have been working the case since mid-December but no one has been arrested.
"I guarantee you that the police are doing everything they possibly can in this case, along with the FBI, to investigate these matters and to make sure our students are safe," said Captain Lees.
The extra precautions put into place today at Plainfield High School - specifically not allowing students to carry back packs and having all students checked for weapons, will remain in effect until further notice, according to police. Students' pockets also must be empty when they enter the building - that includes cell phones, change and keys.
"Plainfield students are amazing," said Cpt. Jill Lees with the Plainfield Police Department. "They came in and said good morning to me, told me to have a good day, were ready to learn, also really focused and paid attention and followed all the rules without having backpacks and following all of the rules set in place."
Threat details
The bulk of the threats targeted Plainfield High School and one specific student there. But those threats then mushroomed. The suspect threatened the girl's friends, other students at the school and even threatened to kill police officers who tried to help. The suspect created a Facebook page under the name Brian Kil, detailing his violent and deadly plan. saying. "I spent the entire night making more explosives. I'll be prepared."
That was more than two weeks ago.
Since then, local police have called in the feds, and specifically a team that specializes in internet crimes, to help track down the suspect before any threats are carried out. No arrests have been made in the case.
FBI involved in investigation of overnight threats that closed Plainfield, Danville schools Thursday
We talked to a Purdue University cyber forensics expert who trains police to solve computer crimes similar to this case.
"Rarely do they escape, because part of the motivation is they need to keep the attention going," said Dr. Marcus Rogers. "They need that fix."
It appears the suspect has renewed their threats. Police say they are ready, with additional officers on patrol.
"It takes a long time to investigate these types of cases," Lees said. "It could take six to eight months to find who is actually behind this. That is something the FBI and other agencies involved are experts at."
Plainfield mall evacuated after social media threat
Carrie Cline contributed to this report.It was a vibrant scene on Newark Avenue over the weekend during the 17th annual LGBT Pride Festival.
Hundreds crowded in the heart of Downtown Jersey City to celebrate the tail-end of Pride Week, which had begun on Aug. 16.
Costumes, vendors and entertainment -- along with plenty of rainbow flags -- lined Newark Avenue as the festival began.
While Jersey City's pride was palpably strong, the LGBT community at large was hit with news out of the White House Friday that President Donald Trump had finalized his ban on transgender individuals serving in the military.
"It's ridiculous," said Matt Basile, a resident of Bayonne attending the festival with his relative, Spencer Basile. "Someone who wants to enlist and give their life for the same freedoms Mr. Trump enjoys -- to ban them from serving in the military is ridiculous. Everyone should have the right to protect their country."
But despite the news, residents remained united and jubilant during the festival.
"Now more than ever we need unity," Basile added. "Everybody from all walks of life -- race, religion, sexual orientation, wherever you're from -- we have to really unite and protect each other."
Jersey City is something of a haven for the LGBT community. In the beginning of the year, the LGBT magazine The Advocate ranked Jersey City the "queerest city in America."Based on the book They Marched Into Sunlight by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, Two Days in October tells the story of two turbulent days in October 1967 when history turned a corner.
In Vietnam, a U.S. battalion unwittingly marched into a Viet Cong trap. Sixty-one young men were killed and as many wounded. The ambush prompted some in power to wonder whether the war might be unwinnable.
Half a world away, concerned students at the University of Wisconsin protested the presence of Dow Chemical recruiters on campus. When Madison police showed up, the demonstration spiraled out of control, marking the first time that a student protest had turned violent.
Told entirely by the people who took part in the harrowing events of those two days — American soldiers, police officers, relatives of men killed in battle, protesting students, university administrators and Viet Cong fighters — the film offers a window onto a moment that divided a nation and a war that continues to haunt us.An Israeli nonprofit has been secretly transferring humanitarian supplies to the Syrian populace devastated by the civil war, Israel21c reported on Friday.
Doreen Gold’s Il4Syrians has been operating since 2011, and provides local NGOs with goods that they then pass on to needy Syrians. The volunteer organization has sent sanitation kits, baby powder, food and medical supplies and devices, including 3,000 protective suits for doctors treating victims of chemical attacks.
Il4Syrians supports 17 field hospitals and operating rooms, all led by Syrian NGOs, by keeping them stocked with everything from sterilization equipment to anesthetics. It also trained 22 orthopedists to create prosthetic limbs with 3D printers, which it also provided.
Convoys from the non-profit enter Syria every month or three, depending on funding.
“We were probably the first international NGO operating in the area,” Gold, a mother-of-two, told Israel21c. “At that point people didn’t realize how deadly the conflict was. They still called it demonstrations, not a revolution, but we had already figured out that the number of casualties was enormous.”
Gold, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, signed a form that says that if she is captured, the Israeli government will not negotiate for her release, according to Israel21c. Before leaving on a mission, all of her volunteers, some 200 of whom are undercover Israelis fluent in Arabic, are required to sign the same form.
“Missions are short and pinpointed,” said Gold, who added that even her own mother did not know about the work she was doing until a few years ago. She admitted that it involves danger. “It’s always frightening,” she said. “We know we are on our own. We have to work where we are needed, and not just where we’re allowed. Being a mother made everything stronger for me because I realize that mothers will do anything to save their children.”
As part of their work, the volunteers train and equip Syrian aides in firefighting and search-and-rescue missions, particularly to help people trapped under rubble after bombings. Gold said, “We discovered that most victims suffer smoke inhalation or burns because bombings trigger explosions in the gas-cooking systems. It means there’s a serious need for firefighters there.”
Il4Syrians has already helped hundreds of thousands of Syrians, according to Israel21c. Even with the implementation of the ceasefire agreement, which went into effect on Saturday night, the nonprofit said it will continue its work while the country tries to get back on its feet — particularly since radicals, such as ISIS and Al Qaeda, not only have a stronghold in country, but said they would not honor the ceasefire.
Gold said the worst part of it all is seeing what’s happening to the people of Syria struggling through the chaos. “At the start, they were anxious to create a change; now you just see despair in their eyes. They have lost hope,” she said.
Gold said her organization has to constantly buy equipment for the same clinics and hospitals that are deliberately and repeatedly bombed. She recalled one incident in which Il4Syrians restocked a clinic after a strike, only to find out later that a doctor had absconded to Turkey with its equipment, in order to open a private clinic there.
“I’m not angry with him,” Gold said. “It’s caused by the desperation of the situation.”
When asked about the amount of work her organization does, she told Israel21c, “It’s always been too much, even from the beginning.”
“But being survivors of the Holocaust, I feel we have a moral [imperative] to be the voice of voiceless people,” she said. “I don’t need thanks. Recognition is unimportant. I just do the mission and deliver what we have to deliver.
“I always say to my volunteers before they carry out a mission, ‘I’ll do my best to bring you home safely, but one thing I won’t take responsibility for is the type of person you’ll be when you get back.’ After seeing this disaster you are transformed. You cannot stay the same. The only thing that helps is planning the next mission.”
In the last few months, Il4Syrians has began offering long-term aid to Syrian refugees in Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Bulgaria. The non-profit, along with one of the largest Syrian NGOs with which Gold works, is now trying to launch discussions between Israel and civil leaders in Syria.WCA tournament series announced, $3.2 million total prizepool for seven titles
World Cyber Arena just announced a series of China-based tournaments in 2014, offering a total prizepool of $3.2 million for seven games. These games include DotA2, HearthStone, Crossfire, World of Tanks and Warcraft III. The tournaments will be held in Yinchuan, starting in October.
Another prestigious competition has been announced in China for 2014, increasing the list of competitions scheduled to take place this fall. This week, it is WCA (World Cyber Arena) that announced their own series of tournaments for seven games - including two titles for mobile phones.
WCA titles :
DotA2
Warcraft III
World of Tanks
HearthStone
Crossfire
Dota Legend (M)
CQB Online (M)
According to the announcement, the tournament aims to gather over 3200 players from every corner of the world in Yinchuan, Ningxia province, China for the offline events held in October. The total prizepool of the events is 20,000,000 RMB (~$3,200,000). However, no further information is currently available about the format of the tournaments, the qualifiers and the exact dates.
Prize pool distribution (estimates) :
DotA2 - $470,000
HearthStone - $190,000
World of Tanks - $100,000
Crossfire - $100,000
Warcraft III - $95,000
DotA Legend - $1,100,000
CQB Online - $1,100,000
Source : 2p.com, mineski.netA Mexican federal district judge in Tijuana on Friday ordered the immediate release of a U.S. Marine veteran being held in Baja California on federal weapons charges.
Andrew Tahmooressi, who was on trial for crossing the border with ammunition and three loaded weapons on March 31, returned to the United States Friday night and flew to his family’s home in Florida.
The decision by the Mexican Attorney General’s Office to cease its prosecution of Tahmooressi brings to a close a high-profile case that has resounded far beyond the border.
In the United States, it prompted calls for Tahmooressi’s release from politicians, veterans groups and conservative talk show hosts. But for months there had been an impasse, as Mexican federal prosecutors insisted that the case be resolved through the courts — not through diplomatic or political pressure.
Tahmooressi, 25, claims he drove into Tijuana by mistake on a Monday night after taking a wrong turn near the Mexican border in San Ysidro. He had recently moved to San Diego from Florida, and says that he was driving out of a parking lot, intending to head north. But instead he drove into the El Chaparral Port of Entry, where Mexican customs inspectors examined his pickup truck and found more 400 rounds of ammunition and three loaded firearms: a.45-caliber pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun and a 5.56 mm assault rifle.
His release was ordered by Judge Victor Octavio Luna Escobedo of the Sixth Federal District Court in Tijuana. Had Tahmooressi been convicted, he would have faced seven to 21 years behind bars.
Luna Escobedo declined to comment. A statement from Mexico’s Federal Judicial Council said the judge ordered dismissal of the case after federal prosecutors withdrew their accusation in closing arguments. The judge ordered Tahmooressi’s “immediate and absolute liberty.”
According to one Mexican official familiar with the case, the grounds for the dismissal were that he is unfit to stand trial because he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Alejandro Tamayo / U-T San Diego Former U.S. Marine Andrew Tahmooressi is released from Mexican custody Friday. Here Tahmooressi gets out of a pickup truck at the border to go through U.S. Customs into the United States. U-T San Diego photo by Alejandro Tamayo Former U.S. Marine Andrew Tahmooressi is released from Mexican custody Friday. Here Tahmooressi gets out of a pickup truck at the border to go through U.S. Customs into the United States. U-T San Diego photo by Alejandro Tamayo (Alejandro Tamayo / U-T San Diego)
On Friday night, Tahmooressi was driven from El Hongo State Penitentiary east of Tecate to the San Ysidro Port of Entry. He walked across the border at about 9 p.m., got into a vehicle and was taken to Brown Field.
He boarded a private jet provided by a foundation run by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson for the flight to Florida. Richardson, who met with Tahmooressi in prison last week, was also on the plane, as were the former Marine's mother, Jill Tahmooressi; media personality Montel Williams; and his former commanding officer in Afghanistan, Sgt. Robert Buchanan.
“He was all grins as he got on the plane to head home to Florida,” said U.S.Rep. Ed Royce, R-Fullerton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Royce and U.S. Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., were at Brown Field to see Tahmooressi off.
The weapons and ammunition confiscated from Andrew's Tahmooressi's vehicle. The weapons and ammunition confiscated from Andrew's Tahmooressi's vehicle.
His family released a statement expressing its relief for his return.
“He is back on American soil and will shortly resume treatment for both his pre-existing Combat Related PTSD and the residual effects of months of incarceration – which has taken a toll on him far worse than his two tours in Afghanistan,” it said.
Even though the U.S. State Department reports that dozens of U.S. citizens are arrested each month for violating Mexico’s gun laws, few if any cases have received such wide attention.
Tahmooressi’s situation initially elicited little public sympathy in Mexico, where gun laws are far more restrictive than in the United States. A headline last May in the Tijuana newsweekly Zeta read: “He did not enter Mexico in error.” But his detention did strike a nerve with some sectors in the United States intent on seeing him released.
Portraying Tahmooressi as a U.S. war hero unjustly detained in a foreign country, they invoked his military service — two tours of duty in Afghanistan with the U.S. Marines, with an honorable discharge in 2012 — and stressed that Tahmooressi needed to return to the United States for treatment. Tahmooressi had been diagnosed with PTSD shortly before his arrest and started treatment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in La Jolla.
Fernando Benítez, Tahmooressi’s Tijuana defense attorney, used a range of tactics to win his release. He initially pressed for dismissal of the case because his client’s rights were allegedly violated when he was held at the El Chaparral Port of Entry for hours without the presence of an attorney or a translator.
But in recent weeks, the attorney focused on Tahmooressi’s PTSD in an attempt to win him a humanitarian release. Key testimony came from a prosecution witness, Dr. Alberto Pinzón Picaseño. The Mexico City psychiatrist interviewed Tahmooressi and concluded that he suffers from a condition that has him feeling in constant danger. The psychiatrist recommended treatment “by specialized persons in his country of origin.”
While Tahmooressi’s case made its way through Mexico’s federal court system, his supporters in the United States sought to apply political pressure on Mexico — and on the Obama administration, as they chastised U.S. officials for not speaking out publicly or pleading his case directly with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The campaign included a White House petition, a congressional hearing, and a push for a House resolution, the majority of whose backers have been Republican members of Congress, including Duncan Hunter of Alpine, an early and vocal advocate for Tahmooressi’s release. Republican figures speaking out on his behalf have included Royce, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Arizona Sen. John McCain.The rediscovery of Shelley’s Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things caused a wave of excitement a decade ago but until now this recently-resurfaced literary gem has only been seen by a handful of scholars and, thus, unavailable to students, scholars and lovers of poetry.
This special acquisition marks the 12 millionth printed book held by the Bodleian Libraries, and makes this rare poem available to scholars, students and the general public for the very first time. The text of the poem has been fully digitized and made freely available online via a dedicated website.
The printed pamphlet containing the poem is the only known copy in existence, and was purchased by the Bodleian Libraries with the support of a generous benefactor. Its acquisition allows this important poem to stay in the UK where it will become part of one of the world’s greatest collections of Shelley works and manuscripts, housed at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford.
Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian said: ‘The mission of a great library like the Bodleian is to preserve and manage its collections for the benefit of scholarship and to put knowledge into the hands of readers of all kinds.
'Through acquiring our 12 millionth book, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, we will be preserving this remarkable work for ever, and making available online a lost work by one of the greatest poets of all time. We are extremely grateful to the generous donors who made this acquisition and our website possible.’
Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the greatest English poets of the nineteenth century, wrote Poetical Essay in autumn/winter 1810-11 during his first year at the University of Oxford and published it in 1811. The poem was written as a response to Britain’s involvement in the Napoleonic war and more specifically, in support of Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, who was accused of libel by the government and was imprisoned after criticizing British military operations.
This rediscovered work shows a young Shelley engaging with the political and social issues that coloured much of his later work. The themes addressed by Shelley in Poetical Essay – the abuse of press, dysfunctional political institutions and the global impact of war – remain as relevant today as they were 200 years ago.
Poetical Essay is substantial in content but small in format. The small, 20-page pamphlet contains a 10-page poem of 172 lines accompanied by a preface and notes from the author. The pamphlet retains its original format without covers, still stitched at the side and in a good state.
Mystery has surrounded the poem ever since it was printed by a stationers on Oxford High Street more than 200 years ago. Shelley published the pamphlet containing the poem under the anonymous alias of ‘a gentleman of the University of Oxford.’
It wasn’t until 50 years after his death that the work was attributed to Shelley, and even then, historical sources imply that it was impossible to find a copy of Poetical Essay. Little is known about the provenance of the rare copy acquired by the Bodleian apart from the fact that it was rediscovered in a private collection in 2006.
‘This is a tremendously exciting moment,’ said Michael Rossington, Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Newcastle. ‘This substantial poem has been known about for years but as far as we know it hasn’t been read by any Shelley biographers or scholars since it was composed, and people are intrigued to find out exactly what it’s about.
'The poem is very interesting because it marks a new stage in Shelley’s development as a poet, revealing his early interest in the big issues of his day and his belief that poetry can be used to alter public opinion and effect change.’
This announcement was made by Bodley’s Librarian, Richard Ovenden, at a special event on 10 November to reveal the new acquisition held at the Bodleian’s Weston Library in Oxford.
Dame Vanessa Redgrave CBE, and a friend of the Libraries, introduced the pamphlet and read the preface to the essay while a group of Oxford University undergraduate students in English Literature read the poem to an audience of more than 300 guests.
To celebrate the event Professor Simon Armitage CBE, Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry, read his new translation of Book VI of Virgil’s epic poem, Aeneid.
Vanessa Redgrave CBE, said: ‘I first read Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy when I was very young. He is intoxicating to read. His words transport you. I’m thrilled that, thanks to the Bodleian and its generous donors, this long lost poem of Shelley’s can be studied by students all over the world.’
Shelley’s Poetical Essay is available to view online. This special website includes a digitized version of the poem alongside the fully transcribed text that is available to download and has been encoded with Extensible Markup Language (XML). The website also provides information and video interviews about the poem and its history.
Shelley’s Poetical Essay will also be on display in the Weston Library, Oxford and can be viewed until 23 December 2015. For more information about the display visit the Bodleian's website.Former England international Paul Gascoigne is to face charges of racially aggravated abuse over a gag he made in a comedy show.
The remarks came during an evening billed An Audience With Paul Gascoigne at the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton on November 30 last year.
He is alleged to have made a 'joke' about a black security guard who he spotted in a darkened corner of the stage and said he could not tell "if he is smiling or not".
The 49-year-old has been summoned to appear at Wolverhampton Magistrates Court on June 17 - the day after England face Wales in Euro 2016.
Last month he had been told he would not be charged but on Friday the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) reversed its decision.
It came after a third CPS lawyer was asked to consider the case under rules which allow a victim or complainant to seek a review of a decision not to charge.Hey kids! It's okay to plagiarize!
Hey kids! It's okay to plagiarize!
WASHINGTON – A Democratic group has unearthed a bit of inspirational autobiography on Senator Scott Brown's official website that was lifted verbatim from Elizabeth Dole's site, language that originated in a campaign speech. In a message to students, the Massachusetts senator uses the exact words as remarks delivered by the former North Carolina senator at her campaign kickoff in 2002.[...] "I was raised to believe that there are no limits to individual achievement and no excuses to justify indifference," said the message from Brown, which was removed later yesterday. "From an early age, I was taught that success is measured not in material accumulations, but in service to others. I was encouraged to join causes larger than myself, to pursue positive change through a sense of mission, and to stand up for what I believe."
Why reinvent the wheel when you can come across as so much more genuine and sincere and committed to public service by using someone else's words. Particularly when you're trying to recruit students to come be interns for you.
So the broken home in which he was raised that led him to take his clothes off to pay for school was where he learned there was nothing he couldn't achieve. But not where he learned that cheating by copying someone else's work is, well, cheating. Right. No wonder somebody got suspicious. Here's screen grabs from the pages.
Sen. Dole's web page
Sen. Brown's web page
It turns out that it wasn't just this one page on his site, either.
Another page on Brown's website also seem to have language lifted from Dole as well, including the introduction message on the "Intern Program" web page. Brown writes, "Senator Brown has long encouraged young people to become involved in the political process. As a public servant, he strongly believes that public service is a noble thing to do, and a wonderful way to give back." A screengrab of Dole's intern program page shows verbatim language used to introduce the program with a few variances—for example, Dole's page referred to the former senator as "a public servant for over 35 years." Brown's spokesman John Donnelly told POLITICO Thursday morning he couldn’t comment on the language used on the senator's intern page for the time being.
Brown's staff, however, did tell the Globe in the original story that the plagiarism wasn't plagiarism but "the result of a technical error." The technical error being they accidentally copied and pasted whole pages from a former Senator's Web page into Brown's. Easy technical error to make. It could happen to anyone who doesn't understand how copy and paste works, I'm sure.Barbecue is all about the smoke. Without the smoke, you might as well be grilling.
image courtesy of BurnInLoveBBQ These eighteen articles cover the full range of smoke ring science- from the choice of fuels to ring formation to modern variations on the theme of cooking near a smoky fire. The best approach is to pull down the menu read them in order, but feel free to dive in on any subject. I will keep the articles updated, correcting errors and clarifying the discussion based on the latest science and your comments. Major corrections or improvements will be indicated in the "date" line at the top of each article: Meat and Myoglobin- Not blood, but an oxygen repository responsible for the color of raw and cooked meat. Myoglobin changes color on exposure to many combustion gases, and this is the ultimate cause of the smoke ring. Fuels- Electric, propane, wood and charcoal are most common. How do they differ? Are fruit woods really sweet? Is green wood better than seasoned? Which fuel has more smoke, bitter flavors, or no smoke ring- and why? Smoke- NOT!- Why the term "smoke ring" is false advertising.. Smoke Flavor- which combustion products taste and smell the best, and how can you control your fire to optimize flavor? CO smoke ring- when does a fire produce carbon monoxide, and will it show up as a ring? Or flavor? NO smoke ring- when does a fire produce nitric oxide, and will it show up as a ring? Or flavor? Smoke Ring Profile- Why some rings are thicker than others. How to control the smoke ring's appearance by adjusting temperature and humidity. Smoker Ring First Aid- what to do if your smoke ring disappears like the Cheshire Cat's smile.... How smoke flows- why some smoke particles and gases stick to meat, while others simply pass by. Smoke Color- Why smoke color and density is a surrogate for combustion conditions, and thus flavor. Curing salts- their history, how they work, and a simple application method Novel smoke sources- sometimes when there's smoke, there isn't fire CO/NOx test rig- how we demonstrated the role of these two gases, and how we measured CO/NO levels MAP - Modern food packaging takes advantage of the binding of CO and NO to meat. To preserve and sometimes fool the eye.Hello!
I was on holiday in Mallorca during the week of the EU referendum- quite possibly the best time to go, to get away from the media circus, make the most of exchange rates before they plummeted, and avoid some of the worst rain the UK has seen in months.
Since returning I’ve tried my hand at writing my own version of the Winnie The Pooh Brexit meme, but things spiraled out of hand a little, and it turned into an exploration of narrative, dialogue, and speech indicators. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it..
“How did you vote?” Said Pooh.
Piglet said nothing.
“I voted remain.” Said Pooh.
Still piglet was silent.
“I said I voted remain.” Pooh said. “If you voted Leave, that’s okay.”
“Pooh.” Piglet said. “It’s been five years since Kanga died.”
“Oh.” Pooh said. “Sorry piglet, I didn’t realise.”
“No, of course you didn’t.” Said Piglet.
“I’m sorry.” Said Pooh.
“Don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.” Piglet said. “It was something that happened to me, after all.”
“So…” Pooh said.
“That Enya song she liked was on the radio today.” Said Piglet.
“Do you know how much money Enya makes?” Said Pooh.
“I don’t know, no.” Said Piglet.
“It’s a lot. She has a net worth of 140 Million USD.” Said Pooh.
“That doesn’t mean she makes a lot of money as such.” Said Piglet. “She may just be very economical with the money she already has.”
“Good point.” Said Piglet.
“Pooh, have you ever noticed how dialogue-driven prose really doesn’t lend itself to complicated discussion, and is much more effective for short, snappy pieces of dialogue, yes said Pooh no said Pooh, well okay then said Piglet and so on? It often feels preachy, like the characters are merely mouthpieces for an obvious opinion or agenda, and their turn-taking is either completely irrelevant, or exists to setup and serve straw-man fallacies.” Said Piglet.
“Oh bother.” Said Pooh.
“What?”
“Who said that?” Said Pooh.
“Oh for pity sake… What?” SAID PIGLET.
“All these words are making my brain hurt.” Mumbled Pooh.
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Sneered Piglet. “You are a silly old bear.”
“Well that’s not very nice Piglet.” Sniffed Pooh. “I’m just a little confused by the sudden change in our length and quality of speech.”
“I’m sorry Pooh, really I am.” Recompensed Piglet. “Are you low on sugar?”
“A little.” Pooh nodded. “Also.. recompensed? Settle down, pig.”
“How much honey have you had today?” Piglet asked.
“None.” Replied Pooh.
“Nonsense.” Piglet shook his head, I mean grumbled. “I saw you eating honey this morning.”
“That wasn’t honey.” Remarked Pooh. “That was hunny.”
“Sorry what?” Asked Piglet.
“Hunny.” Pooh responded. “It’s the cutesy way that I spell honey. I really am a silly old bear.”
PIGLET
[Annoyed]
No, you’re an annoying git.
POOH
[Shocked]
Why?
PIGLET
[Remonstrative]
You knew exactly what I was talking about, you even said that hunny was your name for honey. So you have had honey or hunny or whatever today, you’re just being cute and whimsy for the sake of being cute and whimsy.
POOH
[Crestfallen]
There’s no need to be quite so cruel. Also this new format of our speech really hammers home the emotional intent of your words, and quite frankly I don’t care for it.
PIGLET
[Impressed]
Whatever happen to ‘Oh bother?’
POOH
[Determined]
I just feel like we should try a different form of dialogue.
PIGLET
[Exasperated]
Again?
POOH
[I dunno, resolute or something]
Yes, again.
And so Piglet and Pooh continued their discussion in the form of reported speech. Pooh felt it was a decent way to quickly express intent and viewpoint, but Piglet felt that it lacked depth, and was more than a little lazy. They talked like this for some time, Pooh often stopping to remark how easily the passage of time could be demonstrated without having to show actual discussion or activity. Piglet acquiesced, or at least he would have if acquiescence was a term within his lexical set. Mainly he just nodded. After a good long while, Pooh pointed out that they hadn’t said anything for ages, despite the suggestion that they had. They both agreed on a more honest form of communication.
“Said Pooh?” Said Piglet.
“Said Piglet.” Said Pooh.
“Are we still friends?” Said Piglet.
“Yes… yes we’re still friends. I think.” said Pooh.
“Why?” Said Piglet.
“Well I don’t even know if we were friends to begin with, so ‘still friends’ is an odd concept.” Pooh befuddled. “I mean, I know you, and all my adventures seem to involve you in some way, but are we friends? I think we’re just thrown together by close proximity.”
“That’s okay Pooh, I actually wasn’t asking why you were unsure, I was asking why we were friends, but I think you’ve answered my question anyway.”
“Oh bother.” Said Pooh, because the next line needed to be said by Piglet, and a break in the conversation was necessary.
“Pub?” Asked Piglet.
“What’s a pub?” Asked Pooh.
“It’s where humans and fictional humans and anthropomorphised animals go to drink alcohol.” Piglet gushed.
“I see.” Pooh confirmed. “But there’s no alcohol in The Hundred Acre Wood.”
“Good point.” Piglet agreed. “But they can probably ship it in from outside. Export lager or something.”
“Export lager |
must have for any collection."
- M C from Boardgamegeek.com
An absolutely stunning game visually (and it has purple pieces!), I prefer [Gemblo] because 1) Gemblo scales well from 3-6 people,... and 2) you are allowed to play off of any node (not just corners), so each piece allows more connecting plays. This latter point makes it even more challenging to effectively block your opponents, raising the tension between deciding to keep others from encroaching on your territory or to try to expand your reach. It has expansion cards that may spice up play a bit,... - T. Hedden from Boardgamegeek.com
How many thoughtful six-player games are there that look fantastic, can be taught in a minute or two, and play in 30 or 40 minutes? Very few, if any. That's a good reason to own GemBlo... - Joshua Miller from Boardgamegeek.com
A game pretty and simple enough that you'd be proud to have on your desk. - Travis M Spomer from Boardgamegeek.com Has become my favorite area filling game... I like the hex feel of the game, and the way the pieces connect without attachment that allows other pieces to squeeze through. It is real eye candy, and always attracts viewers who never saw the game before. Plus, it's hard to win. - Todd Redden from Boardgamegeek.com
Abstract, Geometric. A really fun, light abstract game. Plays fairly quickly and leaves you wanting another go. Got this in Korea in 2005.
- Mike Haverty from Boardgamegeek.com
A great abstract that can handle up to 6 players. It is simple game that scratch that tetris itch. My parents like the game because it is simple enough. The game is quick to teach so that the impatient people can start playing right away.
- John Paul sodusta from Boardgamegeek.com
Thank you Kickstarters, I look forward to your comments and contribution!
Note: Gemblo will retail for $29.99 (excludes shipping). With the expansion cards, it will retail for $34.99 (excludes shipping)
About Design and Localization Advisor:
Max Holliday:
"I'm a Graphic Designer, 3d Animator and Game Designer living in Ogden, Utah. I teach Graphic Design as well as 3d Animation at the OGDEN-WEBER Applied Technology Collage and work as a freelance graphic designer on the side. I like games with card driven designs but I'll play just about anything. I take a heavy influence for any of my designs from film and other story driven media."
Please Share the news & Have a Gemblo Good Day!
Here are some Abstract Art you can do with Gemblo! The pictures show Gemblo Deluxe, however Gemblo is smaller in dimension but capable of the same creativity!In 1963 twenty year old student Ira Jeffrey Nye had finished his first year at Princeton when an article he authored appeared in the October issue of the national magazine “Look”. His essay was an honest expression of his experience as a Mormon learning about the Church’s teachings and policies regarding black men and the public statements of the Church leaders.
The article was followed by a brief editorial note describing an encounter the editor of the paper had with Joseph F Smith.
I have acquired a copy of the magazine and a high resolution digital scan of the article can now be found at Archive.org.
The bravery of a young man opening up his troubled conscience in a way which would no doubt earn him condemnation among his faithful peers is remarkable. Jeff Nye passed away in 2010. If his obituary is accurate, he went on to champion civil rights as a journalist and even marched with Martin Luther King Jr. Marriage records indicate that he likely married a woman of Nigerian descent and so it is likely that the issue of racism was close to his heart.
Here is the text of the article:
Memo From a Mormon
In which a troubled young man raises the question of his Church’s attitude toward Negroes
Background
With a political rise of Governor George Romney of Michigan, a Mormon, and the thrust of the Mormon Church into the urban life of our nation, the position of the Negro in the Mormon Church is gaining new attention. There has been a good deal of confusion surrounding this question for some time. Non-Mormons have been confused. As a lifelong Mormon, I have been, too. The Mormon Church taught me that the Negro was not equal to the white in terms of religious rights and opportunities. It taught me that the Negro was cursed with loss of God’s priesthood and that the evidence, or mark, of this curse was his dark skin. Consequently, the Negro could not hold the priesthood in the Mormon Church and was thus unequal to the white in a very important sense. But the reasons for this doctrine, and the scriptural evidence behind it, had always seemed unconvincing to me.
Statement from JFS
Then one evening, I came across an article on the subject that quite surprised me. This article, printed in the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper owned by the Mormon Church, quoted at length one of the highest officials of the Mormon Church, Joseph Fielding Smith, president of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, a body that serves directly under the President of the Church and his two counselors in directing the affairs of the Church. President Smith, whose position is traditionally been the steppingstone to the presidency of the Church, is the Church’s doctrinarian. He officially answers to questions of Mormon youth in the Church’s monthly magazine, The Improvement Era. The Deseret News quoted President Smith as saying: “The ignorance on the part of writers who do not belong to us The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in relation to the views of the ‘Mormons’ on the status religiously or otherwise of the Negro is inexcusable. There is no doubt that in the campaign of George Romney enemies will play up the Negro question to the very limit.” Then President Smith made a statement that surprised me. He said: “The Latter-day Saints, so commonly called ‘Mormons,’ have no animosity toward the Negro. Neither have they described him as belonging to an ‘inferior race.’ ” President Smith went on to quote a passage from the Book of Mormon that says Christ. “denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free….” Next came his major point: “the [Mormon] Church can do more for the Negro than any other Church on the face of the earth. “What other Church can baptize them by divine authority and confirm them and give them the gift the Holy Ghost? What other Church can promise them with assurance that they can if they are faithful and true before the Lord enter into the celestial kingdom?… “What other Church can make a better promise? Moreover, we know whereof we speak, for the gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored with all its powers and divine authority. “The Negro who accepts the doctrines of the Church and is baptized by an authorized minister of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is entitled to salvation in the celestial kingdom, or the highest heaven spoken of by Paul. “It is true that the work of the ministry is given to other peoples, and why should the so-called Christian denominations complain? How many Negroes have been placed as ministers over white congregations in the so-called Christian denominations?” President Smith concluded the article by saying, “it is strange that so many persons are tried and condemned by well-meaning people because of assumed notions and prejudice without a true knowledge of the facts.” This article said just the opposite of what I had learned throughout my teenage years as a member of the Church.
Reflection on reality
A few minutes after I had read it, I began to wonder about the knowledge I had acquired as a Mormon. In the weeks that followed, my inquiries led me to the same answer that I had before reading President Smith’s words: the Negro is not equal to the white in the Mormon Church, and equality is impossible as long as the Church denies the priesthood to the Negro. This is the policy of the Church. The Negro is a junior partner in my Church. He is a junior partner because he cannot hold the priesthood, and the priesthood is the foundation of the Church. Only males hold the priesthood, but the females share it through marriage. A Negro woman who, according to Mormon doctrine, is also cursed, cannot share the priesthood through marriage. Today, if a Negro becomes interested in the Church, he can join, and he can be baptized and confirmed a member by the laying on hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost. He can come to most of the church meetings. But he cannot pass the sacrament, as the 12 and 13 year old boys do. He cannot prepare the sacrament, as the 14 and 15-year-olds do. Nor can he bless the sacrament or perform baptisms, as the 16, 17 and 18-year-olds do. Nor can he perform any of the other duties of the lesser, or Aaronic, priesthood. A Negro cannot hold the higher, or Melchizedek priesthood or perform any of its numerous and significant functions. He cannot offer the confirmation prayer for a person who has been baptized. He cannot offer the prayer to heal a sick relative or friend or anyone else in the priesthood. Most important, he cannot enter the temple to perform the covenants of the temple. This restricts him. from an important lesson, since temple work in the hearts and minds of many Mormons is their choicest earthly blessing. Deprived of the privileges of the temple, the Negro cannot be married to his wife and sealed to his family for eternity. This is the highest covenant, the Mormon may solemnize. It includes various secret and sacred rites and rituals that take place in the temple. Nor can the Negro perform vicarious priesthood ordinances for the dead, which is the other major purpose of the temple. These special, secret rites are a real spiritual blessing to many Mormons. The sanctity and beauty of the temple inject a serene spirituality into the Latter-day Saint. Here, he is renewed and refreshed, ready to face daily life with reinvigorated faith. Lacking the priesthood, the Negro can never hold any position of leadership in the Church, because the priesthood is the prerequisite for any position of authority.
Doctrinal Support
As for scriptural evidence to support this policy, there is very little. There are four books of scripture that are used in the Mormon religion: the Bible: the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Out of the four volumes, Mormons can offer only three verses that support, although not conclusively, the Negro doctrine. These three passages are found in the Pearl of Great Price and are a part of a revelation given to Joseph Smith, who founded Mormonism in 1830. They appear in a section of the Pearl of Great Price called the “Book of Moses.” In chapter 5, verses 40 and 41, the book says: “… And I the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. And Cain was shut out from the presence of the Lord, and with his wife, and many of his brethren dwelt in the land of Nod on the East of Eden.” And in chapter 7, verse 22, the same “Book of Moses” says: “And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people, which were the ‘sons of Adam’ and they were a mixture of all the seed of Adam save it were the seed of Cain, for the seed of Cain were black and had not place among them.” Cain, because he had killed Abel, was cast out from the presence of the Lord. Cain and his seed were black. This is all the information given to us. And this is all the scriptural documentation Mormons offer in support of the Negro doctrine. From this, the Church’s concluded that the Negro, or a person with “Negro blood” (whatever that means), cannot hold the priesthood in the Mormon Church. Yet the word “priesthood” is not mentioned in the three scriptural passages. If we consider the remainder of available scriptural evidence, we find contradictions. Nowhere in the four books, does Christ make a distinction between black and white. Possibly one might postulate that this important issue was lost in the Bible through translation or accident. But the Book of Mormon is the second witness for Christ, and according to leaders of the Mormon Church, it is a pure and undefiled translation. In the article, President Smith quoted a Book of Mormon scripture, 2 Nephi 26: 32-33. The complete text of Verse 33 says: “for none of these inequities come of the Lord; for he doeth that which is good among the children of men; and he doeth nothing save it be plain unto the children of men; and he inviteth them all to come of the him and to partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come under him; black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.” The Book of Mormon thus offers testimony that Christ “denieth none,” regardless of color or race. It says nothing else to contradict this egalitarian view. With this sort of evidence to be found in Mormon scriptures, and even quoted by a high official of the Church, how can Mormons continue to teach and accept a condition of Negro subservience? It is puzzling, unless one keeps in mind, the attitude of overwhelming apathy that Mormons seem to have toward Negroes. Unfortunately, the very existence of the present Mormon Negro doctrine adds to this apathy. In fact, it gives Mormons, a God-sanctioned reason for feeling superior to the Negro.
Familiarity
This is where the Mormon question about the Negro merges into the larger question of racial prejudice. The best way to perpetuate racial prejudice is to provide as little real association between races as possible. Prejudice thrives on ignorance. The Mormon’s Negro doctrine reinforces the ignorance of most Mormons about Negroes. True, this policy seems to have been feasible up to now, because there are few Negroes in the Mormon Church, because few whites have objected to it and because there have been scarcely any outside pressures. Most Mormon seem indifferent to questions concerning the Negro. But times are changing. The Mormon Church, like so many others, is making major efforts to acquire new members through missionary work, particularly in our urban centers. And as these young Mormon missionaries move about in our cities, they are coming into contact with the realities of the race problem today. They are seeing, at firsthand, the great drive of the Negro for equality, for his full measure of freedom.
Conclusion
Can the principle of equality be reconciled with the Mormon doctrine of denial of priesthood? This is the question, the troubles me today. Perhaps the conditions that shape our world today, will produce a new view. If we Mormons believe that God is directing our Church, we can hope that God is preparing a new revelation that will revise our present Negro doctrine. If we do not believe this, we can hope that the more liberal element of the Mormon leadership will produce a doctrinal change as the problem intensifies. JEFF NYE
EDITOR’S NOTE
The article from the Deseret News, referred to by Mr. Nye, appeared in an issue of that newspaper dated July 14, 1962. William B. Arthur, managing editor of LOOK, asked President Smith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to comment on the article during an interview with him last summer, in his office in the Mormon Church’s office building in Salt Lake City, Utah. “I stand by every word in the article,” President Smith said, after reading it aloud in Mr. Arthur’s presence. “The Mormon Church does not believe, nor does it teach, that the Negro is an inferior being. Mentally, and physically, the Negro is capable of great achievement, as great and in some cases greater than the potentiality of the white race. He can become a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, and he can achieve great heights. The word ‘inferior’ is indeed unfortunate.” Mr. Arthur asked President Smith if a Negro boy can pass the sacrament in the Mormon Church, as 12 and 13-year-old white Mormon boys do. President Smith replied, “No.” He then was asked whether Negro boys could prepare the sacrament, as 14 and 15 -year-old white Mormon boys do. The answer was “No.” “Can he bless the sacrament or perform baptism, as a 16, 17 and 18-year-old white Mormon boys do?” Mr. Arthur asked. Again, the reply was, “No.” “The Negro cannot achieve priesthood in the Mormon Church,” President Smith said. “No consideration is being given now to changing the doctrine of the Church to permit him to attain that status. Such a change can come about only through divine revelation, and no one can predict when a divine revelation will occur. “I would not want you to believe that we bear any animosity toward the Negro. ’Darkies’ are wonderful people, and they have their place in our Church.”
Response
It is hard to tell how Nye’s peers received this article. Was he subject to church discipline for air the “dirty laundry”? I have not been successful in locating any family or friends who were familiar with Nye (please contact me if you are). It may be that his intention was not to damage the church’s reputation, but to foster discussion about an issue which was starting to cause increasing difficulties for the membership as well as criticism from outsiders.
In that, his article was a success. The effect of it has been documented in one unlikely place – the records of the BYU Grant Oratorical Contest held 19 November, 1963 – just one month after the publication of Nye’s article. This contest started with over 40 entries and was eventually pared down to 3 finalists. One of them was a political science major from Modesto California named Steven Davis. His speech was a direct response to Nye’s article and it was just as remarkable as its subject. It won the award that year.
You can view the text of the speech at archive.org and I include it here as well:
Challenge for Knowledge
STEVEN B. DAVIS
Several weeks ago there appeared in a magazine of national circulation an article entitled “Memo from a Mormon: A Young Man Questions His Church’s Policy Toward Negroes.” In this article, the young man, a B.Y.U. student two years ago, questioned whether or not the policy of the Latter-day Saint Church toward Negroes was consistent with the Church’s professed desire of achieving equality and brotherhood. It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to know what motivated Jeff Nye to write this article. It does seem apparent that the editors of the magazine for which this article was written were interested primarily in selling as many copies of the magazine as possible; an honest essay was never their goal. But was the article itself completely unfair? Is it possible that the work was an honestly intended one, in which a genuine question was asked? Many apparently believed that this might be the case, for the article generally was treated with tolerance. Yet within this community a type of criticism arose, the nature of which seems particularly disturbing, for the majority of these rejoinders devoted themselves not to a discussion of the religious question set forth by the young man, but instead were devoted to questioning the very existence of the article itself. It was branded “yellow Journalism” by some, yet few explained why this might be so. And one prominent member of the student body dismissed it as a failure of the young man to have learned his lessons as a boy of thirteen, apparently overlooking the fact that this question is a source of serious consideration to many of our Church leaders, let alone a young adolescent. As members of this student body, it should be a source of considerable pride that the majority of individuals who discussed this work did so on a rational, logical, intellectually honest level. But it should also come as disappointing and dangerous that there were those who were content to dismiss this challenge by tactics that begged the question. It is dangerous because it is indicative of a trend which exists in our society today that threatens to influence our religious values. There is at present a pressure or coercion to conform, to accept, to live according to the mores and standards of society without ever questioning the basis or truthfulness of those standards. We are asked to live in a society we have not made and never question the wisdom of the makers. Thus, in too many cases, today’s youth matures only physically. Emotionally our youth is forced from adolescence into maturity and given a standard philosophy without ever really experiencing the despair and the joy that comes from questioning what life is really all about. There can be but one result: the premium placed on conformity produces a generation of young people who know all the answers but never know why they are the answers. This tendency of our society to force an acceptance of its ways is dangerous to us as L.D.S. youth, in that its influence may permeate and corrupt our religious values, causing us to become smug and complacent in our beliefs and intolerant of those who question and wonder. These are serious charges to be made of us, and our automatic response is to deny them. Yet can we say we are entirely tolerant when we dismiss a young boy’s challenge on the basis that he never bothered to learn his lessons? Can I say that I am entirely honest if I always accept and never question what I am told by our leaders? If we make no efforts on our own to increase our knowledge and understanding, can we say that we are living the spirit of the gospel? There are those who maintain that since we possess the great truths, no challenges need be made, no questions need be asked. We answer those people by replying that true knowledge cannot spring from mere acceptance. We answer by replying that a cessation of a search for greater understanding leads to stagnation and a decay of even that little which had been possessed. It is not enough, then, to merely dream of our “mansions on high”; our spiritual progress is dependent upon an ever increasing knowledge. So if an individual questions and wonders, if it is done in humility and honesty, can we justifiably brand that person as being weak and destructive? Brigham Young, as a prospective member of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, could not be satisfied with reading the Book of Mormon only once or twice. Instead, this individual, who was to become known as the “Lion of the Lord,” read the Book of Mormon nine times before he was convinced of its truthfulness. Joseph Smith was asked to conform with the prevailing religious customs of his day and become a member of one of the popular Protestant sects. How fortunate it is for us that he questioned their truthfulness. Brothers and sisters, our leaders have never become smug and complacent in their beliefs. They have constantly spurned the easy, most expedient path and sought instead the joys that come from questioning and striving. Most of us will never achieve the positions of leadership of these men, yet the joys they have experienced can never be denied us if we will but follow their example in searching for an increasing knowledge of the everlasting truths. President Hugh B. Brown tells us of the individual who cannot be satisfied with a cessation of questions and challenges. “His is the philosophy,” he tells us, “that if you choose to go from one mountain peak to another, you must also travel the valleys in between and prepare for the darkness and marshes and other entanglements. The light of the gospel is that beacon which will see you safely through.” The man for whom this University was named once made a similar statement. When asked what a person’s goal in life should be, Brigham Young replied, “There is a Mount Sinai for every child of God if he only knows how to climb it.” May people never say, “The Mormons are a smug, intolerant people. Instead, may it always be said of us that we are an open-minded, questioning, challenging kind. And may we find that our questions lead us to the peak of our own personal Mount Sinais and to the greatest of joys, a perfect knowledge of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Butterfly Effect
Other than motivating the winning BYU speech that year, Nye’s article set in motion a series of events which made history on the issue of Civil Rights in the Mormon Faith. After reading the article, members of the NAACP were “spurred” into action. This is reflected in a news clipping at the time:
“The civil rights supporters were spurred on this week by an article in Look magazine by an LDS church member and 20-year-old University of Utah student. Jeff Nye called upon the Mormon leaders to re-examine the doctrine which prevents Negroes from holding the priesthood.”
(“NAACP to make proposals to Mormon Church” Redlands Daily Facts, 5 Oct 1963, Sat, Page 1 newspapers.com)
The members of the NAACP decided that they would threaten a demonstration at the 1963 October General Conference. It was news of that threatened protest that met the ears of University of Utah professor Stanley McMurrin. In a conversation between with Salt Lake City NAACP chapter president Albert Fritz McMurrin saw an opportunity:
I asked whether there had ever been conversations between officials of the NAACP and General Authorities of the LDS Church on matters of interest to the NAACP. He told me that he knew of none. He assured me moreover that the had made no effort to arrange for conversations with church officials on the civil rights problem or any other matter. Mr. Fritz agreed that it would not be wise to proceed with a demonstration at the Tabernacle without at least first attempting to pursue the question of civil rights legislation with church officials. When I asked if he would like me to arrange a meeting with the First Presidency, he responded with much enthusiasm. So I contacted President Hugh B. Brown, who said that he would like very much to meet with Mr. Fritz and any others who might accompany him to discuss any problems that they would like to put before the Church. Within the next few minutes, with some back and forth telephoning, arrangements were made to have Mr. Fritz and his committee meet with President Brown in President Brown’s office on the following afternoon.”
(“A Note on the 1963 Civil Rights Statement” Sterling McMurrin, Dialogue Vol 12, No2 dialoguejournal.com)
What resulted was the very first meeting between the highest level of LDS leadership and representatives of the NAACP. Hugh B Brown and N Eldon Tanner, First and Second Counsellors in the First Presidency met with a committee from the NAACP and in that meeting gave a good faith commitment that the church was interested in making a statement on civil rights. The members of the NAACP debated whether or not to hold off their demonstration and in the end, decided to see what sort of statement might be made during general conference. Their patience was rewarded by a statement read over the pulpit in the Sunday session by Hugh B Brown:
During recent months both in Salt Lake City and across the nation considerable interest has been expressed in the position of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the matter of civil rights. We would like it to be known that there is in this Church no doctrine, belief, or practice that is intended to deny the enjoyment of full civil rights by any person regardless of race, color, or creed. We again say, as we have said many times before, that we believe that all men are the children of the same God and that it is a moral evil for any person or group of persons to deny to any human being the right to gainful employment, to full educational opportunity, and to every privilege of citizenship, just as it is a moral evil to deny him the right to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience. We have consistently and persistently upheld the Constitution of the United States, and as far as we are concerned that means upholding the constitutional rights of every citizen of the United States. We call upon all men everywhere, both within and outside the Church, to commit themselves to the establishment of full civil equality for all of God’s children. Anything less than this defeats our high ideal of the brotherhood of man.
(General Conference Report, October 1963, archive.org)
This was the strongest statement in support of civil rights for all races that the church had ever made publicly. The statement was accepted by the NAACP and no demonstrations or protests followed the conference. Brown’s words would be quoted and re-quoted in the press anytime the question of racial equality and Mormonism was discussed in the ensuing years, particularly during the presidential campaign of George Romney.
All of this began, in part, with the words of a “troubled young man” who was not afraid to speak his conscience.
Conclusion
Jeff Nye was bold enough to raise a question which undoubtedly separated him from many of his peers. It was a statement that needed to be made. The fact that he was white, himself, was an important facet of the issue. For a black person to speak out against the oppressive nature of the ban would be perceived as someone who had become prideful and wanted to set themselves up against the leaders just so they could get a gain of position. Nye was not at a disadvantage as a result of the ban. He speak out against the error of the policy with nothing to gain and his reputation and social standing to risk. It forced his questions to be confronted without the confounding issue of motive. For his honest confession he was subject to the negative rejoinders and aspersions that can be expected when one sticks one’s head above the crowd to express an opinion that goes against the current.
Steven Davis of Modesto California is just as remarkable for the way in which he responded to the controversial report. Rather than attack the messenger’s motives or fall back onto the oft repeated Mormon dogma about race, he saw that the way that students were reacting to a thoughtful dissenting voice was a problem in and of itself. He declared that students, Mormon students in particular, can better integrate new ideas on a standard of truth facilitated by independent thought and not rote repetition or blind acceptance.
“the premium placed on conformity produces a generation of young people who know all the answers but never know why they are the answers.”
This lesson has many applications among Mormons today. The Mormons in 1963 were confronted with a society that was moving towards acceptance of minorities as equals to whites. It contradicted over a century of scripture and doctrinal teachings. The church now acknowledges that those teachings were absolutely false and unreservedly disavows them. The men and women who rejected those false messages from friends, bishops, apostles and prophets paid a price for staying true to their conscience.
They stood apart from the rest because they realized that the way to find answers to those questions was not by simply relying on what was being told to them, but to doubt and to question and search and reason. So while everyone around them had to wait for the leaders to come around to truth, these illuminated people claimed it for themselves.
The next time that you encounter someone who takes an unorthodox view of issues such as women ordination to the priesthood or how to accept gay men and women – remember the lessons learned here. Sifting truth from error without relying on second hand dogma takes practice and the confidence in your own inner voice will grow as you exercise it more frequently. This has all happened before. It is possible that it could happen again. Are you ready?
P.S.
If you know the family of Jeff Nye or Steven Davis, please contact me by email or leave a comment. I would love to learn more about the aftermath of this article and the thoughts behind the response.
P.P.S.
I have located another clipping which tells of some of the reaction of people to the national article.
A black Michigan State Senator read the story and immediately asked LDS Michigan Governor George Romney if it was accurate and whether or not he shared the views regarding the status of black people which the article pointed out are part of Mormon theology. The Senator incorrectly stated that the article inferred that black men were not able to get baptized.
George Romney was a prominent LDS businessman and politician who was ahead of his time in working for civil rights, though he was careful not to directly confront LDS leaders about the issue within the church. Despite this, LDS Apostle Delbert Stapley penned a letter to Romney attempting to quell his support for civil rights legislation and his advocacy for racial equality. you can read about that communication in the blog post “George Romney and the Delbert Stapley Letter.” I haven’t been able to locate the Governors reply, if any was made. Romney’s record on civil rights would speak louder than any statement, however, and in that he was exemplary.By Ruth Marcus - November 4, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Advice to readers about the coming orgy of analysis about the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections: Ignore it. Disquisitions on The Meaning of It All for President Obama or the 2009 results as a harbinger for Congress in 2010 have scant basis in reality.
Over-interpreting election results is an occupational hazard for political reporters. This problem is particularly acute in the year after a presidential contest, when we are suffering from a bad case of electoral withdrawal.
Thus, The New York Times instructs that the contests offer "some clues about how Americans are viewing Mr. Obama, as well as an early measure of the landscape for next year's midterm elections." National Public Radio says "the off-year elections are being watched by national politicians as a referendum on President Obama and his party."
If so, a look at the history of these races suggests the prognosticators might as well be watching sunspots.
In the 15 gubernatorial elections since 1949, the voters of New Jersey and Virginia have chosen governors belonging to the same party 10 times (seven Democrats, three Republicans). In five of those 10 elections, the party winning both governorships went on to pick up seats in the House and Senate the next year. In three, a sweep of the statehouses augured precisely the opposite result in the subsequent congressional election. Once, Democrats won both governors' races and went on to get a split result (losing seats in one house, gaining them in another). Once, the same thing happened to Republicans. Not a particularly compelling pattern.
Nor does it help to expand the field to examine the consequences of a split result. That's happened five times since 1949 (three times with a Democrat winning Virginia and a Republican taking New Jersey; twice the other way around). Three times Democrats have picked up seats the next year, twice the party has lost seats.
Does it make any difference which state the Republican (or Democratic) winner is from? Not really. Of the three times a Democrat won in Virginia while a Republican was elected in New Jersey, Democrats won seats twice and lost seats once. In the two split verdicts in which the Republican took the Virginia statehouse while the Democrat won New Jersey's, Democrats -- you guessed it -- won seats once and lost seats once.
As Maine goes, so goes the nation, the saying goes. When it comes to Virginia and New Jersey, though, there's no predictive value.
Well, you may wonder, what about the five most recent elections since 1989? After all, the states have changed and elections have become more nationalized. Fair enough -- except that here the correlation is just as weak. Democrats took both governorships three times (1989, 2001, 2005). In two of the subsequent congressional elections (1990 and 2006), they gained seats. In one, 2002, they lost seats. And in the two cycles in which Republicans won both governorships (1993 and 1997), Democrats lost seats once (1994) and gained seats once (1998).
Finally, do the off-year results foreshadow anything for a president's re-election three years down the road? Hardly. Of the 10 elections in which one party won both states, a president of that party was elected six times in the following presidential contest.
Of course, there are years in which a president's political woes contributed to his party's poor showing in the off-year elections and the congressional midterms. The prime example is Bill Clinton's experience of 1993-94, in which Republican gubernatorial victories presaged a shellacking in Congress. Democrats lost the House (down 54 seats) and Senate (down 8) -- and then Clinton went on to win re-election. The next best example is George W. Bush in 2005-06, in which Democratic gubernatorial wins paved the way for large gains in the House (plus 31 seats) and Senate (plus 6).
So it's possible, for example, that Obama's performance in office turned off some of the Virginians who voted for him last year, and played a role in the race between Democrat R. Creigh Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell. But Deeds was a lousy candidate, McDonnell a far more adept one. Virginia is a purple state, but purple with a decidedly reddish tinge.
But as to the question of whether Tuesday's results portend very much for Congress in 2010 or Obama in 2012, the answer is: not really, all the commentary notwithstanding.“1, 2, 3…” “OSS”
You say it in the class, you say it outside of the gym, you says it as a sign of recognition, but do you actually know what “OSS” means? Well we’re about to drop some knowledge on you.
The term “OSS!” or “OSU!” in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu isn’t exactly exclusive to the art. It is a term that is used quite a lot throughout the world of martial arts. The term actually comes from the traditional Japanese Okinawan Karate and is actually an abbreviation for Onegai Shimasu and directly translates into a request, a solicitation or an invitation.
The second definition of “OSS”, also known as “ossu”, means Oshi Shinobu, which conveys the idea of “persevering when pushed”. In other words, never give up, have determination, grit and withstand the most arduous of training.
In other sources “OSS” can be defined as manifestation of “Ki” energy, in karate instead of the phrase “OSS”, fighters will shout “KIAI”, meaning Strength, this is also an indication that someone is ready to fight. In the book “Go rin no sho” ([amazon_textlink asin=’1590309847′ text=’The Book of Five Rings’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’attacktheba01-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’72a6803f-057b-11e7-bd51-0f61a7ac00b7′]), the Samurai would use three types of shouts: One before, One During and One After fighting to celebrate victory or accept defeat.
Just like Jiu-Jitsu the term “OSU” has several uses and it’s important to understand when to use the phrase. It can be used as an acknowledgement of an instructor, a term of endearment to another training partner when they pull off some good moves at a tournament, among a number of things. In BJJ “O |
id in all of sports," said Dave Morgan, the president of USA Today Sports Media Group. "The Fan Index is designed to actually quantify the passion each school's fan base generates beyond the games themselves, as well as to determine which traditions and fan experiences resonate the most with fans around the country."
Rutgers finished No. 64 in the rankings. That put the Scarlet Knights behind 12 Big Ten schools, including No. 1 Ohio State. Only Northwestern, which ranked No. 67, finished behind Rutgers. The Big Ten finished second to the SEC in the conference power rankings based on the average ranking for their teams.
It's a fun list to look through to see where different programs ranked. Each week, there was a vote on a topic. Here are the winners in each category:
Best uniforms: Oregon
Best fight song: Michigan (The Victors)
Best tailgates: LSU
Best colors: Texas
Best stadium: UCLA (Rose Bowl)
Best helmet: Notre Dame
Best mascot: Georgia (Uga the bulldog)
Best field: Boise State
Best band: USC
Best entrance: Clemson (Running down the hill)
Best student section: Texas A&M
Best cheerleading squad: Alabama
Best tradition: Auburn (Rolling Toomer's corner)
Best rivalry: Army-Navy
Best football town: Wisconsin (Madison)
Best fan base: Alabama
Dan Duggan may be reached at dduggan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DDuggan21. Find NJ.com Rutgers Football on Facebook.A drug-policy consultant will visit Buffalo on Tuesday to argue that New York should legalize recreational marijuana not simply because, in his view, the current system squanders police resources, targets certain minorities and fosters a dangerous, underground economy.
Legalizing marijuana, says Nicolas Eyle, can help counter the deadly opiate epidemic sweeping the nation because studies have shown people in medical-marijuana states will select pot over more dangerous drugs to relieve pain. He reasons that more people would reject opiates if marijuana were more widely available through legal means.
"If marijuana has been proven in states that have medical marijuana to counteract opioid use, then I don't see why it wouldn't be any different if people could buy it without a prescription," Eyle told The Buffalo News in a recent interview. "If you could just go buy it, it would solve a lot of problems."
Voters in eight states have allowed the recreational use of marijuana, setting aside studies showing that marijuana smoking poses long-term risks to the lungs, the immune system and memory. The eight include New York's Northeast neighbors Massachusetts and Maine.
But at this point, the Empire State remains a long shot. Bills to legalize pot are not drawing a critical mass of support in the State Senate.
Still, Eyle and other advocates believe the day will come.
"Marijuana prohibition is obviously not working," he said. "If prohibition worked, we wouldn't be having this discussion."
Eyle, who lives in Syracuse, founded ReconsiDer, a national drug forum that has cast a skeptical light on America's drug wars. He has been active with similar organizations and will speak at a news conference in Buffalo Tuesday as a board member of NY Grows, a group hoping to make New York the ninth state to legalize recreational marijuana.
NY Grows is talking up a bill that would allow people 18 and over to possess up to 2 ounces of marijuana and up to six marijuana plants, while continuing to prohibit pot smoking in public places. The board members, who include former Erie County Executive Joel A. Giambra, say legalization could raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the state treasury each year as retailers pay for licenses and consumers pay an excise tax on the product. Giambra and other advocates say the fortune could be plowed into major infrastructure projects.
They see other benefits: Police and the courts could see fewer defendants accused of marijuana-related crimes and could operate more efficiently. A violent underground distribution network would be replaced by legitimate companies licensed to trade in recreational marijuana. Minorities would no longer bear the brunt of arrests and citations for marijuana sales and possession.
In 1977, New York made the possession of small amounts of marijuana a violation, not a crime, as long as it was kept out of public view. But over the decades, police have found reason to charge blacks and Hispanics with misdemeanor possession counts more often than whites. The New York Civil Liberties Union in 2013 released a study showing that black people involved in routine traffic stops are far more likely to be charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession than white people.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo this year proposed completely decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana even if a user brought it into public view. But he still wants sellers charged and did not propose legalization.
While NY Grows sees merit in the pending legalization bill, the proposal has little chance of becoming law, at least in this legislative session. Even if the Assembly bill, sponsored by Buffalo Democrat Crystal Peoples-Stokes, makes it through the Democratic-controlled chamber, there is a slim chance of passage in the State Senate. The main sponsor there is Manhattan Democrat Liz Krueger. But the Senate is controlled by Republicans and a small group of breakaway Democrats – Krueger not among them. Her bill fizzled last year, too.
Senate Republicans in 2014 went along with a proposal to legalize medical marijuana, agreeing that it's a humane way to treat certain patients and will raise money for the state. That gives today's legalization advocates a glimmer of hope. But it's also a development they hope to leverage by arguing that legalizing recreational marijuana could help with the opiate epidemic, just as medical marijuana appears to do.
A study published in the American Journal of Public Health reported that fewer people use opiates in states with medical marijuana laws. Researchers examined data from almost 70,000 people killed in car accidents during a 14-year span – which ended before New York allowed medical marijuana – and found that fewer victims tested positive for opiates in medical marijuana states. The researchers were examining the likelihood that patients would turn to marijuana rather than opiates if allowed, not whether opiates were factors in fatal crashes.
Erie County Health Commissioner Dr. Gale R. Burstein is one of the county officials on the front lines of the opiate crisis. When the legalization bill came up in 2015, she expressed her worries about marijuana's harmful effects on the health and development of adolescents. "Research has shown that any policy that leads to increased marijuana use by adults, such as legalization, leads to increased access for adolescents, despite age restrictions," she said at the time.
On Monday, Burstein continued to express concerns about legalizing marijuana, despite the study. Its authors, she noted, stated that their observations remain preliminary. And she said opiates and medical marijuana are not the only treatments for chronic pain.
“Other options exist," Burstein said, "such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication, Tylenol, some seizure medications, physical therapy, acupuncture, and behavioral counseling." She said an adverse consequence of medical marijuana is the legalization of marijuana for recreational purposes.Johnita P. Due is assistant general counsel for CNN. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
(CNN) I will always remember when things turned. I was 12 years old, and my younger sister and I were with our parents attending a peaceful demonstration in downtown Miami near the courthouse. We were there to protest the acquittal of four police officers in the beating death of unarmed motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie. I had learned the word "acquittal" just that day. It meant they wouldn't be held responsible.
Community leaders were gathered at the front, speaking to a crowd that was in shock and full of anger and despair. The trial had been covered extensively, and nobody could believe that the fatal beating -- with the extent of the physical wounds to McDuffie's head and body -- could be justified or excused. I started to hear rumblings coming from around the perimeter of the immediate crowd. There was shouting and cursing. Bottle throwing. Then a car was turned over and set on fire. That was Miami 35 years ago, but it could just as easily have been Baltimore this week.
The Miami riots of 1980 were the first major "race riots" since the wave of riots spread across the nation in the 1960s.
Harlem 1964: Police shooting of 15-year-old James Powell. Watts 1965: Arrest of 21-year-old Marquette Frye for drunken driving. Newark 1967: Police beating of John Smith while under arrest. Detroit 1967: Police raid on a "blind pig" after-hours bar. Then the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and Baltimore and 125 other cities erupted in flames.
The immediate catalysts for the waves of riots in the 1960s before the death of Dr. King were police action, or, more specifically, perceived unjust police action
That was true in Miami in 1980 after the acquittal of the police officers. And the same in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of police officers for the beating of motorist Rodney King. Wednesday marks the 23rd anniversary of the start of the Los Angeles riots
And now we have Baltimore 2015, with the death of suspect Freddie Gray in police custody.
My parents were leaders and participants in the nonviolent civil rights movement, and they raised me to understand that youths were the key to the movement. It was the images of young people all over the country -- often facing physical danger, discipline from their parents and suspension from school -- that propelled the civil rights movement into the national spotlight.
Juxtapose decades-old images of youths being hosed down by police during nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham and Selma with Tuesday's images of Baltimore youths throwing rocks at police, and you wonder what has happened.
A child's questions
As a 12-year-old girl in Miami, I didn't understand how people could injure and even kill others and destroy their neighborhoods, and risk going to jail, by rioting. I was afraid because I didn't see my father for days as he and other community leaders walked the streets to try to restore calm. I was also afraid that such senseless violence could only derail the legitimate causes of the African-American community, causes historically advanced by nonviolent civil disobedience and through legislative channels.
But two months ago, I agreed to moderate a panel at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights called "Riot -- The Voice of the Unheard?" The occasion was to mark the Atlanta premiere of "Detroit '67," a play written by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Kamilah Forbes that chronicled the journey of a family as they lived through the turmoil of the Detroit '67 riot, including the joy and love they found with one another.
The play and the panel were programmed by Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre Company, a nonprofit devoted to presenting artistic interpretations with diverse voices so that individuals and institutions can have a shared platform in their quest for understanding in American society. Inspired by the mission, I had recently joined the board. Although pegged to the past, the purpose of the panel was to examine how current events relating to police actions against African-American men could potentially lead to rioting and what could be done to prevent it.
I learned that some questioned whether riots are actually purposeless and uncontrolled violence, or whether they are purposeful uprisings against individuals and institutions.
I learned that those who participate in riots often feel hopeless and dehumanized, both as the victims of police action against them that triggered the riots and as perpetrators of violence during riots.
I learned that riots in the 1960s played a role in advancing the civil rights agenda, often by galvanizing local and national government officials to work with peaceful community, church and civil rights leaders to address the root causes of riots. This is a controversial part of our civil rights history that has been sanitized.
'It is a time for action'
At the conclusion of the 1967 Detroit riot, President Lyndon Johnson condemned the violence but said in his address to the nation that: "This is not a time for angry reaction. It is a time for action, starting with legislative action to improve the life in our cities. The strength and promise of the law are the surest remedies for tragedy in the street...."
His administration convened the Kerner Commission to examine the 1965-68 riots, and its findings were that racism had led to joblessness, poverty, a lack of political power, unfair housing, police brutality and inferior schools.
After the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, the Christopher Commission was established and concluded that racial profiling and excessive force, unjust treatment in the criminal justice system, poor housing, and the lack of jobs and education were triggers for the riots.
After all of these riots, the affected city, state and national governments enacted plans and programs to address some of these underlying conditions.
Maybe the Baltimore youths involved in the riots felt the way one youth did in Watts in 1965. As recounted in "The Great Rebellion" by Kenneth Stahl, Dr. King went to Watts to try to calm tensions, and a hostile youth said to him: "We won."
King challenged him: "How have you won? Homes are destroyed, blacks are dead in the streets, stores you shop from for food and clothes are destroyed."
The young man replied, "We won because we made the whole world pay attention... the police chief and mayor had never been here. We made them come."
'The language of the unheard'
Dr. King would say near the end of his life: "It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard."
When I learned that Baltimore high school students planned a purge based on the movie "The Purge," in which people were legally absolved for their anarchistic crimes, it suddenly made sense. They thought they wouldn't be held responsible for their crimes. They thought they would be absolved -- a word not much different from the word "acquitted" I learned the day of the Miami riots. But they got it wrong.
They will forever live the repercussions of their actions, regardless of the impetus.
Photos: Baltimore protests Photos: Baltimore protests People hold hands during a rally at Baltimore City Hall on Sunday, May 3. The death of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody, sparked rioting in Baltimore and protests across the country Hide Caption 1 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Members of the National Guard board a truck at an armory staging area on May 3 in Baltimore. After a night of relatively peaceful protests, the city lifted a curfew, the National Guard is preparing its exit and a mall that had been a flashpoint in the protests has been reopened. Hide Caption 2 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Medics take a man away after police pepper-sprayed him on Saturday, May 2, in Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested in April. Hide Caption 3 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police detain a man on May 2 in Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood. Hide Caption 4 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters hold signs on May 2 in the Sandtown neighborhood. Hide Caption 5 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters march from the Gilmor Homes housing community, where Freddie Gray was arrested, to City Hall on Saturday, May 2, in Baltimore. Hide Caption 6 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police in riot gear enforce a 10 p.m. curfew and clear Baltimore streets of protesters and media on Friday, May 1. Hide Caption 7 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, helps clear Baltimore streets of protesters on May 1. Hide Caption 8 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Demonstrators celebrate the announcement that six officers were charged May 1 in Gray's death. Hide Caption 9 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Demonstrators march through the streets of Baltimore after the charges against the officers were announced May 1. Hide Caption 10 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police on horseback block a Baltimore street on May 1. Hide Caption 11 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A demonstrator celebrates in Baltimore the charges were announced on May 1. Hide Caption 12 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A member of the National Guard stands outside Baltimore City Hall as protesters gather on Wednesday, April 29. Hide Caption 13 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests High school and college students march from Baltimore's Penn Station to City Hall on April 29. Hide Caption 14 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A community organizer later identified as Joseph Kent paces in front of riot police with his hands up during a curfew in Baltimore on Tuesday, April 28. Moments later, he was seen being arrested by police live on CNN. Kent's lawyer said on April 30 that his client had been released from jail. While some protesters defied the curfew and faced off with police, demonstrations Tuesday were largely peaceful. Hide Caption 15 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests State Sen. Catherine E. Pugh embraces a protester while urging the crowd to disperse ahead of the 10 p.m. curfew. Hide Caption 16 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests People attempt to stop protesters from approaching a police line on April 28. Hide Caption 17 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A Baltimore police captain tries to calm a protester on April 28. Hide Caption 18 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Two women sweep up the streets in Baltimore -- reflected in the broken window of a storefront on April 28. See more photos of the cleanup efforts. Hide Caption 19 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A band plays music during protests on April 28 in Baltimore. Hide Caption 20 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A boy in Baltimore offers water to a police officer on April 28. Hide Caption 21 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Jerrie Mckenny, left, and her sister Tia Sexton embrace as demonstrators hold hands and sing the hymn "Amazing Grace" in Baltimore on April 28. Hide Caption 22 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Demonstrators stand in front of a police line and call for peace after a bottle was thrown on April 28. Hide Caption 23 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Maryland National Guardsmen patrol the streets on April 28. Hide Caption 24 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests The remains of a senior center smolder on April 28. Riots broke out Monday, April 27, after Freddie Gray's funeral Hide Caption 25 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police retreat from burned-out cars in an intersection on Monday, April 27. Hide Caption 26 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Firefighters respond to a burning building during the riots late April 27. Hide Caption 27 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police officer walks by a burning building on April 27. Hide Caption 28 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police stand guard on April 27. Hide Caption 29 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters climb on a destroyed Baltimore Police car in the street near the corner of Pennsylvania and North avenues on April 27. Hide Caption 30 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A mixture of milk and water rolls down a man's chest after he was pepper sprayed by the Baltimore Police April 27. Hide Caption 31 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A man rides a bicycle through heavy smoke emitting from a nearby store on fire April 27. Hide Caption 32 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A man shouts for calm as protesters clash with police April 27. Hide Caption 33 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police carry an injured officer from the streets near Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore on April 27. Hide Caption 34 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests People carrying goods leave a CVS pharmacy near Pennsylvania and North avenues on April 27. Hide Caption 35 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A demonstrator raises his fist as police stand in formation on April 27. Hide Caption 36 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Armored cars drive down Pennsylvania Avenue as looters break into shops on April 27. Hide Caption 37 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests People lock arms and form a line opposing police at the corner of Pennsylvania and North avenues on April 27. Hide Caption 38 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police form a barrier between protesters and a burning CVS being attended to by firefighters on April 27. Hide Caption 39 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests People carry goods out of a CVS pharmacy on April 27. Hide Caption 40 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police vehicle burns April 27. Hide Caption 41 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police officer throws an object at protesters on April 27. Hide Caption 42 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A man carries items from a store as police vehicles burn on April 27. Hide Caption 43 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police officer checks on a man who was injured on April 27. Hide Caption 44 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police officer is carried to safety after being hit in the head with a rock during the riot on April 27. Hide Caption 45 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police officer uses pepper spray on rioters on April 27. Hide Caption 46 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police officers push back a protester on April 27. Hide Caption 47 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police react during the riot on April 27. Hide Caption 48 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Baltimore police officers in riot gear look toward protesters near Mondawmin Mall on April 27. Hide Caption 49 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts chases away protesters in a parking lot on April 27. Hide Caption 50 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A woman abandons her car in the middle of an intersection as Baltimore Police officers clash with protesters outside the Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore on April 27. Hide Caption 51 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Police handle the protesters during a riot on April 27. Hide Caption 52 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A demonstrator taunts police on April 27. Hide Caption 53 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters stand off with police during a march in honor of Gray in Baltimore on Saturday, April 25. Hide Caption 54 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A protester throws a barricade at a bar near Oriole Park at Camden Yards after a rally on April 25. Hide Caption 55 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters chase after a car as it drives in reverse after the rally on April 25. Hide Caption 56 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A protester breaks a store window after the rally in Baltimore on April 25. Hide Caption 57 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters get into a shoving match with police during a march downtown on April 25. Hide Caption 58 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters and police square off April 25. Hide Caption 59 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Protesters drive through the Camden Yards area on April 25. Hide Caption 60 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Members of the Baltimore Police Department stand guard Thursday, April 23, outside the department's Western District station during a protest. Hide Caption 61 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A police officer films protesters from the steps of the Western District station on April 23. Hide Caption 62 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Empowerment Temple Pastor Jamal Harrison Bryant speaks in front of City Hall in Baltimore on April 23. Hide Caption 63 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Demonstrators put their fists in the air during a protest outside the Baltimore police's Western District station on Wednesday, April 22. Hide Caption 64 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Hundreds of demonstrators march toward the Western District station on April 22. Hide Caption 65 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests People march through the streets of Baltimore on April 22. Hide Caption 66 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests Demonstrators argue with Baltimore officers during the protest on April 22. Hide Caption 67 of 68 Photos: Baltimore protests A woman is comforted during the protest on April 22. Hide Caption 68 of 68
But the Rev. Jamal Bryant got it right when he said he would open his Empowerment Temple AME Church in Baltimore to youths who would not be in school so he could teach them the power of nonviolence to change society.
That power was evident after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the decision not to indict the officer who killed him. Those protests were mostly peaceful. And the government responded -- not out of fear of violence, but because of a desire to change the conditions that led to the protests.
After several months of investigation, the far-reaching Justice Department report on Ferguson issued in March concluded that the use of policing to raise revenue, combined with a systemic racial bias, had led to a pattern and practice of discrimination and Fourth, 14th, Sixth and First Amendment rights violations against African-Americans in Ferguson. The report made recommendations that the Ferguson Police Department, as well as other departments across the country, should enact to improve police relations in communities of color.
The riots in Baltimore have rightfully been quashed, but the voices of nonviolent protesters continue to be heard.Rek'Sai
- by dignitas/Azingy (May 2015, Patch 5.8)
We're back with new competitive champion guides from our pro players, This time we’ve got an in-depth look at Rek'Sai by
the jungler from our NA team, Azingy.
Special thanks to Robert 'Roscoe' Wery for
his help writing this guide together with Azingy. Related links:
Twitch.tv/lolazingy - @lolAzingy - Profile Page
INTRODUCTION
Rek'Sai had a place in the meta long before the introduction of Cinderhulk, but now she's here to stay. As a tanky jungler with a kit made for natural dps, she can easily act as a frontline while dealing enough damage to be considered a threat. Andrew 'Azingy' Zamarripa has brought her out in solo queue and competitive play on numerous occasions, and here's how he plays her.
Why you should play Rek'Sai - Rek'Sai has incredible mobility. She excels at early ganks when she hits her level three power spike and even without a damage ult, has a high damage combo. With the low cooldown on her Q and potential true damage from her E, Rek'Sai is able to deal out a considerable amount of damage per second.
Why you shouldn't play Rek'Sai - She's a very well rounded champion, she doesn't have many weaknesses, that's why she's top tier. Perhaps if Gragas or Sejuani is open you can pick Rek instead, but I can't think of too many reasons why you wouldn't want to jungle with this champion.
RUNES
Grab nine Greater Marks of Attack Damage, a combination of Greater Glyphs of Magic Resist and Greater Glyphs of Cooldown Reduction, nine Greater Seals of Armor and three Greater Quintessences of Attack Speed.
If you run Attack Speed reds and Attack Damage Quints, it's an inefficient setup, you actually get less AD out of it and not enough Attack Speed to make up for it. In your Seals, the problem with running health is that from level one to five you won't be able to sustain against the jungle camps. Nine armor is going to be around 8% less incoming physical damage, so it's better to grab Armor to make it through the early game.
You can do a lot with blues, you can have 5% CDR, 2.5% CDR but I haven't seen 7.5% CDR, you never really go all CDR blues. In weird scenarios where the other team has an all AD comp, you could maybe go with all CDR, but if there's any some magic damage you should go with a portion of MR.
MASTERIES
The general rule for bruiser junglers is that you don't go 21 in defense because having 21 in offense helps with your early ganks and you might actually take less damage from the jungle because you have a faster clear. You could experiment with it, especially with the popularity of Cinderhulk, but the first choice is 21/9/0.
We go offensive here because we want the level three gank to be successful. Whether tanky or strong, you have the CC knockup, it's a matter of following through with enough damage to secure that first blood. And then with Cinderhulk you have enough tank, so you don't need to over-invest.
SUMMONER SPELLS - Smite and Flash
These spells are about the only setup you'd run. If you were playing something like jungle Master Yi, you might go TP/Smite, but this is a Rek'Sai guide, get out of here Master Yi players. Rek'Sai's knockup engage is a great way to start a fight for your team, and Flashing in to catch your opponent by surprise is going to set your team up for a much stronger engage.
SKILL ORDER
You want to max your abilities Q>E>W, but make sure you get Burrow second, after Q. The extra damage from her E is nice, but the passive healing between camps, the knockup and extra Q ability offer too much to pass up in early jungle clears. This order is pretty standard because your easiest damage comes from the use of your Q, then E, and we only need one point in W for the burrow/unborrow.
ITEM BUILD
A standard jungler's start. Getting anything else will make it nearly impossible to take off when you need to.
I try to make a gank happen level three. A successful first blood will allow you to pick up that early Bami's Cinder, but a forcing a Flash is the next best thing. With the Cinder, your level five power spike is going to put you ahead of any counter-jungler. You'll clear quickly and be able to 1v1 if you invade or they do.
Throughout the rest of the game these are the items you should grab. After completing Cinderhulk, first you'll need to choose between Locket of the Iron Solari and Randiun's Omen. You'll get both, but the order depends on what you need to defend against most. After that you can go Warmog's Armor or Thornmail, but I don't buy Thornmail often, they need a lot of Attack Damage for it to be worth it.
If they've invested more in magic damage a Spirit Visage or Banshee's Veil are solid pickups. I personally go Banshee's a little more often, but the 10% CDR from Visage might make it better for you, depending on how many Runes you have in MR and CDR. Then of course boots whenever you can or is appropriate, and Merc Treads or Ninja Tabi depending on the incoming damage, but I tend towards Merc Treads more often.
These items, like I mentioned for Spirit Visage and Thornmail, are situational. When it comes to Maw of Malmortius, it's not a bad buy if you're looking to snowball a little harder. Hexdrinker after an early kill or two helps you get rolling even faster, the finished item fits Rek'Sai well. It's not a must buy, but if you happen to have around 1450 gold in a choice between the three magic resist items, feel free.
MATCHUPS/PATHING
Gragas is another really strong jungler right now. Level three, I think he could effectively duel you, but it comes down to each champion's health. It's a close matchup, so the more mechanically skilled fighter will likely come out on top. Lee Sin may not see a ton of play right now, but there is a trick if you're up against him. If he follows through with his Q on your or an ally, you can unburrow while he's midair to cut off a ton of his damage.
Beyond that, Rek'Sai is a pretty well-rounded champion and isn't directly countered by anyone else.
In terms of pathing through the jungle, I most consistently start Krugs, move to Raptors, take Red, then look for a gank depending on what side of the map I'm on. Another path that I've taken before is Gromp, Wolves then Red, but that requires a little more experimentation.
CONCLUSION
Rek'Sai is a champion that I consider to be top tier. She was pretty good before, but now with Cinderhulk, she's right at home in this world of tanks. On top of being able to soak up a ton of damage, by being in a fight her AOE damage from Q and Cinderhulk will eventually become too much for your targets to handle, forcing their team to peel for you.@Background Pony Number 17
Gravity was discovered ever since man first gained sapience. The fall of a rock, the plummet of a bird killed, or the produce which falls from fruit trees when the fruit is ripe for harvesting. However, we lacked the scientific terminology and mathematical equations to explain how gravity works other than simply saying that, ’it just does.’
Even many years after Newton and his explanation of gravity, man still seeks to further understand the minute details of how gravity works, hence their quest to prove/disprove the theory of the graviton particle/wave.
Before Newton, people relied on Aristotle’s explanation of how gravity worked. According to Aristotle, rocks fell but smoke rose because they were seeking their own "level" in the order of the world—solid matter being the lowest, then water, then air, then fire, and finally the quintessential stuff the heavenly bodies were made of. Gravity did not affect the Sun and Moon because thy were made of "heavenly stuff" and thus were up in the heavens where they belonged. It was Newton’s brilliant insight that heavenly and earthly bodies were made of the same "stuff" and were affected in the same way, and that allowed him to discover the law of universal gravitation.Being the setting of a show for little kids, Equestria operates on a small child’s understanding of how the Universe works. Geocentrism and Aristotalian physics are the order of the day here.Father of IS fighter jailed one of three men convicted over Iraqi Government bribery
Posted
Three Sydney men including the father of an IS fighter have been jailed for bribing an Iraqi official to get overseas construction contracts.
Between 2014 and 2015, Mamdouh Elomar, his brother Ibrahim Elomar, 61, and businessman John Jousif, 48, plotted to pay the Iraqi Minister for Industry and Minerals $US1 million ($1.27 million) to try to win contracts for major projects.
The trio were each jailed for four years, with a non-parole period of two years.
The men were charged after their phone calls and emails were intercepted.
Mamdouh Elomar, 63, is the father of Mohamed Elomar, who was killed in Iraq fighting for IS — but there is no suggestion the charges are linked to his son's association with the terrorist organisation.
In the NSW Supreme Court, Justice Christine Adamson said the men engaged in a conspiracy and knew what they were doing.
She said after Mamdouh and Ibrahim Elomar's company Lifese Pty Ltd had a downturn in business, they were receptive when Jousif approached them about securing business in Iraq.
She said the Elomars financed the bribe and that Jousif transferred the money.
The judge said the three men gave "deliberate and strategic thought" to how to transfer the money so it would not be detected by Australian authorities.
The court heard Jousif said to the Elomars: "There is no risk, honest to God."
'They were seasoned, successful businessmen'
Justice Adamson said the brothers acted out of greed and, although they were manipulated, they were not coerced.
"They were seasoned, successful businessmen," the judge said.
Justice Adamson said bribery of government officials could never be excused, and although the men all pleaded guilty, that did not mean they were remorseful.
One of the projects in question was a waste management facility in Baghdad worth $571 million.
Justice Adamson said Ibrahim Elomar, who has seven children, had no prior criminal record and had been a successful businessman with a good reputation in the community.
The court heard Jousif had good prospects of rehabilitation.
The Elomar brothers have also each been fined $250,000.
The three men sat together in the dock with an interpreter and showed no emotion during the judgment.
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, courts-and-trials, corruption, bribery, sydney-2000Ascendant Ascendant Strength and Intelligence +20 to Strength and Intelligence Passive Point Templar Ascendancy (Choose one of the three attached options) Passive Point Path of the Templar Can Allocate Passives from the Templar's starting point Inquisitor +30% to Critical Strike Multiplier against Enemies that are affected by Elemental Ailments Damage Penetrates 6% of Enemy Elemental Resistances 10% chance to create Consecrated Ground when you Hit a Rare or Unique Enemy, lasting 8 seconds Immune to Elemental Ailments while on Consecrated Ground Nearby Enemies take 10% increased Elemental Damage (You can only take one of the three Templar Ascendancy passives) (Allies standing on Consecrated Ground Regenerate a percentage of their Maximum Life per second) (Elemental Ailments are Ignited, Scorched, Chilled, Frozen, Brittle, Shocked, and Sapped) Hierophant 25% increased maximum Mana +1 to maximum number of Summoned Totems 8% of Damage is taken from Mana before Life Gain Arcane Surge when you or your Totems Hit an Enemy with a Spell 20% increased Spell Damage while you have Arcane Surge (You can only take one of the three Templar Ascendancy passives) (Arcane Surge grants 10% more Spell Damage, 10% increased Cast Speed, and 0.5% of maximum Mana Regenerated per second, for 4 seconds) Guardian 25% reduced Effect of Curses on you Auras from your Skills grant +1% Physical Damage Reduction to you and Allies 10% increased effect of Non-Curse Auras from your Skills Every 5 seconds, 20% of Maximum Life Regenerated over one second You and Nearby Party Members Share Power, Frenzy and Endurance Charges with each other (You can only take one of the three Templar Ascendancy passives) Intelligence +40 to Intelligence Passive Point Witch Ascendancy (Choose one of the three attached options) Passive Point |
38.5 Notts County 5 January 1989 14 January 1993 7002209000000000000♠ 209 7001900000000000000♠ 90 7001490000000000000♠ 49 7001700000000000000♠ 70 0 7001431000000000000♠ 43.1 Torquay United 15 February 1993 2 June 1993 7001150000000000000♠ 15 7000500000000000000♠ 5 7000500000000000000♠ 5 7000500000000000000♠ 5 0 7001333009999900000♠ 33.3 Huddersfield Town 15 July 1993 5 June 1995 7002108000000000000♠ 108 7001440000000000000♠ 44 7001340000000000000♠ 34 7001300000000000000♠ 30 0 7001407000000000000♠ 40.7 Plymouth Argyle 22 June 1995 3 February 1997 7001880000000000000♠ 88 7001350000000000000♠ 35 7001240000000000000♠ 24 7001290000000000000♠ 29 0 7001398009999900000♠ 39.8 Oldham Athletic 21 February 1997 7 May 1998 7001690000000000000♠ 69 7001270000000000000♠ 27 7001220000000000000♠ 22 7001200000000000000♠ 20 0 7001391000000000000♠ 39.1 Bury 2 June 1998 2 December 1999 7001770000000000000♠ 77 7001190000000000000♠ 19 7001290000000000000♠ 29 7001290000000000000♠ 29 0 7001247000000000000♠ 24.7 Sheffield United 2 December 1999 15 May 2007 7002388000000000000♠ 388 7002165000000000000♠ 165 7002100000000000000♠ 100 7002123000000000000♠ 123 0 7001425000000000000♠ 42.5 Crystal Palace 11 October 2007 2 March 2010 7002129000000000000♠ 129 7001470000000000000♠ 47 7001390000000000000♠ 39 7001430000000000000♠ 43 0 7001364000000000000♠ 36.4 Queens Park Rangers 2 March 2010 8 January 2012 7001840000000000000♠ 84 7001330000000000000♠ 33 7001270000000000000♠ 27 7001240000000000000♠ 24 0 7001393009999900000♠ 39.3 Leeds United 18 February 2012 1 April 2013 7001630000000000000♠ 63 7001230000000000000♠ 23 7001150000000000000♠ 15 7001250000000000000♠ 25 0 7001365000000000000♠ 36.5 Crystal Palace 27 August 2014 27 December 2014 7001170000000000000♠ 17 7000300000000000000♠ 3 7000600000000000000♠ 6 7000800000000000000♠ 8 0 7001176000000000000♠ 17.6 Queens Park Rangers 5 November 2015 4 December 2015 7000400000000000000♠ 4 7000200000000000000♠ 2 7000100000000000000♠ 1 7000100000000000000♠ 1 0 7001500000000000000♠ 50.0 Rotherham United 11 February 2016 18 May 2016 7001160000000000000♠ 16 7000600000000000000♠ 6 7000600000000000000♠ 6 7000400000000000000♠ 4 0 7001375000000000000♠ 37.5 Cardiff City 5 October 2016 Present 7002117000000000000♠ 117 7001510000000000000♠ 51 7001230000000000000♠ 23 7001430000000000000♠ 43 0 7001436000000000000♠ 43.6 Total 7003145400000000000♠ 1,454 7002587000000000000♠ 587 7002403000000000000♠ 403 7002464000000000000♠ 464 0 7001404000000000000♠ 40.4Raytheon
You might assume that missile assembly is quite the precision job given the extra incentive to limit mistakes on the factory floor. But for decades, missile assembly hasn't changed much and errors are not uncommon.
Technicians move large components around on rolling carts and then attaching those parts with hand-held tools. This has sometimes led to mismatched parts getting connected, raising the risks for factory workers as well as for the shipmen who later handled the weapons at sea.
"Missiles have always been a heavily manually-intensive operation," said Randy Stevenson, the director of Raytheon Missile Systems' Weapon Integration Center. "There's lots of materials handling [and] loading onto fixtures to assemble. There's lifting, and moving by hands, for the most part. It hasn't always been the safest operation."
Raytheon
But in 2009, as Raytheon's Camden, Ark., facility edged closer to maxing out its production capacity, the giant military contractor set out to build a new assembly operation in Huntsville, Ala., home to the US Army's Redstone Arsenal, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and even Space Camp. It also gave the designers of the new plant an opportunity to take advantage of more efficient, high-technology already in use in other industries.
"If we were king for a day -- we were given a blank sheet of paper -- what would we do differently?" explained Stevenson. "What we've done here in Huntsville is the end result."
I had hoped to check out the Huntsville plant as part of my summer CNET Road Trip, but scheduling didn't work out. Instead, to get in the Road Trip frame of mind, I talked with plant executives by phone. It's not the same as a behind-the-scenes tour, but still a good chance to learn more about this high-tech missile factory.
The timing of the new plant is propitious. Even though the global missile production industry is dominated by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, foreign rivals are nipping at their heels. According to recent press reports, the China North Industries Corp. may surpass the Americans in missile production sometime within the next five years.
Raytheon says that it has built nearly 2 million missiles since the early 1950s and remains the biggest manufacturer in the world. Clearly, the technology-heavy Huntsville facility, which cost $75 million to build, ought to help Raytheon deal with the stepped-up competition from China. And if past is prologue, the early results offer an encouraging harbinger: Raytheon recently scored contracts worth $350 million for the SM-3, and $243 million for the SM-6, the two missiles being made in the Alabama plant.
SM-3 and SM-6
Raytheon is reluctant to talk about how many of its missiles it makes. In a telephone interview, Huntsville plant manager Angel Crespo said the company can turn out between four and six SM-3s (for Standard Missile-3) and 10 to 12 SM-6s each month.
Raytheon describes the SM-3 as "a defensive weapon used by the U.S. Navy to destroy short- to intermediate-range ballistic missile threats." Last month, the US Navy completed a successful test of an SM-3 to show that the weapon could be fired from both sea and land. The SM-6, Raytheon says, provides the Navy "defense against fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and land-attack anti-ship cruise missiles in flight, both over sea and land."
Raytheon
All told, Raytheon makes 20 different missiles for clients around the world.
According to Stevenson, the Huntsville plant has been able to grow that production capacity -- which is larger than what Raytheon could turn out in Camden, Ark. -- thanks to efficiencies at the new high-tech facility. Fourteen technicians and about 36 support staff can produce more missiles than the staff of 80 to 100 that worked in Camden, he said.
Perhaps the most important element in that boost in capacity is the suite of automated tools that limit the amount of manual lifting of ordnance-laden components. "One of the things you want to do with explosive components is minimize material handling of them," Stevenson said. "We wanted to get [manual push carts] out of our factories."
The aha moment came when Raytheon representatives saw automatic guided vehicles, or AVGs -- essentially autonomous rolling carts -- in car manufacturing plants. In Huntsville, Raytheon has three of them, and may add more if production ramps up. But these are expensive, even by normal AVG standards. While the auto industry's AVGs run about $150,000 to $250,000, Stevenson said Raytheon's cost the company $700,000 apiece.
The extra cost is due to the vehicles being specially outfitted to move missile components around with no human intervention. They're Wi-Fi enabled and aware at all times of their location in the facility via an active laser system that constantly scans 360 degrees for light targets mounted on the walls. Thanks to a map of the factory loaded in the AVGs' memory, they drive themselves to precisely where their payload is needed.
When a new work order is begun, Crespo said, an AVG rolls automatically into the "kitting room" to pick up the "kit" -- the proper set of components for the job -- and then heads for the designated work station. This is big progress in the missile industry, Crespo suggested. Because that process is automated, there are no cases where an employee accidentally sends the kit to the wrong technician, an occasional problem in Raytheon's 10 other factories in three locations around the US.
Manufacturing Innovation and Intelligence
Another newcomer to Raytheon's missile production regimen is a graphical software interface deployed on the Huntsville factory floor. Known as the Manufacturing Innovation and Intelligence (MMI) system, it is meant to guide operators and technicians through their workdays -- making certain the steps they're taking and the components they're working with are exactly what's intended. Because the assembly process is highly regimented, with every component and fastener having a specific place to go, it's essential that things be done the right way.
In the past, Crespo explained, though each step was documented as it was performed, mistakes were sometimes made thanks to typing errors, or mistakes in documenting a step. A very big part of the job of making a missile is connecting thousands of individual fasteners, each of which calls for the application of a prescribed amount of torque. Now, every single component and fastener has a bar code that must be scanned, and the MMI makes sure that workers are unable to proceed if they have the wrong parts. "A serial number gets automatically entered into the system," Crespo said. "No keystrokes, so no chance for wrong keystrokes to be entered."
Raytheon
At the same time, Raytheon is now using automatic torque controllers that feed information to automated screwdrivers about how much torque an individual fastener requires. "If for some reason, an operator...didn't [use] the screwdriver properly," Crespo said, he or she gets "an alert saying you did not torque that one right. You have to do it" again.
If they try to ignore the alert, the MMI system won't let them move on to the next step.
Ultimately, the MMI system is meant to record every step that goes into the assembly of a missile, generating an archived "pedigree" available to both Raytheon and military auditors. The system tracks who worked on a missile, when they did it, and which tools they used. "If it needed 148 fasteners," Stevenson said, "it can tell you every fastener installed, and the torque factors."
Final assembly
Before a missile is a missile, all of its components need to be put together in just the right way. After all those pieces -- guidance systems, propulsion, fins, control surfaces, and others are fit together -- technicians take them to a safe, controlled area for testing. This is the only time that the weapons get operated while still in Raytheon's hands. Assuming that all its systems function properly, the missile then gets returned to the factory floor for one final step: putting it inside its cannister.
According to Stevenson, the cannister is considered as much a part of the weapon system as the rest of the missile. Meant to be physically connected to the Navy's ship, they're provided to Raytheon by the Navy. The job at this point is to assure the missile is "mission ready" and then seal it inside the cannister. The moment that's done, the weapon is complete. Known formally as an All-Up Round, or AUR, this is Raytheon's final product.
But missiles often spend years outside the factory without being fired, and many of their components have a shelf life. That means that after 3-to-5 years, the factory will get back some of the AURs, which will be disassembled, their parts taken out and tested again, or replaced in the case of some time-sensitive components, and then re-assembled.
Thanks to the implementation of all the factory's technology, this process has been improved as much as original assembly. It might seem odd that missiles are returned and taken apart, but that's the game. "At any given time," Stevenson said, "you would see product going in both directions."
Keep an eye out for more behind-the-scenes stories and photo galleries as I travel throughout Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kansas during this year's Road Trip. I'll seek out most interesting technology, military, aviation, architecture, and other destinations our country has to offer. From US Air Force basic training to NASA's Johnson Space Center and FedEx's massive package-sorting hub, Road Trip 2014 will take you along with me.Spider, He Is Our Hero
October 22nd, 2009, 12:49 am
Average Rating: 4.33
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Trev's TwitterWhat happens when Dragon Ball Z meets Dragon Ball Z? The most incredible event in Dragon Ball Z history!!
On Saturday, May 25, at the Animazement convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, Dragon Ball Z voice actors from Japan were on stage with Dragon Ball Z voice actors from the United States, for an over one hour long discussion with fans about the world’s greatest series.
The Japanese guests included Masako Nozawa (Goku, Gohan, Goten, Bardock, Tullece), Toshio Furukawa (Piccolo), Ryusei Nakao (Freeza), and Yuko Minaguchi (Videl, Pan).
The American guests included Sean Schemmel (Goku, North Kaio), Kara Edwards (Videl, Goten), and Kyle Hebert (Teen Gohan, the Narrator, Ox-King, West Kaio).
This was the largest event at the convention, and I estimate there were over 1,000 people in attendance. Fans lined up for hours in advance to get a seat.
The result was unreal! I was there in the front row in order to take photographs, record it, and be sure that I could share it with you today.
This is also the largest post I’ve ever done and required a huge amount of work, so if you couldn’t make it in person, this is the next best thing.
Enjoy!
The World’s Strongest Assemble
Here is the event from another angle:
Emcee: Some of the greats of Dragon Ball Z, all in one room.
Audience: *Applause* Woooooh!
Emcee: This is a groundbreaking event and I can’t think of any other con that has done this yet.
Audience: Nope! *Applause* Yeah, Raleigh!
Emcee: So without further ado I’d like to turn it over to our guests. I believe they’d like to introduce themselves, say a few words, and then we’ll begin. So [to begin], Kyle?
Kyle Hebert: Heeyyy, I’m Kyle Hebert. How’s it going, guys?
Audience: Kyle! *Applause*
Kyle Hebert: 13 years ago, this summer is when I first landed an audition on this little show called Dragon Ball Z. And then I was hired to be teenage Gohan, the Great Saiyaman! And the Narrator, [In the Narrator’s Voice] “Next time on Dragon Ball Z!” And Chi-Chi’s dad, Ox-King. [In the Ox-King’s voice] “Oh, boy, Gohan’s here, hehehe.” [In Paikon’s voice] “And Paikon,” [In West Kai’s voice] “and West Kai too.”
I can’t believe I’m so lucky to be up here on this stage with this amazing gathering here, with the seiyuu, and some of my American compadre’s here. We are so blessed, this is amazing, and thank you for coming today.
Yuko Minaguchi: [In English] Hello everyone. My name is Yuko Minaguchi. My character is Videl and Pan. Let’s all have fun!
Kara Edwards: Hello everyone. My name is Kara Edwards, and you know me as the voice of Videl as well. Hehe. And also Son Goten. I have to say that I am so overwhelmed. First at just how many of you showed up, and it makes me so happy because I have been out of my mind excited about this. I have waited 13 years to meet these people. I deeply wanted everybody to understand what a big, big deal this is, and it looks like you guys totally get it, and I’m so excited by that. It’s an honor to be here, I’ve cried twice already. Thank you for having us here. Thank you.
Toshio Furukawa: [In English] Hello, everyone! I’m Toshio Furukawa from Japan. I am a voice actor for motion picture and drama, and character voice over animation and games. I’ve played a variety of characters, like comedians such as Ataru Moroboshi from Urusei Yatsura, and Shin from Fist of the North Star, Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z, and Portgas D. Ace from One Piece. I am so glad to join this event at Animazement. I expect to have a very good time with you.
Masako Nozawa: [In Goku’s voice] “Ossu! Ora Goku!” [Hi! I’m Goku!] Let’s shoot Kamehameha, all together!
Audience: Wooh! *Applause*
Sean Schemmel: Oh! Hehe. Sorry, I Goku’d out there for a minute. My name is Sean Schemmel, ah, I… I can’t introduce myself now. I’m normally a very talkative person and I’m having trouble making sentences right now. We are sitting in history making, right now, be aware of that. Also there was a full moon last night and none of us turned into monkeys. I just want to say how thrilled I am. Oh by the way I play Goku on the American version of Dragon Ball Z. I’m beside myself, I’m thrilled to be here, and I want to turn it over to Freeza. Kamehame-hi!
Oh, and at the end of this we’re going to beat the crap out of him.
Ryusei Nakao: [In Freeza’s Voice] Hm hm hm hm. Hello earth people, [In English] my name is Freeeeeza!
I am Ryusei Nakao, I play Freeza on Dragon Ball. We have wonderful guests today and a wonderful audience, so we are looking forward to having a very wonderful panel.
Emcee: Without further ado we will open it up to questions from the audience. Somebody raise your hand, I know you’ve got questions. This is never going to happen again, probably.
Questions for the Ultimate Warriors
Question (from me): This question is for Sean and Masako. Sean, how does it feel to be sitting next to Masako Nozawa? And Masako, how does it feel to be sitting next to Sean?
Sean Schemmel: I will defer to Masako first. Ladies first.
Masako Nozawa: … eh? [The translator explains the question to her again, but Masako looks very confused.]
Kyle Hebert: [In Narrator’s voice] Goku is beside himself.
Masako Nozawa: I thought he was Goku.
Sean Schemmel: [In Goku’s voice] “I’m confused.”
… Is there more? I didn’t want to interrupt. Is that okay?
Masako Nozawa: No, I’m done.
Sean Schemmel: Haha. Umm, I’m having a hard time not crying.
Audience: Awwww. [Followed by,] Man up, Goku! *laughter*
Sean Schemmel: So I was telling, uh, Freeza, at lunch, that we as cast members have been working on the show for 13 years and exchanging energy [across the oceans], and now we’re all in the same room. It doesn’t get better than this. Career number one highlight. And I, I don’t have, I can’t talk right now.
Audience: *Applause*
Question: Alright, so I have 7 dragon balls. [He holds a case of all seven dragon balls.] What is your wish?
Kyle Hebert: More Dragon Ball Z. [Audience: Yeaaagh!] More Dragon Ball Z. More, more shows, we want ‘em, bring it back.
Yuko Minaguchi: I think so too, hehe. I like Dragon Ball. I hope it continues forever.
Kara Edwards: I can’t think of anything else I would wish for. For us this is such a big event, Kyle, Sean, and I, we’ve been texting eachother and emailing eachother for months, just so excited. All three of our characters, it’s just so incredible. In life you want to think that your work matters, and when you sit here you realize how much it matters, and how honored we are to be a part of this. So yeah, my wish has already been granted.
Toshio Furukawa: Portgas D. Ace, alive again. And I’d like to return to my mother’s body [referring to Yuko].
Yuko Minaguchi: I am Rouge, his mother [in One Piece].
Masako Nozawa:
I’d like to join Goku and walk the earth, and make friends with everyone.
Audience: Yeagh!!
Sean Schemmel: And now I’ve got to follow that? Hehe. ‘Cause my first thought was, “I hope we get to dub the Battle of the Gods movie.”
Audience: Yeaaaaggghh!!! *Applause*
Sean Schemmel: That would be my wish at this point. I haven’t heard anything about it yet, so we’ll see what happens. Dragon Ball Z is the gift that keeps on giving.
Everything in my life I owe to Akira Toriyama-sama. Everything I’ve done since then, it’s changed my life in ways I haven’t articulated to you yet, so really, more of that. Dragon Ball Z forever, that’s all I can say. More Dragon Ball.
Ryusei Nakao: When I get all seven dragon balls, I will make my wish and turn Freeza into a good guy, and not be a villain.
Masako Nozawa: Haha.
Sean Schemmel: Then we’d have nobody to fight!
Question: What is your favorite episode of Dragon Ball?
Kyle Hebert: I guess I’m first. I don’t remember the episode number or episode title. But after my version of Gohan was introduced, and he’s kind of a dork, all that stuff, there’s a moment in the tournament arena where “things get real,” and then he goes “beyond a Super Saiyan,” and his eyes roll back in his head, he yells and screams, and the tournament tiles start levitating. It was the first time he screamed and frightens everybody and I’m like, “That’s cool!” Then he goes back to being a nerd.
Yuko Minaguchi: My favorite is the one we just did – new movie! Hehe.
Kara Edwards: This is so funny because we were seriously just talking about this during lunch. I think my favorite episode is when Videl learns to fly. First of all because I played both Videl and Goten, which is so much fun to do, back and forth between the two of them. But also because it’s the first episode I can think of that is so subtle and quiet, not the pounding music through the whole thing. It’s also a lot about culture, developing your Qi, your energy, and we seriously just had this conversation. I love that episode, it’s one that I love to watch again.
Toshio Furukawa: [In English] Where Piccolo trains Gohan.
Masako Nozawa: There are many favorite Goku episodes, but if I were to choose one, it’s the story where Gohan is being trained by Piccolo. It seems like Piccolo is always, always mean, and picking on Gohan, but that’s not the case. There is one time where Gohan was really famished, and he finds that there is one single apple left, and that is Piccolo leaving that apple for Gohan. And so you can see that Piccolo is a good man at heart.
Sean Schemmel: Piccolo actually happens to be my favorite character on the show. People always assume… I love playing Goku, but as far as a viewer of Dragon Ball Z I’ve always loved the Piccolo character, he’s just so cool. But as far as my favorite scenes are, again, how do I follow that? Hehe, I’m trying to think of a good analogy but can’t think of one. I love the Goku, Gohan, hanging around in Super Saiyan, father-son moments, that whole story arc there where they just stayed together as Super Saiyan all the time, not fighting. I love those scenes because Goku is gone all the time.
My words somehow feel way more important because everyone is translating right behind me, I feel like I’m on the UN [United Nations], like I’m really important, even though I’m not, haha. “Wow, people are translating for me all the time, so cool!” So those are my favorite moments.
Ryusei Nakao: It’s hard to pick my favorite episode, as Freeza is a villain and all of his episodes are villainous appearances. But as far as recording, Mako picked on me saying, “You really are a bastard!” So I was always sad during the recording. When it comes to memories of Dragon Ball, those are all my sad memories. [Ryusei says this in a tongue-in-cheek manner]
[“Mako” is the nickname of Masako. Nobody knew this until Ryusei started calling her Mako at this convention.]
Question: Thank you for being here. I grew up watching Dragon Ball Z as a kid. What was it like to go back and voice the Dragon Ball Z characters again in the video games, TV specials, and the movie?
Kyle Hebert: The first time we went through and were dubbing Dragon Ball Z and it came to an end, episode 291, it was like, “Oh my gosh, it really does end.” And then we got GT and we got through that, and then the games started coming out, so it was like “Wow, we get to revisit the characters. This is cool.” We had already done all the movies and everything, so we’ve been really, really grateful that we got to come back for, I’ve lost count of how many games there are, from Budokai all the way up to Kinect this year. I’m sure there will be more because there’s an audience for it. And we’re so grateful that there is. Fingers crossed we’ll get to do it again, because the games are the gift that keep on giving. We keep voicing them, you keep buying and playing them, and everybody wins.
Yuko Minaguchi: When we go back, there would be some while before we were able to voice the characters again. But really, it’s a good feeling to go back and play her again.
Kara Edwards: I’ve been really, really lucky. When I started Dragon Ball Z it was my first ever [voice acting] job. I was incredibly naïve throughout the entire process, so I relied heavily on the directors to say, “Do it like this. Say it like this.”
I played the games and different things, but because of the conventions that I’ve been to I have been able to explore the character a lot more. Hearing the things that you guys have said to me, I understand the character so much better now than I did then. Although keep in mind it’s just a lot of yelling. But during those little individual scenes where you can go and act out dialogue, throughout the years it’s so much fun to revisit it because of the different things I’ve been told. It’s like, “Ah, I’m going to do it like this, because you’re right, that really matters.” I think the characters continue to grow. It’s so rare in voice over that you actually get to continue to do voice acting and get better and better and better. What an honor, this is so cool. I like it! Thanks guys!
Toshio Furukawa: [In English] It has been such fun, for a long time. I would like very much to keep going.
Masako Nozawa:
Even when it’s been a while and you go back to do the voices for video games or a full feature, I never have a hard time getting back into the role of Goku because Goku always lives inside me and I live together with him, so it’s just a matter of stepping up and having him come back into my thoughts.
Sean Schemmel: What was the question?
Masako Nozawa: Hahahaha.
Sean Schemmel: Really, I couldn’t hear the question. The games? [Kara repeats it] Oh! Thank you. Haha. I really didn’t know because I was listening and thinking.
Okay, for me it’s not about the games versus the characters, it’s about Z versus Kai. Because when we started Dragon Ball we started right in the middle of the Ginyu Saga and then finished it. Then we did moves in-between, then went back to the beginning, then GT, then started doing games, followed by a big break. By the time we did Kai I was a more seasoned actor and the scripts were identical to the Japanese. It’s unheard of in the industry to be able to revisit your character like that. Most shows don’t get redubbed into a new reboot like Dragon Ball Z Kai. I felt like I was a better actor and played the character better, because Goku was my first audition ever, so [this time] I was able to perform better.
I agree 100% with Masako Nozawa… here, I’m talking to her like she’s not here (because I’m so shy). In my career I’ve done a lot of different voices, but Goku has a special place, separate from everything else I’ve done. I’ve said this before.
What she is saying reminds of what Thich Nhat Hanh says about the Buddha, “I take refuge in the Buddha, the Buddha takes refuge in me.” I take refuge in Goku, Goku takes refuge in me.
That’s my perspective, and I agree with her, completely.
Audience: *Loud Applause*
Ryusei Nakao: Just like Masako over there, there was a 10 year break between the end of Z and [the start of] Dragon Ball Kai. It was a very great occasion to assemble the old cast members and redub Kai. In the interim there were a lot of video game projects, so I never had to leave the character for that long. If you look at the current series, you have so many new young voice actors to work with, and different cast members. It was a great occasion to go back and join the veterans, and even my senpai, to go back and reassemble the cast members of Dragon Ball.
There was one thing on Dragon Ball Kai. Even though it was only 10 years ago, every time I’d pull up to the studio, Mako would say, “Okay, what’s going to happen next? I have to know.”
Masako Nozawa: Hahahaha!
[A young man stands up wearing a full Super Saiya-jin 3 costume]
Masako Nozawa: Eh! Ohhh.
Question: First I just want to say that it’s an honor to see all of you here. This is for Sean Schemmel. I love watching Dragon Ball Z, and for years I have been cosplaying as Goku. I just absolutely love your character, man. My philosophy in life is to live like Goku. You don’t understand. I drove 10 hours just to meet you. [Sean: Thank you] Just one question. I would like to shake your hand. [Sean: Okay] And I’d like to do a Kamehameha with you.
Sean Schemmel: Okay, but I won’t do a Kamahemeha without Masako Nozawa.
Audience: *Loud Applause*
Masako Nozawa: [Looks around confused] Eh!?
Sean Schemmel: He said he wants to do a Kamehameha with me and I said I won’t do it without you.
[The translator translates the |
it so well. And he phoned Mort Abrahams the Executive Producer to see if he could get his name put on the final credits. But it was too late to restore his name, all the prints were all made."[16]
Film Stardom [ edit ]
Shaw achieved his greatest film stardom to date after playing the shark-obsessed fisherman Quint in Jaws (1975).
Shaw followed this with Murder on the Bridge (1975); Diamonds (1975), because "I wanted to play a wonderfully elegant Englishman"[4]; Robin and Marian (1976); Swashbuckler (1976); playing the lighthouse keeper and treasure-hunter Romer Treece in The Deep (1977), for which his fee was $650,000[17]; and as Israeli Mossad agent David Kabakov in Black Sunday (1977).
During filming Force 10 from Navarone (1978) Shaw said "I'm seriously thinking that this might be my last film... I no longer have anything real to say. I'm appalled at some of the lines... I'm not at ease in film. I can't remember the last film I enjoyed making."[18] He made one more movie, Avalanche Express (1979).[19] He said he would use this to pay off his taxes, then focus on writing and making the "occasional small film".[20]
Personal life [ edit ]
Shaw was married three times and had 10 children, two of whom were adopted. His first wife was Jennifer Bourke from 1952 to 1963, with whom he had four daughters. His second wife was actress Mary Ure from 1963 to 1975, with whom he had four children, including daughters Elizabeth (born 1963) and Hannah (born 1966). He adopted son Colin (born 1961) from his wife's previous marriage to filmmaker and actor John Osborne; according to an interview with Colin, he was Shaw's son born during an affair while Ure was still married to Osborne. Shaw's son Ian (born 1969) also became an actor. This marriage ended with Ure's death from an overdose. His third and final wife was Virginia Jansen from 1976 until his death in 1978, with whom he had one son, Thomas, and adopted her son, Charles, from a previous relationship. Shaw's grandson (via his daughter Deborah and film producer Evzen Kolar) [21] is American musician and composer Rob Kolar.[22][23]
For the last seven years of his life, Shaw lived at Drimbawn House in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, Ireland.[24]
Death [ edit ]
Like his father, Shaw was an alcoholic for most of his life.[25] He died in Ireland at the age of 51 from a heart attack on 28 August 1978, while driving from Castlebar, County Mayo, to his home in Tourmakeady.[26] He suddenly became ill, stopped the car, stepped out, and then collapsed and died on the roadside. He was rushed to Castlebar General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.[27][28] He had just completed acting in the film Avalanche Express. His body was cremated and its ashes scattered near his home in Toormakeady. A stone memorial to him was unveiled there in his honour in August 2008.[24]
Robert Shaw memorial in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, Ireland, near the location where he died
Closeup of the text
View of the pier at the site
Legacy [ edit ]
Shaw has a pub named after him[29] in his birthplace of Westhoughton.
Villain Sebastian Shaw from the X-Men comics is named and modelled after Shaw.[30]
Work [ edit ]
Stage [ edit ]
Filmography [ edit ]
Writing [ edit ]It’s hard to believe just by watching the dashcam footage, but the young lady driving the Ford Focus survived this horrific accident that occurred in Belgium.
It all happened on August 13 when Jasmien Claeys, 25, attempted to speed across two lanes and enter the exit, but little did she know that there was a traffic jam up ahead.
She crashed full force into a stationary truck, and if that wasn’t enough, the Focus was hit by the dashcam lorry coming from behind.
Against all odds, the woman was injured, but alive. She broke her top two vertebrae and shattered her hand, while she was also in a coma, but is now “recovering exceptionally well”, according to an interview that she gave to Belgian news station HLN this past Sunday.
VideoScientists developed a drug that could potentially save the sight of children who had bleeding in the eye.
But no drug company would bite on it.
"It became apparent that the only way to try to get this drug on the market was to form a small drug company," said Pat Williams, a pharmacologist.
EyeRx Research Inc. was created.
The company was launched in 1999 by Williams and three other Eastern Virginia Medical School faculty members. Williams and Frank A. Lattanzio are pharmacologists, or scientists who specialize in the study and use of medicines, and Earl Crouch and John Sheppard are ophthalmologists.
Back in the 1980s, Crouch was disappointed the only product that would stop bleeding in the eye due to injury was a drug that had to be swallowed. It made children sick and caused them to vomit. That could make the bleeding worse.
So they created a new eye drop.
They still haven't found a taker because there are very few cases of it a year. Drug companies prefer to invest in drugs that have millions of potential users.
"You can often find cures for disease states, but sometimes it becomes not practical for drug companies to manufacture them because of cost issues," said Lattanzio, the company's vice president for pre-clinical research and development. "It's a hard reality that we found out early. Some of the things we would've liked to take to market, we couldn't."
In the meantime, they're working on a product that remedies the cause of dry eye. That affects millions of patients - and potential buyers - a year. Instead of using manufactured saline to re-wet the eye, it stimulates the tear ducts to produce tears and decreases inflammation, Williams said.
For this project, the company is working with researchers at the University of Virginia and James Madison University with grant funding from the National Institutes of Health. Within the next year, they hope to be able to approach a partner for clinical tests involving people.
Another project is a drug for glaucoma. They've teamed up with the Medical College of Virginia to produce a "cannabinoid," a synthetic marijuana derivative, to use as an eye drop. Not only will the drug lower pressure in the eye, it will protect the retina from further damage.
But they haven't given up on the original drug they developed.
"If there are enough profits from these other drugs, then we can go back to develop it on a humanitarian basis," Williams said. "If you can improve the sight of a handful of people, you've done a marvelous thing."
EYERX RESEARCH INC.
Year founded: 1999
Number of employees: 7
It's a fact: EyeRx specializes in reformulating drugs to allow them to be applied directly to the eye. This allows a higher concentration of drug to reach the eye, while reducing the amount that goes into the rest of the body. That cuts down on side effects. For example, a cannabinoid applied to the eye is diluted by the time it hits the bloodstream, brain and heart.
READ THE SERIES ONLINE
See photos and read our technology series at dailypress.com/technologyseriesThe upper chamber of the Russian parliament has unanimously given a formal consent to President Putin to use the nation’s military in Syria to fight terrorism at a request from the Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Consent was necessary for use of the country's military for foreign combat missions under the Russian constitution.
The request for use of force was sent by the president after considering the large number of citizens of Russia and neighboring countries, who went to join terrorist groups fighting in Syria, head of the presidential administration Sergey Ivanov told media. There are thousands of them, and Russia’s national security would be under threat, should they return home, he added.
“This is not about reaching for some foreign policy goals, satisfying ambitions, which our Western partners regularly accuse us of. It’s only about the national interest of the Russian Federation,” the official said.
Do you realize what you have done? - Putin gives the war party a bootin’ (Op-Edge by @27khv) http://t.co/A2LaheVWqLpic.twitter.com/PhQJwRfRy1 — RT (@RT_com) September 30, 2015
Ivanov stressed that no ground operations are planned in Syria. Russia would use its warplanes to hit terrorist targets when requested by the Syrian government. He stressed that unlike the US-led coalition of countries that bombs militant troops in Syria, Russia was invited to do so by the legal authorities of Syria and thus follows international law.
“The military goal of the operation is strictly to provide air support for the [Syrian] government forces in their fight against Islamic State,” he said.
The bombing campaign is time-limited, Ivanov said, not revealing a clear deadline for it. He said he was not authorized to disclose details of the operation such as the number of warplanes involved.
“All our partners and allies will be informed about our decision today through corresponding military channels. Specific military information will be provided as well, I believe,” he concluded.
Military engagement in Syria would not result in Russia being mired in conflict, Konstantin Kosachev, head of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, said commenting on the news.
“We would not risk getting stuck in a long conflict and threaten the lives of our troops. The operation is aerial only. Certainly, in coordination with the ground operation of the Syrian army,” he told the Rossiya 24 news channel.
Previously, Russia provided the Syrian government with advanced weapons and military instructors to teach the Syrians how to use them.
READ MORE: Russia, Iran, Iraq & Syria setting up ‘joint information center’ to coordinate anti-ISIS operations
The developement comes after Moscow has intensified involvement in Syria, establishing an Iraqi-based military communications center with Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
It also happened just days after President Putin called for an international anti-terrorist effort in Syria that would include the government of President Assad at the UN General Assembly. Western nations have been seeking to oust Assad since 2011, but several key nations such as Germany, France, Britain and the US have confirmed they would not be opposed to Assad staying in power for a transitional period, which would include defeating the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist group.
Merkel admits Syrian conflict cannot be resolved without Bashar Assad http://t.co/3xznqas4sKpic.twitter.com/7XY8R25HYF — RT (@RT_com) September 25, 2015
IS has taken over large portions of Syria and neighboring Iraq and is on its way to creating a caliphate. Islamic State has consolidated its position with a combination of successful raids, barbaric brutality and active campaigning on social media targeting potential recruits and supporters worldwide.
There are other significant militant groups active in Syria, including an Al Qaeda branch in the region, Al Nusra Front, which competes with IS for territory, resources and fighters. Another major player in the country is the Kurd militia, which has been defending the Kurd-populated north from IS with assistance from the US-led coalition.
Russia’s airstrike approach is similar to the US-led coalition, which involves bombing terrorist targets in Syria. But there is a clear distinction that may allow Moscow to succeed where Washington failed, says John Laughland from the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris.
“The difference with the Russian deployment – and this is the key point – is that it is being conducted in cooperation with the Syrian Army. The Russian approach is diametrically the opposite of the Western approach. The Syrian Army has boots on the ground,” he told RT.
If the Syrian Army with Russia’s help manages to score victories against Islamic State, this would expose the US as not really trying to defeat the terrorist group militarily, but actually trying to channel its aggression against Damascus, Syrian political analyst Annar Waqqaf told RT.
“The Americans are certainly using the Islamic State. They think they can contain them, because they know that their funding and support base lays [sic] with US allies in Saudi Arabia and that their logistic lies with the US allies in Turkey. They believe that whenever they want to close the tap they can close it. But in fact it’s not true,” he explained.
Russia’s alliance with Syria, Iran and Iraq would mean that Saudi Arabia and Turkey would have to stop ‘playing double games’ in Syria, says Srdja Trifkovic, international affairs analyst at the Chronicles magazine. The Saudis are financing IS and supporting the Al Nusra Front, in order to take power from the Assad government, and Turkey is more interested in fighting Kurds than Islamic State, he explained.
“It will no longer be possible in the new setup with the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Syrians and the Russians sharing intelligence for the Gulf monarchies and for [Turkish President] Erdogan to get away with this duplicity. For as long as they are able to do so, the Americans couldn’t really get very far with their anti-ISIS campaign,” he told RT.Jordan Rhodes has scored nine goals in 15 appearances this season
Blackburn earned a narrow derby victory over 10-man Preston in Paul Lambert's first game as Rovers manager.
The visitors took the lead when Preston goalkeeper Jordan Pickford diverted Hope Akpan's shot into his own net following a goalmouth scramble.
Jordan Rhodes fired in from the penalty spot to double the advantage after Paul Huntington brought down Chris Taylor.
Joe Garner's left-footed shot gave Preston hope, before Bailey Wright was sent off for a second yellow card.
The result leaves Simon Grayson's North End two points clear of the relegation zone, while Blackburn climb to 13th after picking up their first win in three games.
Lambert took charge of the visitors for the first time following Gary Bowyer's dismissal on 10 November.
And the former Scotland international, back in the dugout for the first time since being sacked by Aston Villa in February, began his reign at Ewood Park in fine style - with a narrow win against one of his new club's local rivals.
Preston had the better of the early stages at Deepdale, but struggled to create clear-cut chances, with only Paul Gallagher drawing Rovers keeper Jason Steele into a save.
The hosts fell behind when they failed to clear a Rovers free-kick, with Pickford deflecting the ball in after Akpan had poked the ball goalwards from close range.
Huntington's misjudged challenge on Taylor allowed Rhodes to score the decisive goal early in the second half, as the Scotland international drilled his penalty into the bottom left-hand corner.
Garner pulled one back from inside the box after Stevie May's shot had been blocked, but Wright's late dismissal for picking up two yellow cards in seven minutes ended Preston's hopes of an equaliser.
Preston North End manager Simon Grayson:
"I think we deserved something. When you look back over the course of the game probably the least we deserved was a point. It was a typical derby match, a lot of tackles and things bobbling around. We felt we had to up the tempo in the second half and we responded really well.
"I think we had Blackburn camped in their own half for much of the game and we just needed a little bit of extra quality that we just didn't have.
"We were sloppy for the goal giving away the penalty. Garner's goal lifted us, the place got rocking, we were on the front foot but ultimately we couldn't find that equaliser which we deserved.
"Overall I thought we defended quite well again but we conceded a freak goal and a penalty so we didn't really look like we were going to concede in open play."
Blackburn Rovers manager Paul Lambert:
"It was strange being back. After nine months out, for the first time in 40 years I was enjoying my life. Then you are back in the hot seat - the highs and lows - but it's great to be back.
"We played a terrific game of football. The atmosphere was great in the stadium and we scored two goals against a team that hadn't conceded in six games. The team deserves so much credit for that and I think we looked a threat every time we went forward.
"I've asked the players to do a lot for me. We've trained a bit differently, which is no slight on Gary (Bowyer) at all, but I have my own way of training, everyone does, and the players have worked ever so hard to master that and it will take time.
"Today is a marker that we can win games. The back four were colossal for us. They were proper men, proper defenders."
Former Aston Villa boss Paul Lambert was named Blackburn manager after the sacking of Gary Bowyer
Blackburn's opener came after Preston were unable to clear their lines from a free-kick
Joe Garner scored his first goal of the season for Preston, but the hosts could not find an equalisercityscape “Harbour Landing” Wins Ferry Terminal Design Competition
Design features an extended green roof and undulating wood structure, but the City will have to find funding.
SHOW CAPTION ✉ Share on: 347173 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.49.43 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.43-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.43-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.43-PM.png 1016 644 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-49-43-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-49-43-pm 0 0 347175 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.49.09 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.09-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.09-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.09-PM.png 1074 684 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-49-09-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-49-09-pm 0 0 347176 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.48.43 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.48.43-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.48.43-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.48.43-PM.png 1350 996 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-48-43-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-48-43-pm 0 0 347167 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.16.57 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.16.57-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.16.57-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.16.57-PM.png 1096 702 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-16-57-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-16-57-pm 0 0 347168 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.16.36 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.16.36-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.16.36-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.16.36-PM.png 1096 702 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-16-36-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-16-36-pm 0 0 347172 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.52.45 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.52.45-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.52.45-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.52.45-PM.png 1030 668 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-52-45-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-52-45-pm 0 0 347174 Screen Shot 2015-03-17 at 1.49.28 PM https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.28-PM-100x100.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.28-PM.png https://torontoist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Screen-Shot-2015-03-17-at-1.49.28-PM.png 1060 646 https://torontoist.com/2015/04/harbour-landing-wins-ferry-terminal-design-competition/slide/screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-49-28-pm/ screen-shot-2015-03-17-at-1-49-28-pm 0 0
An independent jury chose the Harbour Landing proposal as the winner of the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal design competition.
Designed by KPMB Architects, West 8, and Greenberg Consultants, the proposal features an undulating wood terminal structure and a green roof that should allow for some great views of the harbour and island.
The design was chosen after a week-long consultation open house at City Hall (see results in the PDF below), and a two-day jury process where panellists debated the merits of the five shortlisted projects.
Harbour Landing
The next step for the project is to integrate it into the master plan for the waterfront, and then the City will have to find room to fund the project in its capital budget. Local councillor Pam McConnell (Ward 28, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) suggested section 37 (density bonus) money could be allocated to the project, as well as development charges and other funds.
Among the reasons listed for Harbour Landing winning the design competition was that it was a “practical and pragmatic plan” that fit the built environment, and had a “strong strategy about phasing.”
A Look at the Shortlisted Ferry Terminal ProposalsNew Delhi: The barrage of allegations against the Aam Aadmi Party seem to have created a sense of doubt among Delhi voters, on as whether the party that stormed into the political arena on an anti-corruption wave is actually as clean as it projects itself to be.
Sting footage published by news portal Media sarkar alleged that the AAP candidate from Delhi's RK Puram constituency, Shazia Ilmi, offered to help a businessman in exchange for money.
Even though the party attempted to do some damage control by promising an investigation, Delhi voters are already questioning if AAP's anti-corruption stand was just an attempt to gain some cheap publicity.
Significantly, the allegations have surfaced against AAP shortly after Anna Hazare's letter to Kejriwal. And now AAP supporters who rejected the letter as a publicity stunt by Anna are suddenly having second thoughts.
"I still don't believe that our leaders can do such a thing but the video has clearly left a doubt," says Mukesh Khatri, an AAP supporter, who came to see the press conference in which the party leadership came out to defend Ilmi.
"The party today is not the same that was formed after the Anna's movement. But I think still they are a better option than the other parties we have been voting for last 15 years," says an AAP supporter, who claims to have joined the party for its staunch anti-corruption stand.
However, rubbishing the sting operation footage, AAP said that they studied the sting operation footage and reached the conclusion that it is doctored with the intention of maligning the party. AAP felt that since the party has managed to threaten established political outfits like the Congress and BJP in the run up to the 2013 assembly election, it is being unduly targetted.
"The footage has been doctored by the media house before publishing it in the public domain. Parts have been edited out to show suspicious words out of context," said AAP leader Yogendra Yadav. "Dirty tricks are being played by Congress and BJP," he added.
But this has failed to stop questions from being raised against AAP leaders.
Another AAP leader Kumar Biswas has also been accused of taking money for arranging an election ticket. With two national leaders being accused of corruption, the party has swung into action.
"We want to file a case of criminal defamation against Anuranjan Jha of Media Sarkar and the news channel that ran the video without cross checking the content," said Yadav. "We want to appeal to the Election Commission to investigate the video urgently and take a decision within 48 hours."
Despite its outward show of defiance and the party's refusal to accept that the allegations will damage it, insiders say that the charges have already created feuds inside the party.
Meanwhile the Congress didn't miss the opportunity to attack AAP.
"Even though it's yet to be proved that the AAP leaders are guilty, such allegations will only make people aware of what they are going to opt for," said a Delhi Congress leader.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.BLAIR COUNTY, Pa. (KDKA) — New details are emerging as police continue to investigate a shooting spree that left several people dead and three state police troopers injured Friday morning in Central Pennsylvania.
The incident started at a small church in Frankstown Township in Blair County, which is near Altoona. When it was over, three state troopers had to be hospitalized for injuries.
Police are investigating five crime scenes along Juniata Valley Road in Hollidaysburg.
According to investigators, a woman was killed in a church, a man in a residence and another man at the scene of a car crash. The suspect has been identified as Jeffrey Lee Michael of Hollidaysburg.
The motive is unclear.
That’s were police say Jeffery Lee Michael went on a killing spree, murdering a woman in a church, a man in a residence and another man at the scene of a car crash. The motive is unclear.
“That is part of the investigation,” said Trooper Jeffrey Petucci, of Pennsylvania State Police. “It’s too early to say as far as what the motive was. At this point in time, it’s too early to say that.”
The order of the shootings is not known at this point, but police say the suspect – who was in a truck – then fired at two passing police cruisers that were responding to the area around 9 a.m.
State police say he then rammed into a third police car head-on before getting out of his truck and opening fire on the troopers.
Two troopers were hit with gunfire. State police say one of the state troopers was struck by two bullets; one hit his bulletproof vest and the other hit his wrist. The other was injured by shattered glass and shrapnel. A third trooper was injured in the car crash.
All three were treated and released from Altoona Hospital.
“I think we have three very fortunate state police members tonight,” said Lt. Col. George Bivens, of the Pennsylvania State Police. “We’re very thankful for the fact they survived this attack. It was a very violent attack.”
According to state police, the suspect was shot and killed when the troopers at the scene returned gunfire.
The victim’s names have not been officially released and police are not saying what relationship, if any, there may have been between them and the suspect.
The Blair County District Attorney is also involved in the investigation.
A vigil for the victims is being planned at 7 p.m. at the Geeseytown Lutheran Church.
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More NewsUntil now rooftop solar enthusiasts have only been able to pay the full cost of the systems up-front. Flickr: Ajay Tallam
The World Bank has approved a US$625 million loan for the Indian government’s grid-connected rooftop solar PV programme, along with a co-financing loan of US$120 million on concessional terms and a US$5 million grant from Climate Investment Fund’s (CIF) Clean Technology Fund.
The funds will be used for the installation of at least 400MW of rooftop systems and to support India’s overall solar market.
The State Bank of India (SBI) will help deliver the projects by lending to solar developers, aggregators and end-users, mainly in the commercial and industrial rooftop sector. These two sectors have been left out of India's 30% rooftop subsidy scheme.
Until now, rooftop solar enthusiasts have only been able to pay the full cost of solar systems up-front, but the new loans aim to tackle this barrier to growth by supporting various PV business models and introducing third-party ownership, leasing, rooftop rental, as well as direct end-user ownership.
Mohua Mukherjee, senior energy specialist and World Bank’s task team leader for the project, said: “The variety of financing mechanisms on offer under this programme will represent a major innovation for the rooftop market. Most importantly, the scope of the project will go beyond simply making finance available, it will also improve the investment climate for solar PV, and increase the ease of doing rooftop business.”
In March, a report ‘Unleashing Private investment in Rooftop Solar in India’ from the Solar Rooftop Policy Coalition, found that with a business as usual approach, India is set to reach just one third of its 40GW by 2022 rooftop solar target. While the nation is currently on a trajectory of reaching just 13.5GW of rooftop solar by 2022, “aggressive market support” could help India double its rooftop installation trajectory to 26GW in the same period.
A World Bank release stated that Power shortages in India affect industrial output with many industries and manufacturers relying on expensive and polluting diesel-based back-up power supplies. Meanwhile more than 200 million people have no access to electricity.
Despite this, rooftop PV has yet to become widespread in India, with a government official last year claiming that the roll out had been much slower than expected. The World Bank said this was “primarily due to the lack of adequate financing, unfamiliar technology and low consumer awareness”.
Onno Ruhl, World Bank country director in India, said: “Through this project and others like it, tens of millions of electricity customers will eventually be able to generate part of their own electricity needs, from one of the cleanest sources of energy.”
Various regions of India have started to move on rooftop solar-friendly policies, with the Indian city of Chandigarh planning on becoming the second municipality in India to make rooftop solar mandatory on all buildings.
Last month, the state of Gujarat also introduced a subsidy for residential grid-connected rooftop solar systems on top of any benefits provided by India’s Central government.
If you are looking to invest in or develop solar projects in India, join Solar Media on the 7th of June in London at Solar Finance & Investment: India, a conference designed to bring together European and North American investors and developers looking into the Indian market, as well companies with consolidated presence that are exploring new partnerships.Attention, inhabitants of the northern hemisphere of our fragile home world. You're about to get one of the best peeks at Uranus in years – because the strange alien planet will reach opposition with the Sun and be at the closest point in its orbit to Earth.
On Thursday and Friday, Earth will be directly in between the second-furthest planet in our Solar System and the Sun, meaning that as the Sun sets in the west, Uranus will pop up in the east and should be a little more visible than usual, light pollution permitting, with binoculars or a telescope.
Uranus will be just 18.91 astronomical units, or 1,757,794,316 miles (2,828,895,735 kilometres) away from Earth. As an additional bonus, the sky will be particularly dark as it's new Moon time, so the typically faint Uranus will be slightly more easier to pick out.
"Both these factors make it a great time to view the planet," Jane Houston Jones, senor outreach specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told The Register today. "We've actually been looking at Uranus for a couple of months now but it's a more convenient and human-friendly viewing time."
Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two READ MORE
Uranus is instantly recognizable thanks to its blue-green color, which is the result of the methane in Uranus tinting the atmosphere. Those keen for a nighttime glimpse of Uranus should look at the constellation of Pisces to the south east. Jones recommends smartphone users download and use one of many stargazing apps, like Sky Map, that point out and identify planets, individual stars and other features of the night sky.
Getting to see Uranus is something of a treat because it isn't usually this visible. Solar oppositions with Uranus only come around once every 367 Earth days, and, as mentioned, this time there's a new Moon, which means it'll be extra dark out there. For years, it was thought to be a distant star or a comet by its discoverer Sir William Herschel, before the orbital motions of Uranus exposed it as a planet.
Sadly, you won't be able to see Uranus' rings unless you're using a powerful professional telescope.
For those that miss out on a Uranus-viewing tonight, there is another option that could prove illuminating later this month, Jones suggested. October 28 is International Observe the Moon Night, and astronomy clubs across the world will be holding viewing parties focusing in on our natural satellite.
Moon watchers will also be able to spot Uranus on that night, since it's relatively close to our closest planetary companion. Amateur enthusiasts should be happy to help you take a good long look at Uranus as part of the festivities. ®ATHENS, Ala. (WHNT) – Athens Police are looking for three people they say used a stolen truck to burglarize a gun store.
Police say it about around 2:00 a.m. at Craig’s Guns & Tactical on Highway 72 East.
Officers say 3 camouflage Smith & Wesson M & P AR-15 rifles, along with several Glock and Colt pistols were stolen – approximately 20.
Police believe the truck used in this case was stolen in Madison County.
The vehicle has been recovered and is being processed as evidence.
Police have asked owners at the gun shop not to release surveillance video but WHNT got a look at the security footage which shows 3 men ramming into the facade of the building with such force the truck they were in wound up 20 feet onto the sales floor
The truck came through a partially bricked wall, and barred doors and windows.
Shop owner Craig Brown says the force of the truck knocked a 450 pound gun safe 30 feet across the floor.
“That vehicle was heavy enough it just demolished it,” says Brown.
He says he believes the offenders had been in to scope out the store before, possibly even Thursday. Browns says the thieves were only in the shop for about 40 seconds and they that made a beeline for exactly what they wanted.
“They left a lot of valuable guns behind and took guns that they either knew and were familiar with or that they thought they could sell and get rid of easily.”
Thieves also ran over 2 gun racks boasting 100 guns each, so Brown says the collateral damage – even if you don’t include damage to the building – far exceeds what was stolen.
“Just tons of ammo and accessories, I mean just demolished tens of thousands of dollars worth of inventory,” Brown laments.
He says while the mess and residual costs are certainly a headache – he and his staff have to press on.
“We’ll get everything cleaned up today and be open tomorrow, our regular hours 9am to 7pm.”
The owners of the gun store are taking inventory in order to account for all of their merchandise.
Please contact the Athens Police Department at (256) 233 |
Act of 1914 levied a 0.2-percent tax on all sales or transfers of stock. In 1932, Congress more than doubled that tax to help finance the government during the Great Depression. And today, England has a financial transaction tax of 0.25 percent, a penny on every $4 invested.
"Making these reforms will not be easy," Sanders said. "After all, Wall Street is clearly the most powerful lobbying force on Capitol Hill. From 1998 through 2008, the financial sector spent over $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to deregulate Wall Street. More recently, they spent hundreds of millions more to make the Dodd-Frank bill as weak as possible, and after its passage, hundreds of millions more to roll back or diluter the stronger provisions in that legislation."A woman in Baltimore recently found herself in the middle of a pretty bizarre crossfire when she reportedly received a note from some of her neighbors (or, probably just one who is bluffing), stating that her yard is too flamboyant for the innocent eyes of children. The horrific offense that prompted this note? A line of rainbow-colored mason jars holding the words “LOVE” and “OHANA.” Ohana, for those of you who haven’t seen Lilo & Stitch or are not versed in Hawaiian, means “family.” Dire times, indeed. Julie Baker, the woman who owns the house and yard, was flabbergasted by the note. Baker is a widow and mother of four (the youngest of whom is already in high school), and thankfully, has a thick skin. She found some humor in it (as we all should), and soon enough, her friend Maeve Brigid posted the note and a picture of the yard to Facebook.Author and recording artist Sister Souljah on Thursday blasted Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE’s public persona.
“She reminds me too much of the slave plantation white wife of the white ‘master,’ ” Souljah said, according to Time.
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“She talks down to people [and] is condescending and pandering,” she said of the Democratic presidential front-runner.
“She even talked down to the commander in chief, President Barack Obama, while she was under his command,” Souljah added, referencing Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State from 2009 to 2013.
Souljah’s remarks continue a feud with Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonInviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 Trump says he never told McCabe his wife was 'a loser' MORE that began more than a 20 years ago.
Then-Gov. Bill Clinton (D-Ark.) memorably chastised Souljah for remarks she made calling for violence against whites in 1992.
“If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Souljah asked after the Los Angeles race riots that year.
“If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Bill Clinton responded in June 1992, referencing the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard.
Souljah dismissed the former president’s remarks during her interview over the incident Thursday.
“If you ask my view, even if it’s not your view, you have to handle that,” she said. "Don’t tell me I hurt your feelings. I’m not your kindergarten teacher.”
Souljah then argued that race relations are largely unimproved following the election of President Obama.
“[Obama] is fearful and powerless to stop his military and police force from executing innocent people based on race,” she said.
“One of the things I have tried to make clear is that racism is a system of power,” Souljah said. "That system did not go away.
“There have been changes in the nuances of it, but the system is still intact, and it’s still institutionalized.”According to CNN's Jake Tapper, Donald Trump is currently living inside Barack Obama's head, constantly uppermost in his thoughts, no matter the situation. And in this case the situation was the press conference yesterday at the North American Leaders Conference in Ottawa, Canada. During CNN's The Lead, Wednesday, Tapper explained:
PRESIDENT OBAMA: So, let's just be clear that somebody who labels us vs. them or engages in rhetoric about how we're going to look after ourselves and take it to the other guy, that's not the definition of populism. Sorry. This is one of the prerogatives of when you're at the end of your term. You just kind of -- you go on these occasional rants.
JAKE TAPPER: President Obama just wrapping a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto at the North American Leaders Summit in Ottawa, Canada. Let's talk about this, the president speaking quite a bit about trade, quite a bit about accomplishments he wants to achieve with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts, and quite a bit about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Joining me to talk about this all, CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash, CNN senior political reporter Nia-Malika Henderson, CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny, and joining us from New York, CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger. Gloria, let me start with you.
It is one of the grandest ironies of this political year is that a giant real estate developer in New York is currently living rent-free in President Obama's head. Whatever the topic is, President Obama is eager to go after the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, whether the topic is ISIS after the Orlando shootings, or the topic is trade, or, in this case, the question was about clean energy, and he -- President Obama wanted to give a lesson as to what populism truly is.Get the biggest celebs stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Hull City captain Curtis Davies has spoken out after NHS boob job model Josie Cunningham revealed she thought he was the father of her unborn child.
The Leeds-born model took to Twitter over the weekend to claim she was TRICKED into believing she was sleeping with a premiership footballer.
The 24-year-old, who is in labour as we write this, has spoke of her "heartbreak" at finding out she had been'manipulated' for 18 months by believing she was dating Hull City captain Curtis Davies.
But the man turned out to be an imposter.
The wannabe said she met the man who claimed to be Curtis last April, and the pair started sleeping together before she discovered more than a year later he wasn't who he said he was.
Today, the Premier League footballer said he was disappointed at being dragged into Josie's drama.
"I'm not going to give a non story legs by commenting," Curtis began "I will say I'm disappointed..."
He added: "My life goes on as normal."
Josie was distraught over the weekend when she realised she hadn't been dating the footballer as she first believed.
She wrote on Twitter: "Almost 4am and I'm wide awake Feel so dirty, ashamed and devastated.
"Before I explain why I have no doubt that people will think I'm lying, but I'll upload some proof that I have been completely manipulated by a man for the past 18 months pretending to be a premiership footballer.
"I feel physically sick having to admit I was fooled by him and had sex with someone who simply looked like and claimed to be someone he wasn't.
"Back in April last year I received a message from a guy who I believed was Curtis Davies the captain of Hull football club. Over the past 18 months, I've believed this to be true.
"I've had sex with him, I've stayed in hotels with him and I've poured by heart out to him. Back in May last year, my manager told me that he thought the guy could be lying - but I refused to believe it and foolishly have got angry every time since he has tried to suggest it.
"I was told to ask him to tweet me from his Twitter account, which he agreed to do - when I received the tweet it was from a new account and with no followers which concerned me, when I asked why it was not from the verified account I was told it was because I had a bad rep and could damage his career. I believed him (I will tweet a pic from May 2013 showing that tweet)."
She then went on to insist that she hadn't planned the story and said words can't describe how "dirty" she feels after was fooled into believing she was dating Curtis, 29.
She continued: "I let a con man put his hands on me, kiss me with his lips and fill my head with lies - I'm heartbroken. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a kick from thinking a premiership footballer was interested in me, I've been called a liar for months and I've had my head held high thinking the whole country was wrong - when it was really me."
Josie, who is eight and a half months pregnant, admits she's "hated by the country", has no friends and has now been left "completely heartbroken" for the first time in her life.
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She added: "I'm so lucky to have such an amazing and supportive family. I'm sorry I didn't believe you all when you said a footballer wouldn't go near me.
"I'm sorry Rob for not listening to you and I'm sorry to everyone who has pointed out I couldn't bag a footballer. 4am and I'm sat in bed looking at all the messages and thinking "you stupid girl, you was ticked into sex" :( (sic)"
On Sunday evening, Josie expressed concerns about the impact the stress of the situation was having on her.
"This guy was at the top his game. I could go into labour at any point, so trying to keep stress to a min - but I'm genuinely hurting inside," she tweeted.
Josie's rep has confirmed she's in labour.
Read about Josie's rollercoaster pregnancy here.EIB Interview: Why, Senator Rubio?
RUSH: We welcome back to the program Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. I think he just hustled to our microphones here from a Senate vote, correct?
RUBIO: Yeah, we did. Still votin’ on the gun legislation.
RUSH: Gun legislation. Senator, I know your time is limited here. I know you’ve got a very busy day. Let’s get started. I must tell you: I just don’t understand this, Senator. I don’t understand why we’re doing something that the Democrats are salivating over. I’ve never agreed with Senator Schumer about anything and I’m being told that I should on this. I’m just having a tough time. I look at what happened in California after the last amnesty. We lost that state to the Democrats. I’m having trouble seeing how this benefits Republicans.
RUBIO: Well, a couple things. First of all, as far as Senator Schumer and others who are on the bill are concerned, I think the way to understand it is they’ve agreed to things that we believe in because they want our support. They understand it’s important to get something done primarily because, not just in the Senate, but because in the House it’s controlled by conservative Republicans. As far as why we’re dealing with the issue, let me just begin by saying, Rush, that if we didn’t have a single illegal immigrant in the United States we’d still have to do immigration reform, for two reasons.
One, because our current legal immigration system is broken. I think Americans support legal immigration. I know you do. Legal immigration is good for America, if it’s controlled and structured via the legal process, of course. But the problem is the system we have in place right now is broken. For example, it is completely family based which means that it’s based not on what you can do or what talent you have or what merit you bring or what job you could fill, but rather on whether you know someone who already lives here.
That needs to be reformed, and actually we do that. The second is because our immigration laws are not enforced, and, in particular, we don’t have an electronic verification system. So when people are hired they’re basically hired using illegal documents. We don’t track people that are overstaying visas. So 40% of our illegal immigrants are people that entered legally and have overstayed. And our border is not secure, and we know that is a national security and sovereignty issue as much as it is an immigration issue. So, for those two reasons alone, we have to do something.
And beyond it, I would just say it’s not good for the country to have 11 million people here who we don’t know who they are, where they’re living. They’re not paying taxes, but they’re showing up in emergency rooms. They’re driving up the cost of auto insurance ’cause they don’t have driver’s licenses and are getting into accidents. They’re having children, which are US citizens. So, I mean, it’s an issue that needs to be dealt with — and, beyond that, it’s an issue the Democrats were gonna raise anyway. So we might as well have an alternative, and that’s what we’ve worked on. Hopefully, we can keep it an alternative that we can support.
RUSH: I want to stick with the politics of this for just a second.
RUBIO: Yeah?
RUSH: I heard what you say.
RUBIO: Yeah.
RUSH: I understand. I have some questions for you about that, but the politics of this still fascinate me. If you look at the 2010 election or 2012 election results. The percentage of the electorate that was Hispanic was 7%, and we got 27 or 28% of that vote. The evangelical vote was about 28% of the electorate, and we got 78% of that.
RUBIO: Right.
RUSH: The Republican Party seems to be saying, “We need to focus on the Hispanic vote and get rid of the social issues. The social issues are killing us.” But the Hispanic vote is not that big a percentage of the vote in order for the party to be totally turning upside down what it believes in.
RUBIO: Well, Rush, you make an interesting point. I would say two things to that. Number one is, I agree with you that the evangelical… We should continue to be the pro-life and pro-traditional values party — and I believe that, in fact, that will help us among Hispanic voters. The second point I would make to you is that I understand that some voices in the Republican Party are saying we need to do immigration reform for political reasons. I am not one of them per se. This isn’t my motivation.
If people think that we pass this and tomorrow we go from 28% to 38% or 48%, that’s just not accurate. I do think it will help them… I do think it will help us make our argument for limited government, because people will now perhaps be willing to listen to us. Right now, the Democrats just distract them. They basically say, “Well, you can’t listen to Republicans on anything because they don’t like people like you.” It’s unfair, but that’s how they use this issue, and I’m sure they’ll continue to try to use it in that way.
But that should not be the reason why we do this. I mean, if we are doing this for political reasons, I think we’re gonna be disappointed, and it’s not my motivation. My motivation is I want to solve this problem for the country. And beyond that, let me say that as far as what’s happening in California and in other places with regards to the… You know, what’s driving population growth in California among Hispanics, as it is around the country, is the birthrate. It’s not immigration.
And also I would say to that, that every political movement — conservatism included — depends on the ability to convince people that do not agree with you now to agree with you in the future. And I think we have a very strong argument to make to people that are coming here to improve their lives and want to give their children a better life, that what they came here to get away from was big government — and that, in fact, the only way for that to be possible is free enterprise and limited government. It’s a tough argument. We gotta make it consistently over a significant period of time. But I know it’s one I’ve been successful making, and I believe we can be successful making it as a party.
RUSH: You have been, and your personal story is a profoundly motivational and inspirational one, the one that you tell about your father. But then I see polling data again that suggests that 70% of the Hispanic population in the country believes that government is the primary source of prosperity. I don’t, therefore, understand this contention that Hispanics are conservatives-in-waiting.
RUBIO: Yeah. Well, I don’t think… Let me say a couple things. First of all, I think the fastest… On the social issues, the fastest growing religious groups in America, some of the fastest growing churches are Christian — or Hispanic evangelical churches, and I do think we have an opportunity on the social issues. As far as the issue you explained with the 70% of Hispanics — and I haven’t seen that poll, but I’ve heard similar numbers in other places so I understand your point. I’d say that’s a growing problem in America in general. I think we have a growing problem in this country that too many people have forgotten what the true sense of prosperity is.
RUSH: That’s true.
RUBIO: I think that’s true across the board. And let me tell you who I blame for that first and foremost. I blame that primarily, quite frankly, on decisions made by the Republican Party in the past to embrace crony capitalism and corporate welfare as conservatism, when, in fact, that’s not what we’re about. We are about upward mobility. We’re about the true free enterprise system. We’re not about big companies being able to use the federal government to create rules and regulations that make it harder on their competitors.
And I also think that while we’ve had multiple candidates in the past that have campaigned as limited-government conservatives, it’s of course until it’s their government program that they’re trying to protect or what have you. So I don’t think necessarily Republicans have always governed as the limited-government movement and the result is you see this kind of confusion in the American electorate about what the source of prosperity is. We have to do a better job of explaining to all Americans that free enterprise is the only way to consistently create the kind of growth and opportunity that America’s always been identified with.
RUSH: Let’s go to the bill. The last time you were here, you were very certain — you assured everybody — that until the border was secure, there would not be legalization of a pathway to citizenship. Now people who’ve seen the bill say that what actually happens is that the legalization does take place and that then there’s a commission that has 10 years to figure out border security. Which is true?
RUBIO: Well, a couple points. First of all, the legalization does not begin automatically. We don’t want to wait on legalizing, and I’ll tell you why, and my original position was that we wanted to secure the border first and then legalize. The problem is we have millions of people here now, by some estimates 10, 11 million. We want to know who they are and freeze the problem in place. I don’t want that number to grow. It behooves us to know who they are as soon as possible, so it doesn’t get worse. What we do is we say the Department of Homeland Security — and this gets tricky, so it’s important to follow me on it, because I gotta explain the path. There’s actual multiple triggers here.
The Department of Homeland Security has come up with two plans: one to secure the border and one to build fencing. It has to be both, and they have to not only come up with the plans which will be reviewed by the border commission on the advisory role and also the General Accounting Office, which is a nonpartisan, very serious agency of government to ensure that it achieves the following goal: a hundred percent awareness of border, 90% apprehension. They have five years to meet that standard. If in five years the border is not 90% apprehension, 100% awareness, they lose control of the border issue to a commission that is not a Washington commission. It is a commission that will largely be driven by the governors of the border states.
I have full confidence that the governors of these border states — talking about Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, obviously California as well, but particularly Arizona and Texas, which are the ones most impacted by it now — these governors will take care of this problem and they’ll be given money to be able to take care of it. In addition to that, eVerify becomes mandatory for every business in America, starting with the biggest companies, and the entry-exit system becomes mandatory. We will track the entry and the exit of all visitors to the United States at all of our airports and seaports. And all of those things must happen before a single green card is issued to those that are waiting through the regular RPI status, as we call it, the provisional status that we’ve created. And so these are triggers that really must happen, and obviously I think it’s a vast improvement over what we have now.
RUSH: We’re talking with Senator Marco Rubio. Gotta take a brief time-out here. I know your schedule is jam-packed today. If you can’t make it to the bottom of the half hour, you say so and it won’t be a problem. I’ll take a brief time-out now and we’ll be back with Senator Rubio right after this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: And we’re back on the Rush Limbaugh program with Senator Marco Rubio from Florida, and we’re talking about the upcoming legislation involving immigration. Senator, I know you say that the political aspects of this are not yours, but so many people are scared to death, Senator, that the Republican Party is committing suicide, that we’re going to end up legalizing nine million automatic Democrat voters, and that’s why the Democrats are so adamant. We don’t understand why the Republicans are so eager to make that happen. We seem to be wanting to reach out to Hispanics. Once we do everything we do to reach out to Hispanics, how can we ever reform welfare? How can we reform anything that we might want to change if it’s the product of reaching out to Hispanics, giving them what we think they want in order to get their votes, when they’re already gonna vote Democrat?
RUBIO: Well, a couple things I would say about that. First of all, I’m not prepared to admit that somehow there’s this entire population of people that because of their heritage are not willing to listen to our pitch on why limited government is better. As I said at the outset, this is an argument that right now unfortunately I think we are losing in many sectors of our society. We have young people that have somehow grown up, and we can chalk it up to what the schools are teaching or they’re seeing in the mass media, but people who have grown up to believe that government is the source of prosperity. That the way to grow our economy is for the government to spend more.
That’s always been a challenge ’cause it’s a lot easier to sell people on a government program than it is to sell ’em on free enterprise and limited government. It’s easier to promise that that’s for sure, but I think the evidence is on our side. Once we explain to people the reality of this, I think we can convince anyone, certainly I think we can convince a lot of people in America. I think the future of conservatism, and, in fact, I think the future of America depends on how effective we are at explaining to as many Americans as possible why the road we are on right now is such an economic disaster, and I just refuse to accept the notion that somehow we’re not gonna be able to make that argument successfully to Hispanics.
I imagine in places like California and New York, where there’s a large segment of Hispanics that also happen to live in very liberal communities, it will probably be a heavier lift. But in places like Florida, Texas, Virginia, and other places throughout the country, where there’s a growing Hispanic population not tied to these traditional centers of liberalism, I think we have a very compelling story to tell. The evidence shows that Hispanics are heavily entrepreneurial. And I know this. The more taxes people pay, the more that they own, the more they have at stake in the economy, the more conservative and more limited government they become, and I’ve seen that with my own eyes.
RUSH: Well, I have, too, within certain years, certain eras of this country’s history. We’re not in the era like that now. We’re in an era where seemingly more people are low-information than ever before and are more susceptible — Senator, look at the number of people not working. I mean, 90 million people are not working. But they’re all eating, they’ve all got phones, they’ve all got TV sets and so forth. They are being supported. They are able to live sufficiently well enough that getting a job is not that important, not nearly as important. It’s a cultural thing that’s happening here.
And we’re going to throw immigration reform in this mix right now. I understand your objectives, and they’re really admirable, and I totally wish you all the luck and all the best with it. We need people like you fighting for these kind of things. There’s no question. But you said something earlier at the top of the interview that the immigration system is broken, there are 11 million people, whatever, we don’t know who they are, and we’ve gotta fix it. Why? What is it about right now that says, forget everything else fails I’ve asked you, forget the political ramifications I’ve asked you about. Why does it need to be fixed right now?
RUBIO: First of all, a couple things. If it was up to me, if I controlled the flow of business in the Senate we would be focused on tax reform and how to get our economy growing again and how to get the debt under control. But the reality is the Democrats are gonna raise the issue of immigration. So, if they’re going to raise this issue and force us to address it, then we have to have an alternative —
RUSH: Why, why can’t we just defeat it? Why do we have to address it because they raise it?
RUBIO: If they raise the issue of immigration we can’t just vote against it. I think one of the things unfortunately that’s happened in the past is, for example, Obamacare was raised.
RUSH: Well, we did gun control. We just voted down gun control.
RUBIO: Well, not only voting it down, we’ve offered very good alternatives. For example, one of the things that was voted down yesterday was an amendment by Senator Cruz and Senator Grassley that actual is meaningful stuff that focuses on the real problem, which is not guns, the real problem is violence. And we have an alternative that actually focuses — of course, people didn’t hear about this because the mainstream media won’t report on it, but we actually offer some very good alternatives about increasing prosecutions for criminals that are violating the background check, existing background check laws, you know, how to strengthen our mental health systems, et cetera, and no one’s reporting on that stuff. So it’s important to have an alternative and, I think, unfortunately, on immigration, if it arises, we need to have an alternative, too, because we do have things that are wrong with the immigration system.
RUSH: So, what about enforcing current law as an alternative?
RUBIO: Well, the problem with the current law and I think that’s accurate, I mean people have violated the current law, there’s gonna be a consequence for that. You know, it’s a misnomer to believe — some people believe if you’re illegally in the country now you can never become a citizen. That’s not true. Under existing law, if you are illegally here, you can become a citizen. The law says you have to leave the country and in 10 years you can get a green card and once you get a green card you can become a citizen in three to five years. And all we’re saying is, okay, here’s the reality, people have screwed up in government. They haven’t enforced our laws so now we have 11 million people here, and they’re not going to leave. They’ve been here too long, most of them over a decade. What do we do with them, instead of telling them to leave, which they’re not gonna do, what can we do to get them to come forward and identify themselves?
And the answer is they have to undergo a background check. They have to pay a fine for what they’ve done wrong. They have to wait more than 10 years, and they have to start paying taxes. Their legalization is not permanent. It is a renewable legalization that expires in six years. So they have to go back and renew it where they have to prove that they’re gainfully employed, that they’re not a public charge. They don’t qualify for any federal benefits including Obamacare, no welfare, no food stamps. Or the alternative is to leave it the way it is now, and the way it is now is terrible. It’s not good for anybody. The only people benefiting from the way it is now are the people that are bringing them across the border or the people that are hiring labor at the expense of the American worker because they can pay these guys less.
RUSH: You said something key a moment ago and I —
RUBIO: Yes.
RUSH: — want to explore it. You said that as the Democrats propose it, we can’t just ignore it, we have to offer alternatives. Now, you’re a freshman in the Senate so this is not a comment directed at you, but I have been, just as a commentator and an observer, I’ve been amazed. The Democrats propose anything, and we have to accept it, that becomes the news of the day, the item of the day. We somehow have to be in favor of it, but we’re gonna make alternatives. Why can’t we just oppose something that they propose, such as Obamacare. Why did we have to offer alternatives? I know you weren’t there then, but why do we have to offer alternatives? They are proposing things that we intrinsically disagree with, why can’t we just say no?
RUBIO: Well, a couple things. We have opposed, for example, their infringement upon the Second Amendment. On the other hand, you know, our existing laws, we have people right now that are criminals, they’re going in and trying to buy a gun, they fail the existing background check and nobody prosecutes them. That’s a problem. They should enforce that and we had an amendment that would force them to do that. We do have people that are mentally ill in this country that shouldn’t be able — and everyone agrees with that, but also what about violence? No one’s talking about violence. All this focus on what they’re using to commit the violence and no one’s asking the fundamental question of why have we become a society where these acts of violence are happening so frequently? Of course the answer is societal breakdown, and you can’t legislate that.
I mean, there are things you can do to strengthen your society but you can’t force people to be better parents or believe in God or anything like that. On the immigration front, you talk to the business community, you talk to people in our economic system, look, if I were to say to you today, and I know you’re a big sports fan, so if I were to say to you today, you know, if someone can throw 99-mile-an-hour fastballs into the strike zone consistently you know we’re going to bring ’em here. There’s no way in the world we’re not going to. If someone is six-foot-eight and can, you know, dunk basketballs and never misses a 20-foot jump shot, you know we’re gonna keep them. But we’re not doing that for science and technology. We’re asking some of the —
RUSH: Yeah, but that’s a whole different thing —
RUBIO: Yeah.
RUSH: — than what we’re talking about with illegal immigration. We got 30 seconds, by the way, I want to give it to you to wrap up.
RUBIO: Well, that has to do with the immigration reform and modernizing the system. Look, here’s the bottom line. We’re not gonna deport 11 million people. The status quo is amnesty, and that’s why we’ve come up with a process where these folks have to come forward, undergo a background check, pay a fine, start paying taxes, not qualify for federal benefits, and wait 11 years, and then the only thing they get is the chance to apply for a green card. They still have to qualify for it. I know it’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than what we have right now.
RUSH: Senator Marco Rubio, Florida, really, as always, appreciate your time.
RUBIO: No, Rush, thanks for having me.
RUSH: You bet. I appreciate your straightforwardness, a straight shooter.In our continued effort to improve the quality of life for Neverwinter, we’re releasing a new update on June 7. The Maze Engine: Guild Alliances will contain several improvements to existing systems or content, which we’ll reveal as we approach the update’s release.
As the name states one of the major system changes will be guilds and strongholds. Previously, smaller guilds had a rough time donating to their coffer and keeping up with larger guilds who would unlock boons and gear at an accelerated pace due to their membership. We’re introducing alliances as a way for more adventurers to play together, organize events and to strengthen their stronghold. More information on alliances will be released in the near future!
A second major change coming will be Sword Coast Chronicles: a campaign of campaigns, if you will. This storybook-like interface will seamlessly mesh all campaigns together so adventurers won’t be intimidated when they hit level 70. Sword Coast Chronicles will guide new adventurers through the recommended order of post-70 content and will contain unique rewards.
Much like The Maze Engine, there’s much more around every corner and will be revealed soon!
Discuss on the official forumsKenneth Copp has always loved creating things by hand, but it might have surprised his boyhood self in Virginia to hear he’d one day be a full-time furniture maker in Maine, using machines powered entirely by horses.
Copp is a man who feels driven to discover the truest path to right living and to responsibly use Earth’s natural resources. It’s also led him on an odyssey through the spiritual spectrum.
When Copp was in his teens he left his mother’s Lutheran religious tradition to join the Mennonites, attracted by their simple lifestyle and closeness to the natural world. He later gravitated toward the Amish, whose principles deeply resonated with him for several decades. During those years, Copp mastered the art of fine, handcrafted woodwork, in keeping with Amish ideals. He and his family lived in several Amish communities around the United States, ending up in Thorndike, Maine.
Copp is a voracious learner with a deep-seated inclination to seek and to question. Those questions — about religion, God and the Earth’s history — eventually led to his decision to leave his Amish faith behind. His admiration for Amish traditions and lifestyle, however, remains largely unabated. Copp still wears Amish clothing for its practicality. He is an avid believer in reducing consumption of fossil fuels. He believes in shared community support, travels by horse and buggy almost exclusively and hopes to teach students at nearby Unity College about horse care and how to drive a horse and buggy.
“I’d like to see more people that have one to two acres keep a horse and buggy for local travel,” he said. “I think more people could do it if they wanted to.”
Copp ran his home-based business, Locust Grove Woodworks, exclusively by horse power for more than 17 years. Horses harnessed to a central hub inside his barn walk in a circle, turning gears connected to a line shaft that powers Copp’s woodworking machines in an adjoining room. In keeping with his disinclination to complacency, however, he hopes to transition to more sustainable and efficient sources of power — a horse treadmill, solar panels, and stored power. Though he still uses his horse power machine to operate some of his machinery, he currently uses grid electricity for the rest. Under strict Amish rules, he would not have been allowed to make that compromise, even in transition.
Part of his goal is to become more efficient by moving his machines from a distant barn into the same building that houses his showroom full of furniture. “I was planning to put in a horse treadmill because it takes up less room,” Copp said, “but the treadmill doesn’t have as much turning power.”
Then someone suggested that he use his four workhorses to feed a generator or alternator. That way he can store electricity in a battery bank.
Copp is dedicated to partnering with his horses, but “Horse power takes a lot of patience,” he said. “Unlike driving a buggy or plow, in a workshop you are not right behind the horse to talk to them or keep them moving.”
Copp uses a system of ropes that lead from his workshop to the horse power barn. If the horses slow down or stop, so do his machines, so he pulls a rope that flicks the horses’ flanks — like a tap on the shoulder to remind them to keep moving. Better long-term power storage would be more consistent and efficient.
In addition to the horse treadmill, Copp hopes to install solar panels to store energy. He hopes to get back off the grid entirely as soon as he is able, not because of any rules or dogma, but because it’s the right way to live.
Copp, who now thinks of himself as an “Amish atheist,” said his evolution of thought has felt almost like a rebirth, something he calls a “deconversion.” He attributes it to education and is now as devout a believer in learning as he once was in his faith.
“When you become educated,” he said, “you realize you’re not the only one |
the Journal's archrival the New York Times was among those singled out for criticism — Jobs hates the limited NYT Editors' Choice app — must have helped take the sting off. And Jobs did praise the WSJ's iPad app as very attractive. But the CEO also said the app was too slow, essentially calling it a clunky reading experience.
It was on this point that McLeod, who wouldn't comment for this post, is said to have engaged with Jobs. As president of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network, McLeod was at least a player on the paper's iPad strategy as well as a spokesman for it. It's not clear whether the Time Inc veteran got into it with Jobs during the more public Q&A or in a more private meeting afterward, but there was definitely a back and forth between the two men in front of other News Corp. hands: Word of McLeod's purportedly impertinent comments challenging Jobs ricocheted around the company almost instantly.
Jobs' visit to Murdoch's ranch was perhaps a more delicate occasion than McLeod had realized. On the one hand, you have a tightly wound tech executive — one with a rocky history with the Journal. It was the Journal's deputy managing editor who infuriated Jobs by tweeting from a prototype iPad that Jobs brought to the newspaper's office after the device was unveiled but before it was available for sale.
On the other hand you have News Corp. chairman Murdoch, an old school media mogul with, by all accounts, a huge admiration for Jobs and, in particular his iPad. Where Murdoch's digital nemesis Google specializes in indexing and aggregating free content and in offering free services, Jobs has built a brisk business selling old fashioned content for consumption on newfangled devices. Murdoch has called Jobs the best CEO in America.
That feeling is so genuine, some insiders believed, it's possible Murdoch would have seen any questioning of Jobs' statements as an insult to Jobs. The Apple CEO, after all, had been invited to hold forth, not necessarily to attend a press conference. (Wall Street Journal editor and ranch regular Robert Thomson was among those at News Corp. who declined to talk to us about McLeod's encounter and how it was received within News Corp.)
Or maybe McLeod really was over the line in whatever he said. Perhaps Jobs, who can be as icy as he is fiery, made it clear he felt insulted. It's not clear exactly how he reacted.
In any case, McLeod was not long for News Corp. Following the June Jobs encounter, his departure was announced publicly in early September. With no new gigs lined up and an avowed interest in finding similar work to tackle, McLeod did not appear to have planned his resignation.
It's widely agreed within the company that McLeod was not pushed out simply because of a conversation with Steve Jobs. There were other reasons the four year veteran didn't seem like the best fit for the company, which is trying to rapidly evolve its digital offerings. By some accounts, the Journal and News Corp. high command was already on the fence about whether they needed him prior to the Carmel retreat. There is a contingent who believe the Jobs encounter may have tipped the scales against him. And that perception alone testifies to the long shadow cast by America's most famous CEO — a shadow to be feared even in a different company, in a different industry, run by a CEO of very different generation, on a different side of the country thousands of miles away. Steve Jobs is the prototypical media mogul of the 21st Century, and you'd best not forget it.
[Photos of Jobs and Murdoch via Getty Images. Photo of McLeod via AllThingsD. Screenshot of Murdoch's ranch via NZ Life & Leisure.]You couldn't exactly miss them: the Canadian Forces Snowbirds made an appearance over Montreal today accompanied by their French counterparts, la Patrouille de France.
The air demonstration teams conducted a joint flyby over Parliament Hill in Ottawa and on to Montreal, in celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary of Confederation.
"The Royal Canadian Air Force is delighted to welcome the Patrouille de France to Canada as we celebrate Canada's 150 years of Confederation," said Lt.-Gen. Mike Hood, commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, in a media release.
"Canada and France have a profound connection, and our national air demonstration teams flying in formation is symbolic of our lasting friendship and alliance."
The Snowbird team flew nine CT-114 Tutor planes and the Patrouille de France team flew eight Alpha jets in a 17-ship formation. Two "photo-chase" aircraft accompanied the two teams.
In Montreal, their flight path took them over the Jacques Cartier Bridge, Montreal's Old Port and City Hall.
The teams were set to fly at a minimum altitude of 152 metres above the highest point of their flight path.
Great performance by <a href="https://twitter.com/RCAF_ARC">@RCAF_ARC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/CFSnowbirds">@CFSnowbirds</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/PAFofficiel">@PAFofficiel</a> over the hill today! Bien fait!! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/avgeek?src=hash">#avgeek</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ottnews?src=hash">#ottnews</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/snowbirds?src=hash">#snowbirds</a> <a href="https://t.co/lmg27E2Loc">pic.twitter.com/lmg27E2Loc</a> —@CASARAOttawa
The two teams took part in the Aero150 air show in Gatineau April 30.Mendo was the next obvious choice, following my idea from two days ago; isn't it funny how close his name is to being 'Mad Endo'? I suppose not much can be done in terms of unique names for endoskeletons, of all things - beyond calling them unfitting stuff like Barry or something, I guess.
Mendo always reminded me of a gorilla, what with the way his arms are sized and positioned in the actual game, so I tried focusing on his hands and overall brawny look here. Well, brawny for a metal skeleton, anyways.
Mendo was Lolbit's successor and best friend in the merchant business; whilst Lolbit made a name for herself by selling Animatronica's residents top-of-the-line home defense products, Mendo focused primarily on on the defense of the residents themselves. Taking advantage of the fact that animatronics could simply open themselves up for modification whenever they saw fit, Mendo worked with Lolbit to design skeletal reinforcements of the highest quality.
Just like Lolbit, Mendo was quick in befriending the quartet of odd robots who appeared to be on some sort of mission. He supplied them with wares frequently, so long as they had the money to make a purchase. This, of course, soon led to him having to cope with the mysterious disappearance of his best fox friend. With news of a nightmarish beast travelling through Animatronica soon hitting him, Mendo prepared himself for conflict. However, the being that eventually appeared before him was not who he was expecting.
Whilst he put up a decent fight, he could not prevent his code from being altered.
Before he knew it, his body was moving of its own volition, assembling enormous endoskeleton upgrades and attaching them to his frame.
Lolbit was the only thing he could think about as he set off to destroy the heroes he had once befriended, trying to cry out for help as mere growls came out of his iron throat.The Royal Canadian Geographical Society has published its first major update to the “Atlas of Canada” in 10 years, offering the latest snapshot of a country that has yet to be fully explored.
Society CEO John Geiger says the Canadian Arctic is still shrouded in mystery for geographers, who have only mapped about 10 per cent of its waterways. That’s still more than geographers knew 10 years ago, and those discoveries inform the latest edition of the “Atlas of Canada,” which is in stores now.
“We don’t know what lies beneath the ocean in Arctic Canada,” Geiger told CTV’s Canada AM on Monday. “There’s a lot that we don’t know.”
Geiger said he was in the Arctic last summer on a mapping expedition to chart Canadian routes through the oft-disputed territory.
“We all identify ourselves as a Northern people,” Geiger said. “But really, what’s striking is so few Canadians actually visit places like the Arctic.”
Arctic sovereignty remains a contentious issue for Canada on the world stage. Global warming is opening up new shipping routes through Arctic waters, but Canada must contend with Arctic neighbours like Russia and Denmark for the rights to those shipping routes. The area is also thought to contain plentiful oil, natural gas and fishing resources.
A number of UN-mediated treaties, trade deals and agreements have been hammered out to divide up the region, but Denmark recently threw a wrench in the works by laying claim to waters near the North Pole.
The Danes claimed earlier this month that their country is connected to the North Pole by a “continental shelf,” which they say gives them rights to the surrounding waters.
Canada now faces difficult negotiations to divvy up the North, but further mapping expeditions will help clarify the issue.
The actual mapping of the Arctic floor likely won’t be complete for another 10 or 15 years, but scientific expeditions continue to turn up new wonders.
Scientists on a 2010 Arctic expedition discovered the remains of an ancient, never-before-seen breed of mollusk while mapping the ocean floor.
Earlier this year, archaeologists found the wrecked HMS Erebus at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The vessel was one of two Franklin Expedition ships that were lost on a search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.
Researchers' knowledge of the Arctic is better now than it was in 1845, but it’s still far from complete.
“The history of mapping is really the history of our country,” Geiger said.
Geiger acknowledged that most people use Google Maps or GPS devices to find their way around now, but the Atlas of Canada offers unique content and context that readers won’t find elsewhere.
“It’s not just maps,” he said. “They are works of art, and you’re understanding your country.”
Geiger emphasized the value of the atlas as a tactile experience, a work of art and a lasting snapshot of the ongoing effort to fully explore our vast country.
“The world changes, the country changes, but this is a glimpse of Canada at this moment in its evolution,” he said.Every single person we choose to associate with brings out a different side of us. Therefore, the more diverse our group of friends is, the more dynamic and flexible we become as an individual.
A lot of us repeat the cliche that “opposites attract,” but psychology research tells a different story. We’re much more likely to build relationships with people who are similar to us than people who are different from us.
This is called the similarity attraction effect. And while it may be a general tendency in most human behavior, it’s not necessarily a good thing.
In this article I’ll elaborate on this tendency for us to only interact with those who are similar to us, and how we can overcome this bias by expanding the range of people we associate with on a daily basis.
In one study done by Columbia University, they invited executives to participate in a cocktail mixer. Most people going into the meeting had goals of diversity, they would say they wanted to “meet as many different people as possible” and “expand their social network.”
However, by tracking their interactions through electronic name tags, researchers found the opposite. People didn’t seek interactions with people who were different then them, instead they tended to attract with people who were most like them: marketers spoke with other marketers, investors spoke with other investors, and accountants interacted with other accountants.
We have a tendency to be drawn to people based on the similarities we have with them, whether it be race, nationality, culture, religion, occupation, hobbies, or whatever.
It’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it’s sometimes important to go beyond our “comfort zone” of people and seek relationships with those who are wildly different from us.
If you only hang out with people who are like you, then they reinforce the person who you already are. But if you hang out with people who are also very different from you, then you are given an opportunity to grow in new ways.
Having a diverse group of friends gives you exposure to all different types of personalities, cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs. And at the end of the day exposing yourself to these new things can only make you more balanced and better educated as an individual.
So how do you start building a more diverse group of friends? The core of it is cultivating open-mindedness.
I don’t want you to analyze your group of friends and be like, “Oh, I need a black friend or a gay friend.” That’s of course not the right way to approach relationships.
However, if you are open-minded about everyone you meet, then you’re going to naturally find yourself meeting all different types of people.
Be interested in people in general. Everyone has their own stories and peculiarities. When you approach everyone with the intent to get to know them and understand them, you’ll often find that most people are pretty damn awesome in their own way.
Stay updated on new articles and resources in psychology and self improvement:Sanders' statement comes just days after Clinton advisers, who are currently discussing possible vice presidential picks, also named Warren as a possibility in interviews with the New York Times.
"Elizabeth Warren, I think, has been a real champion in standing up for working families, taking on Wall Street," he said. "There are other fantastic women who have been active in all kinds of fights who I think would make great vice presidential candidates."
When asked on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Tuesday if he would commit himself to nominating a woman as his vice president, Sanders demurred but said that he would give "very, very serious thought" to naming a woman as his running mate. Pressed on the matter, he named Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, as a possibility.
As the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination comes down to the wire, the two candidates are looking ahead to their potential running mates — or at least ever-avid political reporters are. As the campaigns have been repeatedly prodded of late on their possible VP pick, one name is creating a lot of buzz: Elizabeth Warren.
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As the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination comes down to the wire, the two candidates are looking ahead to their potential running mates — or at least ever-avid political reporters are. As the campaigns have been repeatedly prodded of late on their possible VP pick, one name is creating a lot of buzz: Elizabeth Warren.
When asked on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Tuesday if he would commit himself to nominating a woman as his vice president, Sanders demurred but said that he would give "very, very serious thought" to naming a woman as his running mate. Pressed on the matter, he named Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, as a possibility.
"Elizabeth Warren, I think, has been a real champion in standing up for working families, taking on Wall Street," he said. "There are other fantastic women who have been active in all kinds of fights who I think would make great vice presidential candidates."
Sanders' statement comes just days after Clinton advisers, who are currently discussing possible vice presidential picks, also named Warren as a possibility in interviews with the New York Times.
Related: Clinton and Sanders Fight Over Gun Control Ahead of Connecticut's Primary
For Clinton, the calculus is clear. Sanders has ignited the far-left wing of the party and brought out many new and independent voters who find Clinton's progressive bona fides lacking. A quarter of Sanders' supporters have said they would not vote for Clinton in the general election. But having a running mate with a strong, progressive resume like Warren's could help to bring some of Sanders' backers back into the fold.
Sanders, on the other hand, has a lot in common with Warren ideologically. They both built careers railing against a financial system that is unfair while promising to break up big banks and other power structures that supersede the needs of average Americans. Warren would be a partner in messaging, and could potentially help Sanders broaden his appeal to female voters.
But whether Warren would actually want the office is another question. John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president, is famously said to have remarked that the position isn't "worth a bucket of warm piss." Warren's office did not respond to a request for comment.
While both candidates have name-checked Warren, she has yet to do the same for either of them. She hasn't endorsed either candidate in the presidential race, and is just one of two senators to avoid wading into it. The former Harvard Law School professor, whose railing against big banks helped her to get elected to the Senate, where she is now one of its most prominent voices, has been conspicuous in her absence from the campaign trail this year.
Related: New York's Attorney General Will Investigate Alleged Voter Suppression in State's Primary
In an interview with CBS last month, Warren said that she had no schedule for when she would dive into the Democratic race, but said that she was "glad" that both candidates were discussing major issues on the campaign trail that are important to her: money in politics, education, and inequality.
But Warren wasn't always silent on the 2016 race. Warren signed a letter in 2013 — along with every other woman in the US Senate — encouraging Clinton to run for president. The following year, as she denied her own interest in running for the presidency, Warren reiterated that Clinton would make a great president.
"I hope she does. Hillary is terrific," she told ABC's This Week at the time.
But that was long before Sanders jumped into the race and proved to be a significant challenger. Since, Warren has stayed mum — at least on the Democratic side.
Clinton's advisers told the New York Times that she is less concerned about finding a running mate whose personality or ideology will help her campaign than she is about finding someone who can dominate the vice presidential debates and be "an effective attack dog" against the Republican nominee.
Though Warren has been careful to avoid taking sides in the Democratic primary, she hasn't shied away from attacking Republican candidates.
Last month, Warren laid out a viral social media assault against Donald Trump, calling him a "loser" and a "wannabe tyrant" who could be "a serious threat" while comparing him to "history's worst authoritarians" in a series of tweets.
Related: Elizabeth Warren Slams 'Loser' Donald Trump in Twitter Tirade
Last week, Warren started up a new tirade against Senator Ted Cruz, responding to a fundraising email that the Texas senator sent out to supporters highlighting how running for president is "a significant sacrifice," describing how he doesn't get to see his family often, loses sleep, and must withstand constant attacks from his opponents.
Are you kidding me, — Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma)April 19, 2016
You chose to run for President, — Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma)April 19, 2016
It's unclear whether Warren will weigh in on the Clinton-Sanders battle before the Democratic convention in July. The two candidates will face off in five state primaries Tuesday night, as their race for the nomination nears its final stages.
Follow Sarah Mimms on Twitter: @SarahMMimmsFirst Lady Michelle Obama, will dine at a Tibetan restaurant during her visit to Chengdu (March 25-26), the capital of a province with a significant Tibetan population.
With the focus of her visit on education, the International Campaign for Tibet has urged the First Lady to raise the issue of the importance of a genuine bilingual policy that asserts the centrality of the Tibetan language in areas where Tibetans live.
State media announced, just days before Michelle Obama’s visit, plans to ensure that Chinese language will predominate over Tibetan in schools in Tibetan areas.
The visit by U.S. First Lady Obama to Chengdu, including a meal at a Tibetan restaurant, offers the opportunity to inquire about the state of Tibetan language education in the People’s Republic of China.
“We welcome the First Lady’s visit to a Tibetan restaurant, a demonstration of the long-standing American interest in the distinct Tibetan culture,” said Matteo Mecacci, President of the International Campaign for Tibet. “Given the trip’s focus on education, we hope she avails herself of the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by Tibetans as they try to prevent their language from becoming the secondary language of instruction in their homeland.”
The term ‘bilingual education’ has different meanings to Tibetans and Chinese. Tibetans seek to preserve their language by giving it at least equal footing with Mandarin. To Chinese officials, ‘bilingual education’ policy provides that Chinese is the main language of instruction, with Tibetan relegated to just Tibetan language class.
As an example, on March 17, the Chinese People’s Daily reported that Tibetan schools in Tsoe, Kanlho area of Gansu province, had implemented the ‘Sino-Tibetan bilingual teaching system’ with an expansion of Chinese language teaching. On the same day, the state media reported that both primary and secondary schools had fully implemented the ‘bilingual education system’ in Dechen (Chinese: Deqing) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan (http://ti.gzznews.com/Html/News/KbNews/DiQing/14/03/Content_201403177621.html). (see below)
In Qinghai province, which is predominantly the Tibetan area of Amdo, government efforts to prioritize Chinese over Tibetan led to widespread peaceful protests by Tibetan schoolchildren in 2010.
In response, local educated people in Tibetan nomadic and rural areas have set up ‘pure language’ groups to ensure that even those with little education can learn and speak Tibetan. Tibetan intellectuals are risking their careers to spend their time expanding work on the Tibetan language together with modern information technology.
“Tibetans have reached a critical point in the struggle to preserve their unique language and its remarkable literary and religious culture,” said Matteo Mecacci. “But the Tibetan language, which is core to Tibetan communication, culture, religion and national identity has been steadily undermined under Chinese rule over the past six decades. The Chinese authorities are focusing on the dominance of the Chinese language to the detriment of Tibetan, and are also marginalizing the Tibetan language by withdrawing it from the curriculum.”
ICT briefing: Tibetan language education
Chinese policies that undermine Tibetan language run counter to provisions in China’s own laws, specifically the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law. The Dalai Lama has pointed out that Chinese legal protections for language and culture are not implemented in Tibet. Primary reliance on the Tibetan language creates serious obstacles for Tibetans in terms of their further education, jobs and income in the Chinese-run system. Research shows that children do better when the language acquired from birth is the teaching medium. While primary-level classes are still taught in Tibetan in many Tibetan areas, instruction as higher levels is in Chinese in all subjects other than Tibetan language classes. Tibetans are find themselves at an educational disadvantage. Tibetans want to learn Chinese, but not at the expense of the integrity of their mother tongue, in which their religious and cultural heritage is transmitted. The Chinese government spends heavily on education in Tibetan areas. A nine-year compulsory education program, in the areas where this is implemented, provides three years of free vocational education programs. The entire curriculum is in Chinese, however. Students who choose ways to learn through the Tibetan language medium at middle school must pay higher fees than those at Chinese middle schools, even while the schools are administered by the same education department. Tibetans have created non-governmental groups and small private schools for instruction in Tibetan language. These schools, where Chinese is also taught as a major subject, aim to sharpen youths’ knowledge and understanding of their linguistic and cultural identity, history, literature, poetry and other subjects. Authorities have responded negatively to some of these Tibetan initiatives. Since 2008, several Tibetan community leaders involved in Tibetan language promotion or active in civil society have been imprisoned, often in attempts to ‘cut down the tall trees’ by removing figures of influence from the community. A number of Tibetan students who participated in peaceful, moderate demonstrations to protect their language have also been imprisoned. Private schools have been closed as well.
Translation of recent articles on ‘bilingual education’
50,000 Gansu Primary and Secondary Students to Receive “Tibetan and Chinese Bilingual” Education
http://ti.gzznews.com/Html/News/KbNews/DiQing/14/03/Content_201403177621.html
“I’m currently teaching a fifth-year class. I remember the time when they started going to school: I asked one child to clean the blackboard, but instead he brought his homework to me.” At 11 AM, reporters arrived at the Gansu Province Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Tsoe City #4 Primary School for interviews. School teacher Xue Liyun said, “Tibetan students studying Chinese, and Chinese characters, are basically starting from scratch. After the school started Chinese and Tibetan bilingual education, children have an environment to study Chinese and Chinese characters, and when they reach the 5th or 6th year speaking Chinese and writing Chinese characters is basically no problem.
According to facts provided by school Party Secretary Li Kangping, this teaching model is therefore based on making Tibetan the teaching language, making use of a full-time boarding school which uses the “Five Provinces Tibetan Area Chinese Textbook” and teaches Chinese language classes. Currently the school has a total of 1,484 students, all Tibetan.
According to statistics, at the end of 2013 Kanlho had a total of 143 Chinese and Tibetan bilingual education schools, of which 125 were primary schools and 18 were secondary schools. 51,363 students are receiving Chinese and Tibetan bilingual education, which accounts for 37.08% of the primary and secondary students in the prefecture. The “Tibetan and Chinese bilingual” education model is being continuously optimized to increase the enrollment of school-age Tibetan children, to increase the completion rate and graduation rates of Tibetan students, and to win the support and welcome of the masses of farmers and nomads.
Implementation of Tibetan and Chinese Bilingual Education Achieves Initial Success in Yunnan’s Dechen Tibetan Region
http://www.mzb.com.cn/html/Home/report/14037350-1.htm
Recently this reporter entered several schools in Yunnan Province Dechen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture which have implemented Tibetan and Chinese bilingual education. Students who are serious about studying the Tibetan language can be seen everywhere, forming a unique campus landscape.
According to facts provided by Yunnan Province Dechen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Education Secretary Yang Hongbing, over the years Dechen Prefecture has actively promoted Tibetan and Chinese bilingual education, leaving the spoken and written Tibetan language with a strong heritage, and cultivating a large number of educated individuals for the Tibetan region. Currently there are 22 Tibetan language schools in the prefecture, with nearly 3,000 people receiving standard Tibetan language learning in schools.
In recent years, the enthusiasm for learning Tibetan has also increased among non-Tibetan students. At both the Dechen Tibetan Secondary School or the Gyalthang County Nationality Elementary School, some Naxi, Yi, Lisu, and even Chinese students are studying Tibetan. In the eyes of these students, bilingual Tibetan and Chinese is the “common language” of the Tibetan region. Dechen Tibetan Secondary School Tibetan teacher Jiayang said, “Language is an important carrier of cultural transmission, and having children study Tibetan has a positive effect on Tibetans cultural heritage. It isn’t difficult for students of other nationalities to study Tibetan, and because they often use Tibetan to communicate with classmates at school, their progress is obvious.
Dechen Tibetan Secondary School, founded in 1994, is Yunnan’s only fully bilingual school. Vice Principle Li Jixian explained that the school currently has nine middle school classes and six high school classes. More than 940 students study here, of whom over 95% are Tibetan. In order to reduce the price of studying, the government has provided 1,000 yuan living allowance per year for every student from rural or urban poor families.
Tibetan Secondary School has 6 Tibetan lessons each week, almost equal with the number of hours given to language, mathematics, and other core classes. In recent years Tibetan Secondary School has had a college entrance exam rate of more than 98%, with most students accepted after graduation by the Central Nationalities University, the Southwestern Nationalities University, the Yunnan Nationalities University, Tibet Autonomous Region University and other universities, mainly to study Tibetan medicine, teacher training, and professional Tibetan language. After graduation most people return to the Tibetan region to build their homeland.
It is understood that the Gyalthang Nationality Primary School put Tibetan language study content into the everyday curriculum beginning in 1999. In recent years the dropout rate has been 0%. From the 1980s until today, the Gyalthang Nationality Primary School has delivered a base of nearly 2,500 students with Tibetan language skills to receive higher education.
Yang Hongbing says that in order to inherit and promote Tibetan culture, Dechen Prefecture will strive to construct a completely bilingual education system in the future, while at the same time adding public and elective classes on Tibetan calligraphy, arts, and crafts, and Tibetan culture for tour guides, training more multi-talented people.In the first of an occasional series in which the greatest recording artists reveal their favourite records, Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time. So for the lowdown on Zappa and Bill Hicks, step right up...
1 In The Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra (Capitol) 1955
Actually, the very first 'concept' album. The idea being you put this record on after dinner and by the last song you are exactly where you want to be. Sinatra said that he's certain most baby boomers were conceived with this as the soundtrack.
2 Solo Monk by Thelonious Monk (Columbia) 1964
Monk said 'There is no wrong note, it has to do with how you resolve it'. He almost sounded like a kid taking piano lessons. I could relate to that when I first started playing the piano, because he was decomposing the music while he was playing it. It was like demystifying the sound, because there is a certain veneer to jazz and to any music, after a while it gets traffic rules, and the music takes a backseat to the rules. It's like aerial photography, telling you that this is how we do it. That happens in folk music too. Try playing with a bluegrass group and introducing new ideas. Forget about it. They look at you like you're a communist. On Solo Monk, he appears to be composing as he plays, extending intervals, voicing chords with impossible clusters of notes. 'I Should Care' kills me, a communion wine with a twist. Stride, church, jump rope, Bartok, melodies scratched into the plaster with a knife. A bold iconoclast. Solo Monk lets you not only see these melodies without clothes, but without skin. This is astronaut music from Bedlam.
3 Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart (Straight) 1969
The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that'll never be beat, it's a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.
4 Exile On Main St. by Rolling Stones (Rolling Stones Records) 1972
'I Just Want To See His Face' - that song had a big impact on me, particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does. When he sings like a girl, I go crazy. I said, 'I've got to learn how to do that.' I couldn't really do it until I stopped smoking. That's when it started getting easier to do. [Waits's own] 'Shore Leave' has that, 'All Stripped Down', 'Temptation'. Nobody does it like Mick Jagger; nobody does it like Prince. But this is just a tree of life. This record is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it.
5 The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars (Point Music) 1975
This is difficult to find, have you heard this? It's a musical impression of the sinking of the Titanic. You hear a small chamber orchestra playing in the background, and then slowly it starts to go under water, while they play. It also has 'Jesus Blood' on it. I did a version of that with Gavin Bryars. I first heard it on my wife's birthday, at about two in the morning in the kitchen, and I taped it. For a long time I just had a little crummy cassette of this song, didn't know where it came from, it was on one of those Pacifica radio stations where you can play anything you want. This is really an interesting evening's music.
6 The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan (Columbia) 1975
With Dylan, so much has been said about him, it's difficult so say anything about him that hasn't already been said, and say it better. Suffice it to say Dylan is a planet to be explored. For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in - so the bootlegs I obtained in the Sixties and Seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me. His journey as a songwriter is the stuff of myth, because he lives within the ether of the songs. Hail, hail The Basement Tapes. I heard most of these songs on bootlegs first. There is a joy and an abandon to this record; it's also a history lesson.
7 Lounge Lizards by Lounge Lizards (EG) 1980
They used to accuse John Lurie of doing fake jazz - a lot of posture, a lot of volume. When I first heard it, it was so loud, I wanted to go outside and listen through the door, and it was jazz. And that was an unusual thing, in New York, to go to a club and hear jazz that loud, at the same volume people were listening to punk rock. Get the first record, The Lounge Lizards. You know, John's one of those people, if you walk into a field with him, he'll pick up an old pipe and start to play it, and get a really good sound out of it. He's very musical, works with the best musicians, but never go fishing with him. He's a great arranger and composer with an odd sense of humour.
8 Rum Sodomy and the Lash by The Pogues (Stiff) 1985
Sometimes when things are real flat, you want to hear something flat, other times you just want to project onto it, something more like.... you might want to hear the Pogues. Because they love the West. They love all those old movies. The thing about Ireland, the idea that you can get into a car and point it towards California and drive it for the next five days is like Euphoria, because in Ireland you just keep going around in circles, those tiny little roads. 'Dirty Old Town', 'The Old Main Drag'. Shane has the gift. I believe him. He knows how to tell a story. They are a roaring, stumbling band. These are the dead end kids for real. Shane's voice conveys so much. They play like soldiers on leave. The songs are epic. It's whimsical and blasphemous, seasick and sacrilegious, wear it out and then get another one.
9 I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen (Columbia) 1988
Euro, klezmer, chansons, apocalyptic, revelations, with that mellifluous voice. A shipwrecked Aznovar, washed up on shore. Important songs, meditative, authoritative, and Leonard is a poet, an Extra Large one.
10 The Specialty Sessions by Little Richard (Specialty Records) 1989
The steam and chug of 'Lucille' alone pointed a finger that showed the way. The equipment wasn't meant to be treated this way. The needle is still in the red.
11 Startime by James Brown (Polydor) 1991
I first saw James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable... it was like putting a finger in a light socket. He did the whole thing with the cape. He did 'Please Please Please'. It was such a spectacle. It had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church. It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas and you couldn't ignore the impact of it in your life. You'd been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to the stage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat.
12 Bohemian-Moravian Bands by Texas-Czech (Folk Lyric) 1993
I love these Czech-Bavarian bands that landed in Texas of all places. The seminal river for mariachi came from that migration to that part of the United States, bringing the accordion over, just like the drum and fife music of post slavery, they picked up the revolutionary war instruments and played blues on them. This music is both sour and bitter, and picante, and floating above itself like steam over the kettle. There's a piece called the 'Circling Pigeons Waltz', it's the most beautiful thing - kind of sour, like a wheel about to go off the road all the time. It's the most lilting little waltz. It's accordion, soprano sax, clarinet, bass, banjo and percussion.
13 The Yellow Shark by Frank Zappa (Barking Pumpkin) 1993
It is his last major work. The ensemble is awe-inspiring. It is a rich pageant of texture in colour. It's the clarity of his perfect madness, and mastery. Frank governs with Elmore James on his left and Stravinsky on his right. Frank reigns and rules with the strangest tools.
14 Passion for Opera Aria (EMI Classics) 1994
I heard 'Nessun Dorma' in the kitchen at Coppola's with Raul Julia one night, and it changed my life, that particular Aria. I had never heard it. He asked me if I had ever heard |
is one of the most remarkable leakers we’ve ever seen gets to flee overseas, and then talk to the Department of Justice about what he wants for his trial. Come home, son, and spend your 30 years in jail. He’s cooked.”
CNN’s “expert” is apparently unaware that the DOJ very frequently — almost always, in fact — negotiates with people charged with very serious felonies over plea agreements. He’s also apparently unaware of this thing called “asylum,” which the U.S. routinely grants to people charged by other countries with crimes on the ground that they’d be persecuted with imprisonment if they returned home.
Also, with this prevailing mentality being spewed by former government officials and current news network “experts” — “come home, son, and spend your 30 years in jail. He’s cooked” — does anyone have difficulty seeing why Snowden believes he would not get a fair trial?
Ignatius: “It must be very difficult to be Edward Snowden, living in the Moscow of Vladimir Putin, at a time when Putin’s opposition is being murdered in the streets, so I can’t help but think that Snowden wants out, and the fact that he’s willing to negotiate, which he said before he wouldn’t do, is interesting.”
It’s hard to overstate how false and misleading this is. Snowden had never said he wouldn’t negotiate for his return; as I’ve demonstrated, he’s been negotiating this through his lawyers informally for a long time, and his position has always been the same: he’d like to return home if he could be assured a fair trial. David Ignatitus just made all of this up, all based on this fake news item that Snowden has had some sort of sudden change of heart.
Then there’s the bit about living in the Russia “of Vladimir Putin.” For more than 60 years, U.S. elites have been eager to tell Americans that anyone living in Russia is inherently miserable. That’s particularly true of Western dissidents: the apocryphal stories of British defector Kim Philby being destroyed by a dark, lonely, miserable existence that culminated in his drinking himself to death are often invoked to suggest that a similar fate awaits Snowden (who doesn’t drink, who lives with his longtime girlfriend, who is regarded as a hero by millions and millions of people around the world, who receives awards and prestigious appointments, and who is incredibly gratified and fulfilled both by what he did and his current life).
That’s all Ignatius is up to with these claims, all based on the obvious media-created fiction that Snowden has suddenly realized how desperate he is to leave Russia. Again, this entire conversation — like the whole media blitz yesterday about this story — is all based on utter fiction.
This “everyone-in-Russia-is-miserable” line has been a staple of U.S propaganda since the end of World War II, and remarkably, nothing has changed. Indeed, the climate created by our New Cold Warriors is, in some respects, even more desperate than the “he’s-a-Soviet-shill” tactics pioneered in the 1950s (yesterday, BuzzFeed investigated a journalist for the Thought Crime of writing articles which BuzzFeed’s blogger Miriam Elder deemed to be “pro-Russia,” and thus smeared him with evidence-free innuendo as a likely paid Kremlin agent). Yes, many political rights are severely abridged in Russia, but there are over 140 million people living in Russia and some of them are fulfilled human beings living fulfilled human lives (BREAKING!) while there is substantial human misery in the U.S. as well.
Snowden did not choose to live in Russia. He was forced to remain there when trying to leave because the U.S. government revoked his passport and bullied the Cubans out of offering him safe passage on his way to Latin America. But whether jingoists like David Ignatius can comprehend this or not, Snowden (as most people would) actually considers living in Moscow with his girlfriend and freely participating in the vital global debate he provoked to be preferable to withering in a cage inside the repressive U.S. penal state.
Blitzer: “What do you think, Mr. Speaker? He could spend the rest of his life in Moscow — it might be chilly there in the winter — but it’s better, presumably, than jail?”
I can’t overstate how many times I’ve heard people say that Snowden must be miserable in Moscow because of how cold it gets in the winter. Leave aside the bizarre view that climate is the greatest factor in determining how happy and fulfilled someone’s life is, and further leave aside the notion that all 140 million Russians must have a horrible life because it’s cold during the winter. There are other places — such as Canada, North Dakota, Sweden, Boston — that are also extremely cold; do people believe that residents there are, as a result of the weather, inherently doomed to horrible lives?
Gingrich: “I think if we can find a way to get him home, get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked... it’s worth doing, but I think he’d have to serve jail time, and it’d probably be fairly lengthy. I don’t think the country would tolerate this level of betrayal, not having some very significant jail time — Blitzer: “You say lengthy. What do you think? Gingrich: “I’m not an expert in this, but I’d say more than 10 years.”
Where to start? First, Gingrich’s belief that it’s possible to “get the rest of the documents that he has not leaked” is simply adorable. Second, Gingrich is a fascinating choice for CNN to have pontificate on proper punishments given that he is the first House Speaker to ever be punished for ethics violations, for which he was fined $300,000. Third, David Petraeus was just allowed to plead guilty for leaking extremely sensitive secrets — not out of a whistleblowing desire to inform the public but simply to satisfy his mistress — and will almost certainly spend no time in jail; Gingrich, Blitzer, Ignatius and friends would never dare suggest that the General should go to prison (just as DC’s stern law-and-order advocates who demand Snowden’s imprisonment would never dare suggest the same for James Clapper for having lied to Congress).
Most important, if you were Snowden, and you constantly heard U.S. political and media elites consigning you to prison for a decade or longer before your trial started, would you remotely believe assurances that you’d get a fair trial? What rational person would ever willingly submit themselves to a penal state that imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world, run by people with this mentality?
And when you examine case studies like this of what U.S. media is not just capable of doing but eager to do — concoct a completely false narrative based on fictitious events and then proceed to spend a full day drawing all sorts of self-serving and propagandistic lessons from it — why would anyone regard what comes spewing forth from them with anything other than extreme suspicion and contempt?
Photo: Bryan Bedder/GettyThere have been a handful of memorable goaltending performances in the history of the Ottawa Senators franchise:
Patrick Lalime racking up three consecutive shutouts in the 2002 playoffs against the Philadelphia Flyers.
Mike Brodeur carrying his own equipment up the ramp at Madison Square Garden in 2010 because he barely made it to the game on time – only to post a shutout win over the New York Rangers.
Pascal Leclaire saving 56 shots in a triple-overtime win over the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 2010 playoffs to stave off elimination.
But what Craig Anderson accomplished Sunday night – a 37-save shutout in Edmonton in his first game back after the club announced his wife Nicholle has been diagnosed with cancer – moves to the top of the list of impressive goaltending performances in franchise history.
Recency bias often clouds our judgment and prompts us to say, ‘That was the greatest performance I’ve ever seen’ just moments after a final whistle sounds.
But we can say with great confidence that we’ll always remember the night Anderson went into Edmonton and posted a shutout with the heaviest of hearts.
The mere fact that he flew from his family home in Florida to Edmonton at Nicholle’s urging was impressive enough. Given the travel and the mental fatigue, nobody would have blamed Anderson if he wasn’t sharp or allowed several goals. Anderson had carte blanche with the Sens fans and media heading into Sunday’s game; the rare instance when an entire hockey-mad market didn’t place any expectations on its goaltender. If Anderson had surrendered five goals last night, the Sens fan base would have been there to offer a supportive shoulder. And the media wouldn’t have surrounded his stall to ask pointed questions about his on-ice performance.
Even the most hardened journalists and broadcasters – who have been trained to stay neutral and objective – were pulling for Anderson last night. The old adage in our industry says to cheer for the story, not for the players. Last night, however, was the rare instance where it felt okay to do both because they were one and the same. In the final minutes of that game, we were all privately saying the same thing so as to not jinx it with a public declaration: “Please hockey gods, just let him have this shutout.”
As the final buzzer sounded and Anderson secured the shutout, Chris Cuthbert uttered a phrase on the TSN broadcast that melted the collective hearts of hockey fans: “That one was for you Nicholle.”
The tear-inducing moments didn’t stop there, as Anderson stepped back onto the ice as the game’s first star. His counterpart Cam Talbot stayed on the Oilers bench to cheer Anderson – the finest example of respect and sportsmanship that can be displayed. And until last night, I’d never heard an opposition building give a standing ovation to a goaltender who just shut out the home team. It was almost like the Oilers and their fan base felt privileged to play a secondary role in this story.
The Edmonton fans clearly understood what Craig and Nicholle Anderson have known for the past couple of weeks: That sports mean nothing; but they can also mean everything at the same time.
We saw it a few weeks ago when Dee Gordon hit an emotional home run in the first plate appearance for a Miami Marlins player after the tragic death of teammate Jose Fernandez. We felt it at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 when Joannie Rochette delivered an emotional bronze-medal performance just days after her mother suddenly passed away. And we witnessed it a few years ago when Brett Favre tossed four touchdowns in the first half of a Monday night game in Oakland with his father’s death weighing heavily on his mind. Ottawa fans will always remember the night when Wade Redden flew to Tampa in 2006 just hours after his mother's funeral and scored a goal and added two assists in a playoff win for the Senators.
Last night’s performance by Anderson was yet another reminder of why we love sports. It can be the ultimate distraction from our own daily stresses and anxieties. And when we see an athlete dealing with a real-life problem that we can relate to, it makes them more relatable to the common fan.
The TSN 1200 radio post-game show Sunday night was flooded with calls and e-mails from places as far away was New Zealand, Australia and Turks and Caicos. Sports fans around the world felt connected and bonded to an Ottawa Senators goalie during an otherwise meaningless October game in Edmonton.
For a few hours, we didn’t look at Anderson as a goalie making $4.7 million. Instead, he was unmasked as a caring husband and father who is trying to work through a family crisis.
It’s always inspiring when we see that athletes need sports for more than just the paycheque.A mountain rescue team is urging outdoor enthusiasts to oppose the removal of a phone box in a remote Lake District hamlet.
BT Payphones has applied for permission to remove the phone box at Seathwaite in Borrowdale.
Keswick Mountain Rescue Team said the public telephone is a vital means of calling help in an area without mobile phone reception.
A team spokesperson said: “Although this phone box may get little day-to-day use in this age of mobile phones, it has been and still is a real lifeline during emergencies.
“There is no phone reception on any network at the head of the valley and so it remains the only form of communication to the police and mountain rescue.”
The rescue team is asking walkers and other to make their views known on the online planning pages of Allerdale Borough Council, which has received the application from the subsidiary of the telecoms giant.
The Seathwaite phone lies on the route to Scafell Pike via Styhead Tarn and the Corridor Route, and sits in the shadow of Base Brown and Glaramara in the valley lying south-west of Rosthwaite.
Keswick Mountain Rescue Team, one of the busiest in the Lake District, covers the area around Seathwaite and responds to frequent calls for help from walkers and others in distress in the area.
Comments can be made on the Allerdale Borough Council website.August 2017 was the month that made many cryptocurrencies investors rich!. Everyone who had Bitcoin in a Bitcoin Cash supporting wallet was credited with same amounts of the airdropped Bitcoin cash.
Although many wallets and Bitcoin exchanges were not ready to offer support for Bitcoin cash at the time due to network uncertainties and disruptions that come with a hard fork, Bitcoin cash support gradually increased over time.
With the increase in support, came also increase in price. Bitcoin cash which initially traded at around $200 to $300, but as the network gradually became stable; it had a direct bullish effect on the Bitcoin cash market price.
As wallet and exchanges began to offer support for Bitcoin cash, it also made the Bitcoin cash price move on the bullish side of life. It is important to note that Bitcoin cash market price surpassed the $2000 price area before experiencing a significant price correction and as at press time, its currently trading at around $1,384 with a market capitalization of $23.28 billion.
ANALYSTS SAY BITCOIN CASH WILL NOT SURVIVE ON THE LONG RUN
While Bitcoin has a massive hierarchy of developers who are continually prepping up the Bitcoin code base, Bitcoin cash can only boast of a handful of developers.
The chief engineer at Bitgo, which is a giant In the Bitcoin and Blockchain security ecosystem, is of the opinion that Bitcoin cash would do excellently well in a short-term timeframe, but will struggle in the future. The engineering guru explained that Bitcoin cash has a very shallow development team.
In his words:
“I suspect BCH will do alright for the short term: there is plenty of demand from users to externalize their cost of the transaction into node operators. But crypto asset engineering is a marathon, not a sprint.”
In another development on November 12, Adam Back, who is one of the developers mentioned in the original Bitcoin whitepaper released by Satoshi Nakamoto. Adam Back said Bitcoin has the edge over Bitcoin cash regarding long-term scaling because Bitcoin cash lacks the infrastructure to support second layer scaling.
Adam back further explained that Segwit is a bug fix which makes excellent scaling on layer 2 and lightning possible, but Bitcoin cash intentionally removed the bug fix. He continued by saying Bitcoin will be fine in the long term, but Bitcoin cash will have scaling issues because of the absence of Segwit and lightning.
It remains to be seen how this whole scenario will play out, but in my candid opinion, I think Bitcoin will forever stay the “original Bitcoin.”O'Reilly Blames Obama For Not Ending Institutionalized Racism But Highlights Affirmative Action Programs April 4, 2013 3:08 PM EDT ››› Blog ›››››› SERGIO MUNOZ
Fox News host Bill O' Reilly suggested President Obama is to blame for the decades-long high unemployment rate among African-Americans, ignoring other factors such as institutionalized racism, even while acknowledging his employers have used affirmative action programs.
In an interview with Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Robert L. Johnson on the April 3 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly wondered why "93 percent of African-Americans voted for President Obama last November even though black employment is so high," arguing that the president "had four years to improve the black unemployment rate and it's not improving." Johnson explained to O'Reilly that the graph he displayed to show African-American unemployment - which does not show the white unemployment rate and starts in 1996 - only told a fraction of the story and obscured the fact that African-American unemployment has been consistently double that of whites for half a century. This was the chart displayed by O'Reilly:
But as prepared and explained by Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), who noted "for African Americans, the last 50 years have been marked by extremely high unemployment occasionally interrupted by periods of merely high unemployment. At no point can we say that blacks have experienced a low unemployment rate[,]" this is what the other three-quarters of the chart O'Reilly didn't display looks like:
In addition to immediately providing context for O'Reilly's partial presentation of African-American unemployment, Johnson also disagreed with the argument that this 50 year problem was driven by "out-of-wedlock" birth, as O'Reilly claimed. Although Johnson agreed this might be "one of the social factors that African-Americans face," he noted it was hugely overshadowed as a "primary driver of African-American unemployment" by a "legacy of long-term institutionalized racism" that places barriers to employment in front of "millions of African-Americans who have the talent, the work ethic, the integrity, the ingenuity to be successful in jobs or in business."
Although O'Reilly declined to take a position on whether or not "the question of race discrimination still lingers on," he did acknowledge "every corporation that I have worked for in the past 37 years has actively recruited African-Americans. They want them. All right? Qualified African-Americans, they are looking for them." This is, of course, a description of a common practice in corporate America. Seeking to improve business through improving diversity in their ranks and management, corporate America has long been proactively race-conscious in its hiring practices.
In other words, according to O'Reilly, Fox News utilizes an affirmative action program.
Support for affirmative action, accurately explained as an equal opportunity program for equally qualified applicants, is widespread. In addition to the modern Democratic Party and progressives, corporate America and the military - no bastions of wild-eyed activism - have consistently supported the constitutionality of affirmative action in support of institutional diversity. In fact, even then-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced his support for sex-based affirmative action in a nationally televised debate, and a surrogate for his campaign further told Fox News that Romney implemented a quota system as governor of Massachusetts.
Yet despite this broad support for affirmative action - the consideration of race in a holistic individualized review process in furtherance of diversity - conservative activists have managed to chip away at the continued vitality of this race-conscious effort and others. Indeed, in the as-of-yet undecided Fisher v. University of Texas, right-wing media is urging the conservative justices of the Supreme Court to strike down race-conscious consideration of qualified applicants in higher education entirely. As has happened in the past, an adverse decision in this area - affirmative action for qualified applicants in government programs - will inevitably restrict the affirmative action efforts of private programs.
O'Reilly's correct description of affirmative action is in marked contrast to the outright smear and lies usually spread by the right-wing media about what race-conscious policy actually involves. Conservative columnist George Will described diversity efforts as "nonsense," "propaganda," and "rotten," a relatively mild swipe that paled in comparison to a wildly deceitful blog by a conservative legal advocacy group that is already spreading through right-wing media.
Based on an NPR description of an affirmative action program to increase lifeguards of color in Phoenix, Arizona, Fox Nation reproduced the blog verbatim under the headline "City Recruits Minority Lifeguards Even If They Can't Swim." The Blaze skipped the "black people can't swim" myth and went straight for the deadly "Phoenix Affirmative Action Program Could Actually Get Someone Killed." None of these posts mentioned the crucial fact in the original NPR article from which they cribbed that all applicants of any color must pass the same swimming test in order to become lifeguards. From the NPR report:
To help diversify its lifeguard ranks, the city raised about $15,000 over the past two years in scholarships to offset the cost of lifeguard-certification courses. Recruits who pass a swim test at the end can apply to be city lifeguards.
In light of the misinformation on this topic in the rest of the right-wing media, it is heartening to see a correct description of race-conscious review of qualified applicants on one of Fox News' flagship shows. Hopefully, Fox News will utilize this correct explanation of affirmative action when it reports on the Fisher decision. It was, after all, apparently a part of every stop of O'Reilly's successful career.The German Government has agreed on a set of measures to address the huge number (last count: around 800,000) of refugees arriving in the country. The Federal Government will spend at least 6 billion euros over the next year to register, feed, house, and process asylum applications.
Beyond the funds, the government also calls on the EU to develop a comprehensive and unified plan to process asylum seekers, as well as an international alliance to fight the sources of the current refugee crisis, e.g. the civil war in Syria and continued instability elsewhere.
The particulars of the Government’s plans are as follows:
Speeding the Asylum Application Process
The central priority will be the acceleration of the asylum process. This will be achieved through an immediate increase in the staff of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BMAF), which is the agency responsible for making asylum decisions. In addition to these personnel increases, the government will increase the number of Federal Police Officers (Bundespolizei) by 3000 for the next three years. The new police officers will assist in receiving and processing refugees.
The Government will introduce a law, to be passed by the end of October, that establishes the Balkan states – Kosovo, Albania, and Montenegro as “Secure Origin States.” This is a measure intended to accelerate the asylum application process for migrants from these states, who make up a significant percentage of the total number of refugees expected in Germany this year.
The timetable for asylum applications will be reduced from 6 months to 3 months.
Infrastructure
The Federal Government will assist the states and local communities with the construction of approximately 150,000 winter-safe living quarters for refugees. The Government will offer any available federally owned infrastructure (e.g. barracks, other buildings) and will assume the cost for any required renovations. In the meantime, certain building codes and bureaucratic requirements will be relaxed in order to accelerate the timetable.
In addition to these facilities, the Government will provide support for the construction of social housing facilities in communities. These social housing units will be available to all residents – not only refugees.
Provisions for Refugees
Refugees will be provided with goods, rather than cash, during the asylum application process. This is to reduce the incentives for economic migrants posing as refugees.
Money – Lots of It
The Federal Government will increase budget outlays for refugees by 3 billion Euros for the fiscal 2016 budget. It will provide another 3 billion Euros directly to states and communities. The exact distribution and use of this money will be agreed upon at a Federal/State conference scheduled for September 24th of this year.
Refugees and Work
The work prohibition for asylum applicants and their dependents will be reduced to three months. The Federal Government will provide financial means when necessary to induce the integration of asylum applicants into the workforce, including increased funding for Job Centers.
Immigrants from the Balkans
To compensate for the presumed increase in deportations, the government has proposed to increase the number of legal migrants from this region. Anyone from the Balkans who has proof of a job contract or a study-place in Germany will be allowed to migrate legally.
Call for Volunteers
The Government will increase the capacity of the Federal Volunteer Service by 10,000 members.AUBURN, Ala. -- Auburn University says someone deliberately poisoned trees at Toomer's Corner, where fans have long celebrated big wins and hundreds gathered after the Tigers won the football national championship on Jan. 10.
The university said in a statement Wednesday that a herbicide commonly used to kill trees was applied "in lethal amounts" to the soil around the two trees, and that they likely can't be saved.
Auburn fans celebrated the school's BCS title in January at Toomer's Corner. AP Photo/Dave Martin
Auburn discovered the poisoning after taking soil samples on Jan. 28, a day after a man called a syndicated radio show based in Birmingham saying he had used the herbicide on the trees.
"The weekend after the Iron Bowl, I went to Auburn, Ala., because I live 30 miles away, and I poisoned the Toomer's trees," the caller told The Paul Finebaum Radio Show, saying he was at the Iron Bowl.
Calling himself "Al from Dadeville," he said he used Spike 80DF, also known as tebuthiuron, and the trees "definitely will die." The caller signed off with, "Roll Damn Tide."
Later Thursday, WTVM in Columbus, Ga., reported that police arrested Harvey Almorn Updyke, 62, on a charge of criminal mischief. His bond is set at $50,000, the station reported.
Auburn fans traditionally celebrate by using toilet paper to roll the Toomer's Corner trees, which are estimated to be more than 130 years old.
"We will take every step we can to save the Toomer's oaks, which have been the home of countless celebrations and a symbol of the Auburn spirit for generations of Auburn students, fans, alumni and the community," university President Jay Gogue said in a statement.
City police are investigating the incident. The use of Spike 80DF is also governed by state agricultural laws and the Environmental Protection Agency. The university said it doesn't use the herbicide.
"We are assessing the extent of the damage and proceeding as if we have a chance to save the trees," said Gary Keever, an Auburn University professor of horticulture and a member of Auburn's Tree Preservation Committee. "We are also focused on protecting the other trees and shrubs in Samford Park. At this level the impact could be much greater than just the oaks on the corner, as Spike moves through the soil to a wide area."
A small group gathered and rolled the trees Wednesday afternoon.
The soil samples were tested at Mississippi State.
The amount of herbicide detected in four samples ranged from 0.78 parts per million -- described by Auburn as "a very lethal dose" -- to 51 parts per million.
"This herbicide is extremely active and persistent," Keever said. "It's very likely to be in the soil for 3 to 5 years."
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.Update, 10.11.2018: Due to the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., marketplace providers are requried to register with the state and begin collecting Minnesota sales tax on behalf of remote sellers using their marketplace no later than October 1, 2018.
Update 7.12.2017: "Sales on online marketplaces crossed $1 trillion in 2016," according to an Internet Retailer research report. With this kind of money changing hands, online sellers should expect more states to impose taxes on marketplace providers. Washington has already done so.
Minnesota has enacted the nation’s first tax on marketplace providers and expanded the definition of what it means to do business in the state.
HF 1 requires a company to collect sales and use tax if it has an employee in Minnesota, and expounds an in-state affiliate creates a tax obligation for every company in the controlled group. The measure also declares that selling through a marketplace creates nexus — a tax obligation — for marketplace sellers. Finally, it requires a marketplace provider with a place of business in the state to collect and remit sales and use taxes on behalf of its sellers.
The new requirements will only affect marketplace providers with a physical presence in Minnesota — like Amazon. The country’s largest online seller opened a sorting center in Shakopee in 2015 and a nearby fulfillment center in 2016. Together, they enable Amazon to provide same-day and one-day delivery to the Twin Cities area.
Approximately 50 percent of items sold on Amazon are from “sellers, small businesses and entrepreneurs.” Although Amazon has been collecting and remitting Minnesota sales tax since October 1, 2014, it has only been doing so on sales of its own products; it hasn’t been required to collect tax on sales by its third-party sellers. Currently, if a seller has nexus with Minnesota through its own ties to the state (e.g., goods stored in an Amazon warehouse), the individual seller is liable for any sales and use tax owed — not Amazon.
Once HF 1 takes effect, marketplace providers with nexus in Minnesota must collect and remit tax for all retailers selling in the state through the marketplace, unless the retailer qualifies for the small seller exception. The marketplace isn’t responsible for collecting and remitting tax for sellers making less than $10,000 annually if their only connection to the state is through the marketplace.The University of Louisville Game Notes vs. Charlotte were made public today and with that we were able to get our 1st Depth Chart of the 2016 season.
Offense
QB
Lamar Jackson
Kyle Bolin
Jawon Pass
Tailback
Brandon Radcliff
LJ Scott
Jeremy Smith
FB
Lamar Atkins
Malin Jones
LT
Geron Christian
Tyler Haycraft OR Linwood Foy
LG
Khalil Hunter
Chandler Jones
C
Tobijah Hughley
Nathan Scheler OR Robbie Bell
RG
Kiola Mahoni
Kenny Thomas
RT
Lukayus McNeil
Danny Burns OR Toriano Roundtree
HB
Cole Hikutini
Charles Standberry
Tight End
Keith Towbridge
Micky Crum
WR
Jamari Staples
Devante Peete
Seth Dawkins
WR
James Quick
Jaylen Smith
Javonte Bagley
WR
Reggie Bonnafon
Traveon Samuel
Gio Pascascio
Defense
DE
Drew Bailey
Chris Williams
DT
DeAngelo Brown
Kyle Shortridge
DE
De’Asian Richardson
GG Robinson
OLB
James Hearns
Henry Famurewa
ILB
Keith Kelsey
Isaac Stewart
ILB
Stacy Thomas
Amonte Caban
OLB
Devonte’ Fields
Johnathan Greenard
Gary McCrae
CB
Trumaine Washington
Shaq Wiggins
Chris Taylor-Yamanoha
Safety
Josh Harvey-Clemons
Zykiesis Cannon
London Iakopo
Safety
Chucky Williams
Dee Smith
Khane Pass
CB
Jaire Alexander
Ronald Walker
Alphonso Carter
Special Teams
Placekicker
Evan O’Hara
Blanton Creque
Punter
Mason King
Austin Johnson
Long Snapper
Colin Holba
Tyler Polston
Holder
Mason King
Punt Returners
Jaire Alexander
Traveon Samuel
Kick Returners
Jaire Alexander
Traveon Samuel
Reggie Bonnafon
James Quick
TCZ Comments
commentsTime magazine has a big interview with MPAA CEO Dan Glickman and Ratings Administration chairman Joan Graves to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the American movie rating system. (Its birthday is tomorrow, and it would prefer it if you didn't mention its age.) We suggest celebrating by viewing This Film is Not Yet Rated or controversial titles like the timely American Psycho, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, or the Kevin Smith Appeals Trio: Clerks, the highly-underrated Jersey Girl or Zack & Miri Make A Porno (in a theater near you). Then discuss whether the system works or is, as some might say, completely and totally unfair and arbitrary.
Anyways, in the Q&A, which we were alerted to by Variety's Hollywood's Aggregated Links (HAL) Web site, Kevin Smith pal Joan Graves says she'd love it if Steven Spielberg made an NC-17 film, because apparently it's ok for Spielberg to make a dirty movie.
Here's the full exchange between author, and former Entertainment Weekly writer, Gilbert Cruz and Graves:
I don't really see Steven Spielberg going out and making an 'NC-17' epic anytime soon.
Graves: No, but wouldn't it be great if someone like him did? It would really help the rating.
"Help the rating!" How? There's no way Universal or Paramount would let Spielberg release an NC-17, we think. They certainly wouldn't be happy about the rating, which would mean the respective movie would generate a heap of controversy probably ultimately resulting in an appeal in which Spielberg would kind of have to win. Because if he didn't, Spielberg fans would lash out at the MPAA, which probably wouldn't help the rating or the agency's reputation.SAN FRANCISCO—Of all the products announced today at Google's massive event, the Daydream View might be the best seller. At only $79, Daydream packs a "Good enough" controller and VR headset into a single box, allowing anyone with a brand new phone (for now only a brand new Google phone) to experience virtual reality. The Daydream opens up the Gear VR concept to the entire Android Ecosystem, with future Android devices expected to support the standard.
Regardless of sales, the Daydream View is definitely one of the cleverest devices at the event. It is full of interesting little touches that show off all the thought that went into it.
Here's an example: rather than plastic (or cardboard) the Daydream View is made of cloth. Besides a few plastic bits on the inside, the headset is made of thermo-bonded cloth material that is stiff enough to provide structure and dense enough to block out light. The advantage of cloth is that it's super light—I couldn't get an exact weight, but Google says the device is "30 percent lighter than similar devices on the market today." Google probably means the Gear VR, which weighs 318g without a phone. Weight is extremely important for a VR headset—lighter devices are more comfortable, which lets you play longer without fatiguing.
Another neat feature? The automatic image alignment system. As a universal VR headset, the Daydream View doesn't "lock in" the phone to a certain position. Sure, the closed door and bumper nubs are grippy enough to hold the phone in place, but—within a certain tolerance—the phone doesn't need to be in any particular spot.
At first this seems odd since, like Google's last universal viewer, Google Cardboard, the split VR image that displays on the phone needs to be perfectly lined up with the two lenses in order to have a good VR image. The Daydream View handles this automatically and without internal electronics.
The phone compartment has six bumper nubs: one in each corner of the headset and two in the center. The two center nubs are black, and they actually carry a capacitive load that is read by the touchscreen. The top and bottom center nubs contact the screen, and the software computes a straight line between the two points. That line is used as the center point, allowing the image to be shifted over—or even tilted slightly—and center with the lenses. The Daydream uses no headset electronics, it works, and it's cheap.
Another nice touch: the door hinge accommodates phones of different thicknesses up to 11.5mm, which is great for usage with phone cases. The Daydream View accomplishes this with hinges that, besides folding up, can extend out of the headset on retractable extensions.
The headset is entirely "dumb" and devoid of electronics, save for a single NFC chip on the door. This replaces the QR code of Google Cardboard, allowing the phone to read certain headset properties, like the required distortion to work with the lenses. The NFC chip also triggers VR mode, making it easy to get started.
The Daydream is definitely comfortable, mostly because of the fluffy soft face cushion and light weight. The single strap in the back works like a pair of ski goggles and secures the device to your face. They attach with Velcro, allowing you to easily clean the Daydream (hand wash only). Unfortunately, light does leak into the bottom and side of the headset, making it less immersive than the HTC Vive, Oculus, or Gear VR.
Headset tracking seemed excellent. It was quick and responsive, but like the Gear VR, the Daydream is not positionally tracked, so walking around doesn't work. The one oddity was a slight wobble around the side of the image.
Ron Amadeo
Every Daydream headset, whether built by Google or not, requires a three-axis controller to come bundled with the headset. The headset has a small circular trackpad with physical click action, side volume buttons, a single action button, and a home button. It also has a three axis accelerometer that allows it to be used like a laser pointer.
The home button and action button are both round, but the home button sits much deeper into the controller than the action button, allowing you to easily feel which is which. The controller has its own storage point on the headset, which is a simple indent on the inside of the door with a small strap to secure it. The controller has a small 220mAh battery that charges via a USB Type C port. Just below the port are holes for a lanyard.
Every demo I tried used the controller like a laser pointer, which worked great. The majority of actions are performed by pointing the controller at something and pressing down on the trackpad, which brings a satisfying click and performs some kind of action. Navigating menus and clicking on points of interest was a snap. This should also enable Wii remote-style waggle actions, but none of the games on display used them.
Daydream will ship with a "VR Home" Play Store app, which shows a few thumbnails floating in a forest. Besides the usual home screen thumbnails, of interest was an app drawer button, which didn't work, along with a Play Store button, which also didn't work.
Daydream has some time to get the software together—it doesn't launch until November. The hardware is very impressive though. It's cheap, but within that cheapness are plenty of great ideas.
Listing image by Ron AmadeoMany other restaurants and dining businesses in Japan have not fared so well. After peaking at 29.7 trillion yen in 1997, the country’s restaurant sector has shrunk almost every year as a weak economy has driven businesses into price wars — or worse, sent them belly-up. In 2009, restaurant revenue, including from fast-food stores, fell 2.3 percent, to 23.9 trillion yen —20 percent below the peak, according to the Foodservice Industry Research Institute, a research firm in Tokyo.
Bankruptcies have been rampant: in 2009, |
and June.
RELATED: Looking past Wisconsin, Cruz strategizes a contested convention
Trump has maintained that the nomination should go to which ever candidate claims the most delegates before convention, whether or not they cross the 1,237 delegate threshold to win. He has even made veiled threats to sue to the Republican Party if he enters the convention with the most delegates and leaves without the nomination—in which case he's asserted his supporters would riot.
RELATED: Donald Trump predicts 'riots' if GOP convention picks alternate nominee
The convention rules won't be written until mid-July, the week before the delegates gather, so it remains unclear how the event will unfold procedurally. Experts assume that the delegates will take a series of votes, with most bound on the first and second to vote according to their state primary, then freed on successive ballots to vote with their personal preference. There remains the possibility that a yet-unannounced candidate ends up with the party vote.
"If Trump doesn't win on the first ballot, the assumption is that he would begin to lose support," said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University. "If Cruz doesn't win on the second or third ballot, then the thing is wide open."A Holistic Look at Foot-Care for Dancers
Call me a slow, but I learned this weekend that taking care of blisters is kind of a big deal.
An infected blister can land you in the hospital.
I’m writing this after having spent three days off my feet because of a silly little blister (although the emerg doctor said something along the lines of, “wow… I’ve never seen a blister like that before”. Real reassuring, doc).
I find this story a little embarrassing to tell, but I’ll tell it anyway (in part because I like talking about myself, and in part spare you from making choices as foolish as mine). I’m even sad to say that this blister story isn’t even directly related to dance.
Aside from the obvious foot-care lessons you’ll take away from my story, I hope you’ll also appreciate the less obvious, but highly relevant, lessons revealing of our often misguided, illogical reasoning as dancers, and the strange choices it causes us to make.
Minor foot-wounds can escalate in non-linear ways
I remember a dancer once telling me she got a blood infection after a modern dance intensive because of bacteria she picked up through a cut in her foot. Some of us are susceptible to those nasty slits where the toe and foot meet, for which there is no real effective tape-job.
When I think of all the times that I’ve danced barefoot on floors spattered with other dancers’ sweat, and sometimes blood, with splits under each toe, and did not get a staff infection, I realize that chance played a pretty significant role in my recent foot episode.
Dancers get a lot of blisters and foot wounds. Never once have I thought twice about taking care of them. Maybe that’s just me. My laxity about hygiene resembles that of my iliofemoral ligament.
I’ve even used duct tape on blisters, leaving it on for a few days until it finally came off in the shower. Definitely don’t do that, guys.
I’m reading the book “Fooled by Randomness” By Nassim Nicholas Taleb (strongly recommend).
The main theme of this book is that we need to be taking into account the randomness of situations as well as the other factors such as the who, what, when, where and how. Why? Because there will always be the “rare event”. The one we don’t expect to happen. The one that seems random because nothing has ever happened like it before.
Of COURSE we can’t predict things to happen that have never happened before. That doesn’t mean the possibility of them happening to you is nil.
For example, we can put in all the hard work for a performance, have it down perfectly, but then slip and fall on a slick patch: The rare catastrophic event. That’s never happened before! That was totally random!
Knowing that randomness dictates a portion of our lives in this way, regardless of how prepared or informed we are, we can choose to cushion our decisions to ensure that if something bad does happen, it won’t be the worst case scenario. We’ll be ok.
It won’t end in a trip to the hospital…
Today’s example, you get a blister. That really sucks. What sucks more is knowing that there is a small chance that the blister can get infected, which can get into your blood and lymph, and send you to the hospital.
It’s a small chance. But you need to pad yourself against that small chance because life can be random like that.
And to entertain the 8 of you who will read this all the way through here’s what happened:
What can happen to an infected blister in 24 hours or less
(You can skip this narrative and go to the conclusions if you’d prefer to save time)
I walk a lot. Walking became an important part of my life the day after my hamstring injury when I promised myself internally that I would never take my legs for granted.
Apparently though, I still do.
I wear out shoes really quickly, which then start to poke my heels and give me blisters, and which I tend to ignore. I was limping, but was running late and had to get to work on time, so I kept walking. Priorities.
Something in my inner thigh started to hurt, which I assumed was my adductor acting up because of my altered limpy gait pattern: Hip hiking, avoiding pronating the foot, and I’ve strained that adductor before. Made sense to me, but I kept walking anyway.
Over the course of the next 6 hours at work, the blister puffed up to the point where it hurt to put my shoes back on. But I did anyway.
I went home thinking, “I be damned if I let this annoying little blister prevent me from walking to work tomorrow”.
Then, nearly the moment I arrived home, the weird symptoms started. My fingers on my right hand went white and numb (think Reynaud’s-like). My vision went blurry, it was harder to breathe, my heart rate was way up, I felt feverish, dizzy, was shivering to the point that my teeth were literally chattering, and I couldn’t think straight. I was cooking dinner but I couldn’t feel the knife in my hands or see what I was chopping clearly.
So I took a half-hour hot shower, and was in bed by 9pm thinking I was having an allergic reaction to the cold (it was -40 degrees that day).
I woke up the next day feeling equally gross, and my blister had grown and looked to be red, puffy, and infected. My inner thigh was even more tender, and not in a muscle soreness type of way. But I went to work anyway (are you noticing a trend?).
I had a workshop to teach and sure as hell was not going to let a little fever and a blister stop me from hanging out with my students
It soon became obvious to myself and my partner, based on the fact that being vertical was a challenge, that I was unfit to teach. Then, another friend of ours, a chiropractor, came in to check me out. Her conclusion was “That shit is infected and your whole lymph line is blocked and inflamed. You should go to the hospital”.
Aw crap.
That blister escalated quickly in less than 24 hours. The sore “adductor” was a lymph node in my groin.
Then, as I was walking the 20 feet or so to the exit, to get into my friend’s car and head to the hospital I started to black out. I have a little history of fainting, so I knew what was happening and was able to collapse to the floor with relative control, and was also fortunate to be in a room full of 30 odd chiropractors, physios, massage therapists, who were there for an NKT level 1 seminar.
I am now the girl who left NKT in an ambulance.
In the ambulance, speaking with the paramedic, I lost nearly all my faith in the medical system. Her conclusion: “Sounds like the blister is totally unrelated to your fever and fainting, and you probably had an anxiety attack. You can get therapy for that”.
Ahhhhh.
At the hospital, the same paramedic emphasized at triage that I had an undiagnosed history of anxiety attacks. I am amazed at how little medical professionals truly listen. Listening is a skill I am working on, personally, and to her credit, say she has inspired me to further cultivate it.
Note to self: NEVER again tell a medical professional you’ve experienced “anxiety”. Of course I’ve been anxious before! Hasn’t every human being felt anxious? As a performer I’ve felt anxious waiting in the wings to go on stage to the point where I think I’m going to pee my pants. But I do not have an anxiety disorder. Please don’t put words in my mouth and overlook what’s really happening to me.
Anyway.
The doctor finally checked me out. His conclusions “Doesn’t look infected. I think the fainting is unrelated. So is the fever. Why exactly are you even here?”
I wanted to cry out of frustration.
I had to ask him to please palpate the swollen and warm lymph nodes in my leg. I had to talk him into considering that the blister could be infected (it was). I had to question him until he speculated that I might need anti-biotics (I did) and whether he should drain the blister (he did, eventually).
I can’t believe I was that close to being sent home with no action, and no answers. A reminder to always advocate for your own health.
Doctors see so many people in a day. It’s not their fault and we can’t blame them for doing their best on a given day. The system isn’t perfect and I was a less urgent case. I can appreciate that and am grateful that in Canada I can receive care without having to pay big money.
I do feel very fortunate to have received advice before heading to the hospital, from several people that I respect and trust more that any doctor. Their words allowed me to stand up for my health and ask questions to receive the treatment I needed.
Finally, the doctor opened the blister to drain it and bandage me up. “Oh, look at that, it is infected. That certainly explains the lymph node inflammation. I’m going to prescribe you some antibiotics”.
No shit.
Now, having spent three days off my feet, I can finally appreciate this foot-care thing.
Some conclusions?
Some people say these things happen for a reason. To teach us a lesson, or something. I don’t think there is implicit meaning in this, or that anything happens for a specific reason, but I do feel that circumstances like this make for excellent opportunities to reflect and learn.
I realize that i was misinterpreting my resolution years ago to not take having legs for granted.I was still ignoring signs to slow down, this time under the guise of “if I stop it shows I don’t appreciate what my body can do”. Instead of becoming more mindful, as intended, I was reverting to old patterns of over-use under the illusion of appreciation. A fine line.
I realize that I need to stock my bag with band-aids, and that even if I “don’t have time” to stop to pick up first aid supplies in my rush to work, people will be understanding of my need to take care of myself. Something I also didn’t do very well as a dancer.
I realize that a surface wound can affect motor control and cognitive function. Being off my feet without a healthy dose of movement. An altered gait pattern. A feeling of lethargy that drains the ability to think clearly. I could feel my shoulders tightening in an attempt to ground me, as my feet didn’t have their same ability to get feedback from the floor.
I realize that we must stand up for ourselves when we find ourselves in the care of medical professionals who will not listen or see the full picture. Be an advocate for your health.
I realize that by not taking care of myself I let other people down, being unable to teach that day, and missing a few days of work. We do this as dancers, too.
I recently read the biographies of two dancers: Kenny Pearl (who was a teacher of mine) and Misty Copeland (who is awesome).
Their stories have this one thing in common: Both Copeland and Pearl danced through injuries when they knew they shouldn’t have, but they did it because they didn’t want to let people down- The people who believed in them, their choreographers and employers, and especially themselves.
Misty danced an important performance with 6 tibial stress fractures. Kenny constantly picked up the slack for other injured dancers, filling in for them on tour, picking up extra performances, until his knees finally gave out on stage.
This blister incident of mine… It’s that same thing we do as dancers. We’d rather take a huge risk with our bodies and our careers than take care of our basic needs.
This theme shows up often in my life, and I know I am not alone (please tell me I’m not alone!).
So, this is not a blog post about foot-care for dancers. It’s a call to think critically and not be an idiot about these things (although incidents like this can create really great space to reflect and think critically about our choices).
We think that we have no choice- Either we sacrifice our bodies or we let people down, but this is false because we wind up letting people down to an even greater degree if we sacrifice our bodies.
This is a blog post about being fooled by randomness (just read the book!). This was a freak, random incident. Historically, I should have been totally fine. Be aware of possible outcomes, especially the rarest, highest risk outcomes, that we don’t think will happen, and make appropriate choices.
And to leave you with one piece of foot-care: Always put band-aids on blisters. But you already knew that.Tony Love, 39, is charged with unlawful use of a weapon by a felon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. View Full Caption Facebook/SheddAquarium; Cook County Sheriff's Office
COOK COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — A suburban driver is accused of flashing a gun at a woman who cut him off near Museum Campus earlier this week.
Tony Love, 39, of south suburban Harvey, shouted, "F--- you, b----," while waving a loaded.380 caliber handgun from inside his 2000 Chevy Tracker about 11 a.m. Tuesday, according to an arrest report.
The woman followed Love's SUV away from the 1600 block of South Museum Campus Drive — where the incident occurred — and called 911, court records show.
Police arrested Love a few blocks away near the Shedd Aquarium, 1200 S. Lake Shore Drive, Assistant State's Attorney Erin Antonietti said during a bond hearing.
Though Love initially denied any involvement, prosecutors said, police found a.380 caliber handgun loaded with six bullets inside Love's vehicle.
The gun was reported stolen from Indiana last month, Antonietti said.
Love is charged with unlawful use of a weapon by a felon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Prosecutors said Love has prior convictions for drugs, possession of a stolen car, two DUIs and being an armed habitual criminal.
According to his public defender, Love recently worked for a freight company and as an auto mechanic. He is part of his neighborhood block club, the attorney said, and has three children, ages 12, 18 months and a newborn.
Cook County Judge Laura Sullivan set bail at $250,000.After the block diagram, the schematic drawing is the very first stage in fleshing out your idea into a working design. It’s when you figure out your project’s electrical flow, and it serves as a crucial reference during the layout stage. For these reasons, it’s incredibly important to build your schematic in a way that is clear, comprehensive, and organized for both you and your teammates. A clean schematic will minimize your chances of making translational errors down the road, making reviews and debugs a breeze.
Here’s a style guide to help you keep your schematics legible and consistent (you can download a printable checklist of the Style Guide here!).
Organization
Strive to maintain a left-to-right flow.
Have inputs on the left of symbols, outputs on the right – of course it’s not always possible but it’s a good rule-of-thumb. In general, don’t place pins on the tops of symbols (particularly true for rectangular symbols representing ICs, but there are exceptions, like an opamp symbol). Power symbols/flags should be pointed up and GND symbols pointed down.
Have inputs on the left of symbols, outputs on the right – of course it’s not always possible but it’s a good rule-of-thumb. In general, don’t place pins on the tops of symbols (particularly true for rectangular symbols representing ICs, but there are exceptions, like an opamp symbol). Power symbols/flags should be pointed up and GND symbols pointed down. Use flags/indirect connections rather than directly drawn nets.
Only make direct net connections if they are short. This prevents the dreaded “spaghetti” effect and keeps the schematic readable.
Only make direct net connections if they are short. This prevents the dreaded “spaghetti” effect and keeps the schematic readable. Make all your pins visible. Avoid invisible pins, even if your CAD tool supports it.
It’s better to keep everything visible to make it more likely that errors are caught.
It’s better to keep everything visible to make it more likely that errors are caught. If a pin is purposely left unconnected, mark it and avoid ambiguity.
You can do this using your CAD tool’s no-connect symbol (typically an “X”). This signals to reviewers that the no-connect is intentional.
You can do this using your CAD tool’s no-connect symbol (typically an “X”). This signals to reviewers that the no-connect is intentional. Avoid using 4-way connections.
They make it unclear whether the connection is deliberate or a mistake. Use two 3-way connections to make it clear that it was intentional. This way, all 4-way connections default to being a mistake.
They make it unclear whether the connection is deliberate or a mistake. Use two 3-way connections to make it clear that it was intentional. This way, all 4-way connections default to being a mistake. Place large groups of decoupling caps (ex. for large BGAs) in a separate dedicated section.
It’s OK to place decoupling caps right beside the IC if there are fewer than 5. This keeps things clean.
It’s OK to place decoupling caps right beside the IC if there are fewer than 5. This keeps things clean. Be consistent with the placement of your text.
Things like reference designators, values, part numbers, etc. should be placed in the same manner for all components.
Things like reference designators, values, part numbers, etc. should be placed in the same manner for all components. Organize your schematic by creating sections for major functions.
These may be: FPGA Processor Memory Power – switching regulators Power – linear regulators Clock Generation PCIe Audio Video Board inputs Board outputs Decoupling
These may be:
Naming Conventions
Give all nets clear, descriptive names.
You should be able to tell what a net’s function is by its name alone. For example, use MEM_FLASH_A15 instead of just A15. This way, you know it’s address bit-15 of the flash memory.
You should be able to tell what a net’s function is by its name alone. For example, use MEM_FLASH_A15 instead of just A15. This way, you know it’s address bit-15 of the flash memory. Same things with Power Always start with “VCC”. Makes all power nets easy to identify. Include the voltage in the name to make debugging easier (ie. VCC_5V, VCC_3V3, VCC_0V9). Special analog power nets can be designated with AVCC…
Ground: GND
If you have separate ground islands, name them AGND, AGND_AUDIO.
If you have separate ground islands, name them AGND, AGND_AUDIO. Name all active low pins with a lowercase ‘n’ instead of an overline.
(ie. RESETn, INTn,)
(ie. RESETn, INTn,) Indicate the positive and negative legs of differential pairs using lowercase ‘n’ and ‘p’. (ie. CLK_DDRp, CLK_DDRn)
Begin clock net names with “CLK”.
Special attention is often paid to clock routing during layout so this naming convention is a worthwhile practice.
Special attention is often paid to clock routing during layout so this naming convention is a worthwhile practice. Use uppercases for all other pin names and net names.
That is, except for the n/p suffixes mentioned above. Consistency is important to readability.
That is, except for the n/p suffixes mentioned above. Consistency is important to readability. Use reference designators for all components and follow standard conventions. BT – battery R – resistors RN – resistor networks C – general capacitors XC – decoupling capacitors (designs with hundreds of decoupling caps, like for large BGAs, may quickly run up the count if you only use “C”, so it’s good practice to keep a separate ref des for decoupling caps) L – inductors and ferrites (alternative FB for ferrite bead) FC – fiducial T – transformers D – diodes (this often includes LEDs) Y – crystals Q – transistors P – multi-pin connectors J – simple connectors (video connectors, audio connectors, etc.) U – ICs RG – power regulators (like LDOs) SW – switches TP – test points H – holes/vias (sometimes it makes sense to include specific components on the schematic to designate corresponding holes on the layout, like in DDR routing)
Be specific with I/O pins.
Parts with programmable I/O or I/O that can take on multiple functions should use pin names that reflect the function(s) selected for the particular design, rather than listing all the possible functions or using the generic pin names (like IO_B7_255). For busses, indicate the signal direction (input into the device, output from the device, or bi-directional) using lowercase i,o, and io prefixes to the signal names. This is particularly useful for FPGAs (where almost all I/O are programmable). It’s very good practice to define your FPGA’s top pin-assignment in your FPGA software, compile to make sure it’s valid, export the pin-assignment, and use this as the basis for creating the symbol.
Parts with programmable I/O or I/O that can take on multiple functions should use pin names that reflect the function(s) selected for the particular design, rather than listing all the possible functions or using the generic pin names (like IO_B7_255). For busses, indicate the signal direction (input into the device, output from the device, or bi-directional) using lowercase i,o, and io prefixes to the signal names. If your CAD software doesn’t have good features to indicate a net’s controlled impedance, include it in the net name.
For example: VIDEO_IN_CVBS_Z75 (Z=Impedance, 75=ohms), PCIE_TX_ZD85 (ZD=differential impedance, 85=ohms)
Symbols
Order pins on the symbols by function, not by number.
Place power pins near the top and ground pins near the bottom.
Place power pins near the top and ground pins near the bottom. For IC packages with a thermal pad, create an additional pin on the symbol to connect it to the ground plane.
The clearest way to do this is to name it GND_PAD with a pin number one greater than the total number of pins.
The clearest way to do this is to name it GND_PAD with a pin number one greater than the total number of pins. Create symbols by copying/pasting the pinout table from the datasheet into a spreadsheet.
Then import this spreadsheet into your CAD tool. This is opposed to typing in the pin names/numbers manually. Copying and pasting minimizes the chances of data entry errors.
Then import this spreadsheet into your CAD tool. This is opposed to typing in the pin names/numbers manually. Copying and pasting minimizes the chances of data entry errors. Use multi-part symbols for large devices to keep things organized.
Break up the sub-symbols by major function. Have a separate symbol for power and ground. Using multipart symbols applies not only to large ICs but also to components like resistor networks (ie. a 16-pin package containing 8 resistors). Resistor networks are often used for series termination on large busses. It’s often cleaner to create a multi-part symbol where each part is a single resistor. This way, you can order the resistors on your schematic without nets crossing over when directly connecting them.
GeneralChinese phones are getting better and better by the day. With manufacturers like OnePlus, and Xiaomi stepping up their game significantly, no longer is China synonymous with garbage quality control, and devices that stop working after a week or two.
In January of 2016, Xiaomi made a controversial announcement, saying that they would begin locking the bootloaders of their phones, in a bid to crack down on modified firmware being shipped on their phones by unauthorised resellers.
The Redmi Note 3
Last November saw the release of the Redmi Note 3, a phone with an extremely impressive spec sheet for an extremely modest price. But this article is not about extolling the virtues of Chinese smartphones, their low-cost revolution, or even an analysis of the cost to performance benefits.
The phone originally launched with a MediaTek processor, which pretty much meant that there would be extremely limited, if any, developer support from the community. Earlier this year, the company put out a refreshed version, which is called the Redmi Note 3 Pro in certain markets, and it sports a Snapdragon 650 processor.
This, coupled with the fact that Xiaomi has actually released the kernel sources for this phone (something they get a lot of flak for not doing), means that there are numerous custom ROMs available for the device, including the ever popular CyanogenMod ROM.
Switching to ROMs
For those who don’t like Xiaomi’s Android offering (called MIUI), or have used stock Android, and just can’t make the change to something that looks and behaves so differently, or plain just don’t want to, or do not want to be left without extremely convenient features like Google Now on Tap, or be left on Android Lollipop when Nougat is out, the existence of these ROMs are a god-send.
I personally love tinkering with things, so much so that I often end up breaking them outright. However, putting them back together again is a great learning experience. Being a power user, my first decision after purchasing this phone was to flash a CyanogenMod build, but I discovered that I couldn’t even flash a custom recovery, because of the locked bootloader.
Using the officially provided unlock tool was an exercise in patience: after waiting two weeks for unlocking permissions, the tool refused to work, getting stuck on the very first stage, saying that it could not match the Mi account on the phone with the one that had unlocking permissions.
Leaving aside the fact that it’s ridiculous for one to need permission from the manufacturer to do anything to a device you’ve bought, the MIUI forums are cancer-inducing, flooded with low effort and even lower quality posts and comments, full of poor English and very liberal sprinklings of exclamation points, and plentifully vague ‘thank you’s.
Is it even possible to flash CyanogenMod on a Redmi Note 3?
The short answer is yes. Though it turns out that I was not the only one experiencing the permission unlocking problem, nobody had any solutions that worked, and the closest I ever got to getting an answer was someone saying that the MIUI team were aware of this, and it would be fixed in an update to the tool. This post was from several months ago, and the tool has not been updated yet.
What I did, step by step
Upon further digging, after wondering if I could still unlock it through fastboot and adb commands, I managed to acquire an unlocked bootloader file. But this was just the start of an extremely long night of flashing and reflashing and wondering if I’d finally managed to brick a phone.
I acquired a stock image from the phone’s firmware download section of the MIUI website, and replaced the bootloader file in there with the one I’d acquired. After putting my phone into Emergency Download mode, I managed to get 30 seconds into the flashing procedure with the company’s MiFlash utility, when it suddenly declared that my brand new 32 gigabyte phone had no storage space available to flash the modified MIUI ROM. To top things off, I was unable to boot up the phone.
I managed to flash the original bootloader back with fastboot commands, and thankfully I was able to boot up the phone again. After multiple attempts to flash the ROM I was met by the same result: a soft-bricked phone that simply would not boot up. As a last ditch effort, I tried to check if my MiFlash utility was out of date, but the all the links kept taking me to the version I already had.
I finally assumed that I’d gotten a bad bootloader file, so I went hunting again, only to find the same thing happening with another one. So I did some more digging, and after wading through several forum posts in Chinese, I found a link to a “beta”, 64-bit version of the MiFlash utility. I’d given up hope on flashing a custom recovery by this point, however I decided to give it a go nonetheless.
It worked.
After SIX HOURS of gruelling forum diving, and constant soft-bricks, endless bootloops and incredibly vague errors, I’d managed to get my bootloader unlocked.
From this point on it was extremely straightforward: I flashed TWRP, and then a stable snapshot of CyanogenMod onto the device.
It was a long night, but in the end it was extremely worthwhile.
However, that’s just me and my one-off experience, and I can get incredibly obstinate in my attempts to make things work. I definitely don’t see the average person who dabbles in custom ROMs sitting through any of the crap I had to go through.
The average cell phone user should probably stay away from this entirely, if they’re not well-versed with swapping ROMs and trying workarounds.
While one can argue that Xiaomi’s decision to lock bootloaders is beneficial to consumers in the West, where people are forced to buy their products through resellers who very often DO flash malware infested bloatware onto phones first, it harms the consumers’ ability to customize their device a whole lot more. And that’s one of the most compelling differentiating features of Android.I really do enjoy the interviews I have done on Got A Ukulele - you learn something new in each one and they are so enlightening - this one has that in spades - say hello to Ken Middleton!
Ken and his wife on the Ohana Stand at a show in Paris
Ken is someone known by so many people in the uke world right around the globe. I have also been lucky enough to have him play with our group which has been a total pleasure. A really nice guy with so many useful tips at his disposal. (He also plays rather well too!).As well as playing and performing, Ken is the International Marketing Manager for Ohana Ukuleles and has also brought out his own brand of uke strings called Living Water Strings (a brand I am mightily impressed with!). And if that didn't keep him busy enough, he also runs ukulele workshops and has a range of ebooks of ukulele tab available - who better to talk ukulele with then?I caught up with him recently for the blog.Swanee RiverAin’t She SweetWhat we know and what we don’t know about the Ohio State knife attack
After a man attacked students with his car and then a butcher knife Monday morning, national media immediately descended onto Ohio State’s campus. Here is a breakdown of what is known and what is unknown as of Monday afternoon.
Knowns
At 9:52 a.m., a gray Honda Civic jumped curb and struck multiple pedestrians.
Nine were injured, and are receiving care at Wexner Medical Center, Grant Medical Center, Riverside Methodist Hospital.
The suspect was wielding a butcher knife and attacked bystanders after crashing the car.
Two pedestrians are receiving treatment consistent with being struck by a vehicle.
One casualty on the scene has been confirmed to be the suspect. Multiple shots were heard by students.
There was no evidence of a firearm at the scene, or a second assailant.
Two individuals were arrested at the Lane Avenue parking garage, but were later released.
A little after 3 p.m., the university announced all buildings, with the exception of, the Student Academic Services on West Lane, have reopened to students retrieving items.
Unknowns
The motive of the attack is unknown, although University Police Chief Craig Stone said the attack was intentional.
Some outlets are reporting the name of the assailant, but it has not been confirmed to The Lantern. CNN is reporting details about the assailant that are inconsistent with the name being reported by other outlets.Sometimes you see something so strange you just have to have it. That’s exactly what happened to me on DailySteals.com a few weeks ago. Ultra-cheap Android tablets are a dime a dozen, and you can find them at your nearest Walmart or CVS. Cheap Windows devices are much more rare, which is why I was instantly captivated when I saw this $40 Windows netbook.
What is it?
The official name for this little device is a little hard to find. Most people just call it the Sylvania 7″ WiFi Netbook, and that’s good enough for me. This device was made way back in 2006. For a frame of reference at that time no one had heard of an iPhone or “Galaxy phone.” Speaking of smartphones, remember your first one? Chances are it had better specs than this netbook.
This bad boy is powered by a whopping 400MHz ARM processor with 128MB of RAM. The original Motorola DROID had a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM. The 7-inch display on the netbook has 480×800 resolution, which is just about the same as the DROID’s 3.7-inch display. The one thing this little device has a lot of is USB ports (three of them).
This device was made as a “basic internet device.” It has a web browser (Internet Explorer) that can access most mobile sites, and probably many full sites back in 2006. You’re also supposedly able to watch YouTube videos, but I haven’t gotten than to work. Someone back in the day would have likely bought this as a casual coffee shop device.
So is it really Windows?
Technincally, yes. The Sylvania WiFi netbook runs something called Windows CE. It was designed by Microsoft to run on devices with minimal storage. It’s looks like Windows 95, and it actually operates much the same, but you can’t do nearly as much. You can’t install regular.exe programs, or far as I can tell, anything in general. Windows CE is the most stripped down version of Windows you will ever find. It doesn’t even have Paint.
Unless you’ve used Windows CE in the past, you probably never will. If you’re super interested in Windows CE, for whatever reason, read more about it here.
Now what?
Even if this thing just collects dust in a corner, which it might, it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come. Doing something as simple as a Google search on such minimal hardware made me want to pull my hair out. How crazy is it that in just around 6 years my phone is immeasurably faster than a “computer?” Technology is an amazing thing. Next time you’re telling at Windows for wanting to restart just think about Windows CE.
Now I want to hear from you. What should I do with this $40 device? If you have any ideas let me know below!Spokesman grilled for half hour about cover up
Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
August 19, 2016
In a remarkable exchange with the press corps, a State Department spokesman was berated and questioned for half an hour over blatantly obvious lies and deception concerning the Obama administration’s $400 million payment to Iran.
For the first time in seven months, State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted Thursday that it was a key part of the deal with Iran for American prisoners to be released, and without that provision, the Iranian government would not have received the money.
“In basic English, you’re saying that you wouldn’t give them the $400 million in cash until the prisoners were released, correct?” AP reporter Brad Klapper asked Kirby.
“That’s correct,” Kirby answered.
The Obama government has repeatedly claimed that the money was part of a settlement over a failed arms deal from 1979, and was not a ‘ransom’ payment.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Klapper continued the line of questioning, leading Kirby to make remarkable accusations against the press.
“Listen, this happened in January, and this is the first time you’ve ever said flat out that they [Iran] wouldn’t get the money until the prisoners were released,” Klapper said.
“That took, let’s count it, seven months. Why all the beating around the bush if it was such a great and noble decision?” the reporter probed.
“The only reason that we’re having this discussion is because of press coverage, Brad,” Kirby said.
“So, evil reporters have made you dredge this out?” Klapper asked.
“No, I’ve never called you guys evil. I’ve called you other things, but never evil,” Kirby joked, attempting to make light of the situation.
“You can’t blame press coverage because you didn’t say what this was seven months ago,” Klapper responded.
“We did describe it seven months ago, Brad,” Kirby said.
“You did not say it was contingent, this was contingent on that,” Klapper replied. “Now you’re saying flatly out that this was, this payment was contingent on the release of the prisoners. You did not say that in January.”
The questioning then turned to the State Department’s alleged attempt to cover up deception over the deal by deleting eight minutes of a 2013 State briefing from the official record.
An exchange between State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and Fox News reporter James Rosen was deleted after Psaki admitted that “there are times where diplomacy needs privacy in order to progress,” in other words, sometimes the government lies to conceal information.
Psaki and Rosen were referring to untrue comments made by another State Department official that there had been no official talks between Iran and the United States regarding a potential nuclear deal.
The State Department later claimed that the deleted portions of video were caused by a “glitch,” but then Kirby walked back that claim, saying that the video had been removed at the request of an unnamed government official.
After an investigation into the matter, Kirby claimed Thursday that there was no conclusive proof that |
seize [C.C.R. 1237-42, 207]
1240 Cardigan (Aberteiui/edificavit turrim de Cardigan) refortified by Walter Marshal [R.B.H. & A.C. n.4]
1241 Degannwy (Degannoe) handed over to King Henry [AC]
1242 (Garth Grugyn/Garthgrugyn) fortified by Maelgwn Fychan [R.B.H. & A.C.]
1245/6 The castle which was Morgan Gam's [A.C.]
1245 Dryslwyn (Deresloyn) besieged [A.C. s.a.1246, n.1]
1246 Dinefwr [C.P.R. 1232-47, ]
1248 Carreg Cennen (Caric Kennenn) regained by Rhys Fychan after it had been treacherously lost by his mother [R.B.H.]
1256 Ewloe begun [P.R.O. Chester 29/23 m.48]; Llywelyn ap Gruffydd broke down the enclosure of the park [of Eulowe] and in the same place built a castle still [1316] situated there [CAPW, 93]
1257 Welshpool (Trallwg/Trallug) mentioned, Bydydon near Llanfyllin (Bydydon/Bodedon) destroyed [R.B.H. & A.C.]
1257 Dinefwr, Dryslwyn, Llandovery, Carreg Cennen, New Castle Emlyn [C.Ch.R.]
1259 Dinefwr (Dinewour/probably an error for Dryslwyn?), New Castle Emlyn (Castelh Nowid) of Maredudd ap Rhys, and Cricieth (Crukeid) [A.C.]
1265 New Castle Emlyn (Emelin) of Maredudd ap Rhys [C.C.R. 1264-68, 95]
1271 Rhyd y Bryw (Rid briw) [Lit. Wal., 29, 216]
1271 Dryslwyn, Dinefwr [R.B.H.]
1273 Brecon attacked [C.C.R. 1272-79, 56]
1273 Dolforwyn (Bachyranneleu) begun [Lit. Wal., No. 25]
1274 Dolforwyn (Dolvorwyn). Welshpool (Trallwg) burned and destroyed to the ground [R.B.H.]
1274 Forden (Wythegruc) occupied by Llywelyn? [Rot. Hund. II, 90]
1277 Dolforwyn (Doluorwyn) surrendered [R.B.H.]
1277 Dinefwr [Lit. Wal., 36]
1277 Dinas Bran, towers and walls mentioned [C.A.C.W., 83]
1277 Dinefwr, Carreg Cennen, Llandovery [C.P.R. 1272-79]
1277 New Castle Emlyn [C.A.C.W.]
1281 Dryslwyn (Tryslugn) [Lit. Wal., No. 200]
1283 Dinefwr [Lit. Wal., 122]
1283-1307 mention of Gwyn ap Gronow of Englefield (Flints) who held the bailiwick of the town of Vaynol (Faenol) & had suffered in his loyal service to the king in the wars [CAPW., 64]
1282 Dinas Bran captured [Cal. Chancery R., 240]
1284 Dolwyddelan turrim [Lit. Wal., No.319]
1287 Rhys ap Maredudd held the new castle in Emelyn (Novum Castrum) until he rose in war, 1318-9 [CAPW., 71; AC]
1287 Dryslwyn (Deresloyn) besieged, [AC]
The Norman CastlesNew Delhi: Ram Jethmalani has never minced his words. So it came as no surprise that even as he announced his retirement from the legal profession after more than seven decades, he seized the chance to slam the government, calling it a “calamity".
It was at a function organized by the apex bar body, the Bar Council of India, to felicitate the new Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra that Jethamalani announced his retirement. He added, however, that he wants to “combat the corrupt politicians that have been brought into positions of power…"
Jethmalani’s career has been marked by high-profile cases and run-ins with some of the most powerful people in the country. Known as a criminal lawyer, particularly his techniques of cross-examination of witnesses, Jethmalani repeatedly proved his mettle in the court-room, making him one of the highest-paid lawyers in the country. In 2015 Legally India— a legal news website—conducted interviews with law firm partners and advocates to determine how much lawyers charge per hearing—Jethamalani came with a hefty price tag of Rs25 lakh. Mint wrote at the time, “Jethmalani can afford to price himself out of the market for all but the most affluent clients because a majority of the cases he does take up these days, he handles pro bono."
Jethmalani’s spectacular journey began, at least in India, in the 1950s when he became involved in the famous Nanavati murder case of 1962 —a love-triangle where a naval officer was tried for the murder of his wife’s alleged lover. But Jethmalani wasn’t representing either one of the sides—he was a young lawyer, starting out at that point of time and had been picked up by Mamie Ahuja, sister of Prem Ahuja, the man who had been shot dead, to look after the interests of her brother. This was a “watching brief". It helped him establish himself in Bombay where he had moved from Karachi after partition (He was a partner in a law firm in Karachi).
The Nanavati case put him on a legal journey that would overlap with politics and events. From Haji Mastan to the assassins of Indira Gandhi and from Rajiv Gandhi to L.K. Advani, Jethmalani has represented people from all walks of life, especially those who would find themselves on the wrong side of history.
“He is an outstandingly brilliant man. His in-depth understanding of the philosophy of criminal law, evidence, reading of the Constitution and his ability to dissect and analyse any situation is exceptional. I don’t think that we will have another Jethmalani. I believe he is the only lawyer in India who can cross-examine in a trial court, argue constitutional questions of law in the Supreme Court and show his mastery in civil law on the same day," said Siddharth Luthra, a senior advocate specializing in criminal law.
Jethmalani, who served as the Union minister for law in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government from 1999 to 2000, started dabbling in politics as early as 1971. He contested his first election as an independent candidate from Ulhasnagar in Maharashtra but lost. As chairman of the Bar Association during the Emergency, Jethmalani was strongly critical of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, earning him an arrest warrant. In spite of large-scale protests by lawyers, Jethmalani had to leave India (he went to Canada). But he didn’t give up on India. Once the Emergency was over, he secured a Lok Sabha seat for himself from Bombay in the 1977 general elections. Although a Bharatiya Janata Party member, in 2004 he decided to contest against Vajpayee from Lucknow—the decision may have had something to do with his removal as law minister.
It’s been a love-hate relationship with the party. It welcomed him back in the fold in 2010 with a Rajya Sabha ticket from Rajasthan but expelled him three years later for anti-party remarks. Clearly the acrimony, as evinced by his recent statements, continues.
“It was back in 1993, when Jethmalani first expressed a desire to retire from practising as an advocate. Despite this, he has continued to be part of the legal system for the last 25 years. I won’t be surprised—and will be delighted—if he is back again to enrich the bar and bench for years to come," said senior advocate Sanjay Hedge.SL11B, the Community Celebration marking Second Life’s eleventh anniversary, has been officially announced, with a blog post which reads in full:
The event will be held from Sunday June 22nd – Sunday June 29th—seven days of amazing exhibits, music, conversation, debate, firework displays, games, puzzles, sports and everything else the wonderfully inventive communities of Second Life™ can pack into seven days and 11 sims.
Actually, even that won’t be the end of it, as the sims will be open for a further seven days for everyone to explore.
The theme for this year is a line lifted from Winston Churchill’s 1943 address to the American people, while visiting Harvard University: the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. Why this quote? I’ll let event PR lead Saffia Widdershins explain:
Last year’s theme was “Looking Forward, Looking Back,” but we focused mostly on looking back, and rightly so, as 10 years was an important milestone and a perfect opportunity to reflect back on where we came from.
This year it’s time to look forward; to imagine where we are headed.
When Winston Churchill said this in 1943, he could not have imagined a virtual world like Second Life, but now, more than seventy years later, his words have come true in this new world that we have created.
If there’s one thing that makes SL unique, it’s our community of users. Users from all corners of the globe come together under a single umbrella to build a community that comes from our minds and our imaginations. Everything we see, touch and use in Second Life is a product of our imaginations, our minds, and our community.
And this year, at the SL11B Community Celebration, we want to celebrate precisely that!
Details are understandably sparse at this point in time – this is, after all the initial announcement – but rest assured, more details will be appearing as the plans start to come together.
I’ll be doing my usual coverage of the lead-up to the celebrations and the week of festivities itself, as well as covering any other SL11B activities which may be going on across the grid that I get to hear about.
For those wishing to keep bang up to date with the news on SL11BCC, click the FOLLOW link on the blog!
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AdvertisementsWhen it comes to the world of soccer, one phrase that seems to reverberate any time there is a debate to be had is this: soccer is subjective. The basic idea here is that, for both fans and members of the media alike, there are a multitude of varying perspective and opinions. Indeed, everyone is entitled to an opinion. With that said, I’m here to make a declaration: Darlington Nagbe is a phenomenal soccer player, and I’ll fight anyone who says differently.
First things first, he doesn’t always score goals. Indeed, he managed only one all last season, a fact that led some to call his 2014 campaign a slump. However, in the system utilized by Portland Timbers coach Caleb Porter, scoring goals is not Nagbe’s job. Instead, he is there to pester opposing defenses wherever opportunities present themselves, thereby helping to create chances for his teammates.
According to WhoScored.com, in 2014, Nagbe was 2nd overall in Major League Soccer in both dribbles successfully completed and fouls suffered. He is not only extremely elusive and frustrating for defenders, but also possessed of significant technical ability. Nagbe’s first touch is as silky and smooth as anyone in the league. Moreover, he has the unique ability to turn on a dime and leave a defender in the dust, but also the composure to pick out the most intelligent pass possible.
While Nagbe has consistently featured domestically for the Timbers, there could soon be an opportunity for him to showcase his immense talents on the international stage. According to Timbers owner Merritt Paulson, the 24-year-old will be eligible to represent the United States Men’s National Team in September.
The USA’s roster is already deep and talented, but in this writer’s opinion, Nagbe should be on Jurgen Klinsmann’s speed dial as soon as logistically possible. His versatility (he can play as a winger or an attacking midfielder) combined with his pace and technical ability would make him a dangerous addition to the US player pool.
For this week’s video analysis, I chose Nagbe’s game against the LA Galaxy. I feel this game really showcases the player perfectly. He doesn’t have a flawless game, but he’s directly involved in both of his side’s goals and he puts his stamp on the game like he typically does. I would say this is an average game for him. It’s one you will likely see from him numerous times throughout the season, and that’s why I picked it. Judge for yourself just how good of a performance it was:
0:19 – One of Nagbe’s best attributes is his dribbling. His ability to walk the sidelines without losing possession is unreal.
1:55 – Nagbe uses his chest to take a brilliant first touch into space. He’s then able to combine with his target man, eventually leading to a shot on goal
2:34 – Not only does he possess pace and technical ability, but strength as well. Here, he’s able to utilize his physicality to fend off defenders while dribbling.
3:06 – The technical ability, skill and creativity of this back heel pass is breathtaking. It is moments like these that make you want to watch him every week.
3:34 – This is a first touch that dreams are made of. The majority of players in the top leagues around the world wish they had this type of ability.
4:40 and 6:31 – A few of his mistakes on the day. In both instances, he gets caught in possession in dangerous spots on the field. These were difficult positions for him, and perhaps show the Timbers over-reliance on Nagbe to navigate out of tight spots.
4:54 – Work rate is a very underrated aspect of Nagbe’s game, as he’s more than willing to track back and help out when needed.
7:37 – A brilliant first touch allows him to control this long ball, and leaves him in a perfect position to execute a lovely pass to Adi for the goal.The term ‘rewilding’ is being recognised and acknowledged more widely and more frequently in Europe, while many initiatives and organisations have started to use this term. But what is ‘rewilding’ and how do we like to use it in the European context? It is for this reason that we have developed a working definition of ‘rewilding’ and first published this in our Annual Review 2014.
Rewilding Europe is a learning organisation, to be more specific: learning by doing. It means that during the first years of our initiative, we have been pioneering and exploring ‘rewilding’ in a European setting and in different regions of our continent. We received many responses and extensive feed back from many organisations, stakeholders, individuals, scientists and authorities. This has helped us a lot in shaping a working definition that we believe is particularly suited to Europe’s history, culture, and condition of landscapes.
Rewilding Europe believes there is a need for a working definition for ‘rewilding’ as this is becoming a conservation approach that is used more and more in Europe. We recognize that there might be differences in how ‘rewilding’ is defined and practiced in different places across the world. We will use this definition for the vision and work of Rewilding Europe and hope and encourage other organisations and initiatives to adopt this working definition as well. We very much welcome suggestions and views to further sharpen and improve it.
— “We have deliberately chosen to call this a ‘working definition,” says Wouter Helmer, Rewilding Director of Rewilding Europe. “It means that while developing our initiative further, we will learn more and that will help us to refine it as we go, to a point where we feel satisfied and see others adopting this definition – which in fact represents an additional approach to conservation.”
Our working definition is:
Rewilding ensures natural processes and wild species to play a much more prominent role in the land- and seascapes, meaning that after initial support, nature is allowed to take more care of itself. Rewilding helps landscapes become wilder, whilst also providing opportunities for modern society to reconnect with such wilder places for the benefit of all life.
A number of important annotations further clarify this working definition for the European situation. These annotations are provided here:
Rewilding represents a new appreciation of wilder landscapes, in which people understand the interdependent relationship between the health of wild nature and the health of human society, and act to strengthen this indispensable relationship.
Rewilding creates a new understanding that life-supporting European biodiversity is fundamentally important, and is best derived from natural processes and the habitats that are the result of those processes.
Rewilding can occur in all types of land (and sea-) scapes, on a small and a large scale. While a formal protected status is not required, some form of it is often desirable to assure continued, long-term benefits of rewilding.
Rewilding is future-oriented, and works towards the return of natural processes and wildlife within our modern social context, creating new opportunities to link human activities to such wilder, natural landscapes.
Rewilding often requires some initial supportive measures, to kick-start natural processes again, or to help wildlife species come back in more natural numbers, but always with the goal of less intervention after that point.
Rewilding is a relative and progressive process, and can be understood as occurring on a ‘Scale of Wildness’, where the process is directed towards moving up on this scale.
Rewilding is not geared to reach any certain human-defined ‘optimal situation’ or end state, nor to only create ‘wilderness’ – but it is instead meant to support more natural dynamics that will result in habitats and landscapes characteristic of specific area(s), with abiotic, biotic and social features that together create the particular ‘Sense of the Place’.
Reintroductions and population reinforcements of flora and fauna are meant to restore ecosystem functions and processes, but in historically indigenous range of species.
In Europe, even our wildest landscapes are missing certain key natural processes and/or species, making even these areas important and “qualified” for rewilding.
To restore ecosystem functions and natural processes, working with ‘ecological replacements’ (of extinct species) is also an option (cf. IUCN), however the main focus is on the native species, including those that may be extirpated (extinct in the local the area).
The Annual Review 2014 in pdf-format can be downloaded here.The recurring subscription model is a business strategy that a growing list of app developers have decided to adopt, and the latest such move comes from the folks behind the stellar iOS and Mac writing app Ulysses. Users can now enjoy a 14-day Ulysses trial, and thereafter subscribe for $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year.
Subscriptions are beneficial to developers because it provides them with a recurring source of revenue as they work to continually update the app, provide fixes and support, and develop new features. Software products are never “done” and software engineers, designers, and support staff never stop working, so it makes sense from a sustainable business perspective.
That said, it’s also understandable that, despite the considerably lower cost of entry, there may be pushback among consumers who aren’t interested in yet another subscription fee to add to their ever-growing list of recurring payments.
So the folks at Ulysses are sweetening the deal for already-existing customers, providing a lifetime 50% discount off the $5 monthly, which means paying $30 a year for full access to Ulysses on Mac and iOS.
Synology RT2600ac: The AirPort Extreme replacement.
Benefits of a subscription model
Ulysses provides a list of several benefits on its blog post about the move to the subscription model. The first benefit listed was the ability to offer a free, cross-platform 14-day trial. After the trial elapses the app will simply switch over to a read-only mode.
The second benefit, one already mentioned, is that a single purchase unlock access to the app on both iOS and Mac platforms. That means that you always have access to the latest and greatest versions of Ulysses on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.
Ulysses is also providing a free-use period of up to 18-months for those who recently purchased the app. Mac customers get 12 months of free-use, and iOS customers get 6-months, for a combined total of up to 18 months if you happened to have purchased both.
A recent Friday 5 episode discussing Ulysses
Prior versions of Ulysses
As expected, previous single-purchase versions of the app have already been removed from the App Store, effective immediately. The good news is that updates for both High Sierra and iOS 11 have been included in those sunsetted versions, so users should be able to enjoy the apps with no issues on the upcoming versions of iOS and macOS.
Existing users will be able to access purchase history to re-download the older, single-purchase versions of Ulysses at any time, but new customers will only have access to the subscription-based app downloads going forward.
Subscriptions are here to stay
You might not like it, but the reality of the situation is that subscriptions are here to stay. They provide ongoing revenue to expensive software development costs, and also provide consumers with a lower cost of entry, perpetual updates, and cross platform support. For software developers with ongoing development costs, it’s just a matter of time before the initial surge of growth plateaus and new methods of revenue have to be explored to keep things operational.
What are your thoughts on Ulysses’ transition to a subscription-based model? To be honest, I wasn’t thrilled at first, but as a prospective lifetime discount user, I think it’s a reasonable deal considering I get access to both the latest Mac and iOS apps going forward, and I get to support a worthy developer in the process.
You can download the Mac version and the iOS version of Ulysses with free 14-day trial starting today.
Update: for a further explanation of the mindset that went into this update, check out this in-depth blog post that explains the thinking and background that went into the decision. It goes much more in depth on some of the talking points that I alluded to in the post.When browsing cannabis strains or purchasing cannabis at a shop, you may notice strains are commonly broken up into two distinct groups: indica and sativa. Most consumers have used these two cannabis types as a touchstone for predicting effects:
Indica strains are believed to be physically sedating, perfect for relaxing with a movie or as a nightcap before bed.
Sativas tend to provide more invigorating, uplifting cerebral effects that pair well with physical activity, social gatherings, and creative projects.
This belief that indicas and sativas deliver distinct effects is so deeply rooted in mainstream cannabis culture that budtenders typically begin their strain recommendations by asking you which of these three types you prefer.
However, data collected by cannabis researchers suggests these categories aren’t as prescriptive as one might hope—in other words, there’s little evidence to suggest that indicas and sativas exhibit a consistent pattern of chemical profiles that would make one inherently sedating and the other uplifting. We do know that indica and sativa cannabis strains look different and grow differently, but this distinction is primarily useful only to cannabis cultivators.
So how exactly did the words “indica” and “sativa” make it into the vernacular of cannabis consumers worldwide, and to what extent are they meaningful when choosing a strain?
Indica and Sativa: Origin and Evolution of the Terms
The words “indica” and “sativa” were introduced in the 18th century to describe different species of cannabis: Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica. The term sativa, named by Carl Linneaus, described hemp plants found in Europe and western Eurasia, where it was cultivated for its fiber and seeds. Cannabis indica, named by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, describes the psychoactive varieties discovered in India, where it was harvested for its seeds, fiber, and hashish production.
Although the cannabis varieties we consume largely stem from Cannabis indica, both terms are used–even if erroneously–to organize the thousands of strains circulating the market today.
Here’s how terms have shifted since their earliest botanical definitions:
Today, “sativa” refers to tall, narrow-leaf varieties of cannabis, thought to induce energizing effects. However, these narrow-leaf drug (NLD) varieties were originally Cannabis indica ssp. indica.
“Indica” has come to describe stout, broad-leaf plants, thought to deliver sedating effects. These broad-leaf drug (BLD) varieties are technically Cannabis indica ssp. afghanica.
What we call “hemp” refers to the industrial, non-intoxicating varieties harvested primarily for fiber, seeds, and CBD. However, this was originally named Cannabis sativa.
Confused? Understandably so. As you can see, with the mass commercialization of cannabis, the taxonomical distinctions between cannabis species and subspecies got turned on its head and calcified. It seems the contemporary use of indica and sativa descriptors is here to stay, but as an informed consumer, it’s important to understand the practical value of these categories—which brings us to the research.
Indica vs. Sativa Effects: What Does the Research Say?
This three-type system we use to predict cannabis effects is no doubt convenient, especially when first entering the vast, overwhelming world of cannabis. With so many strains and products to choose from, where else are we to begin?
Ethan Russo, neurologist and cannabis researcher “The clinical effects of the cannabis chemovar have nothing to do with whether the plant is tall and sparse vs. short and bushy, or whether the leaflets are narrow or broad.”
The answer is cannabinoids and terpenes, two words you should put in your back pocket if you haven’t already. We’ll get to know these terms shortly.
But first, we asked two prominent cannabis researchers if sativa/indica classification should have any bearing on a consumer’s strain selection. Ethan Russo is a neurologist whose research in cannabis psychopharmacology is respected worldwide, and Jeffrey Raber, Ph.D., is a chemist who founded the first independent testing lab to analyze cannabis terpenes in a commercial capacity, The Werc Shop.
“The way that the sativa and indica labels are utilized in commerce is nonsense,” Russo told Leafly. “The clinical effects of the cannabis chemovar have nothing to do with whether the plant is tall and sparse vs. short and bushy, or whether the leaflets are narrow or broad.”
Raber agreed, and when asked if budtenders should be guiding consumers with terms like “indica” and “sativa,” he replied, “There is no factual or scientific basis to making these broad sweeping recommendations, and it needs to stop today. What we need to seek to understand better is which standardized cannabis composition is causing which effects, when delivered in which fashions, at which specific dosages, to which types of [consumers].”
What this means is not all sativas will energize you, and not all indicas will sedate you. You may notice a tendency for these so-called sativas to be uplifting or for these indicas to be relaxing, especially when we expect to feel one way or the other. Just note that there’s no hard-and-fast rule and no determinant chemical data that supports a perfect predictive pattern.
If Indica vs. Sativa Isn’t Predictive of Effects, What Is?
The effects of any given cannabis strain depend on a number of different factors, including the product’s chemical profile, your unique biology and tolerance, dose, and consumption method. Understand how these factors change the experience and you’ll have the best chance of finding that perfect strain for you.
Cannabinoids
The cannabis plant is comprised of hundreds of chemical compounds that create a unique harmony of effects, which is primarily led by cannabinoids and terpenes. Cannabinoids like THC and CBD (the two most common) are the main drivers of cannabis’ therapeutic and recreational effects:
THC (Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol) makes us feel hungry and high, and relieves symptoms like pain and nausea.
CBD (cannabidiol) is a non-intoxicating compound known to alleviate anxiety, pain, inflammation, and many other medical ailments.
Cannabis contains over a hundred different types of these cannabinoids, but start by familiarizing yourself with these two first. Instead of choosing a strain based on its indica or sativa classification, consider basing your selection on these three buckets instead:
THC-dominant strains are primarily chosen by consumers seeking a potent euphoric experience. These strains are also selected by patients treating pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and more. If you tend to feel anxious with THC-dominant strains or dislike other side effects associated with THC, try a strain with higher levels of CBD.
strains are primarily chosen by consumers seeking a potent euphoric experience. These strains are also selected by patients treating pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and more. If you tend to feel anxious with THC-dominant strains or dislike other side effects associated with THC, try a strain with higher levels of CBD. CBD-dominant strains contain only small amounts of THC, and are widely used by those highly sensitive to THC or patients needing clear-headed symptom relief.
strains contain only small amounts of THC, and are widely used by those highly sensitive to THC or patients needing clear-headed symptom relief. Balanced THC/CBD strains contain balanced levels of THC, offering mild euphoria alongside symptom relief. These tend to be a good choice for novice consumers seeking an introduction to cannabis’ signature high.
It’s worth noting that both indica and sativa strains exhibit these different cannabinoid profiles. “Initially most people thought higher CBD levels caused sedation, and that CBD was more prevalent in indica cultivars, which we now know is most definitely not the case,” Raber told Leafly. “We are more prone to see some CBD in sativa-like cultivars, but there isn’t a systematic rule or relationship in that regard.”
Terpenes
If you’ve ever used aromatherapy to relax or invigorate your mind and body, you understand the basics of terpenes. Terpenes are aromatic compounds commonly produced by plants and fruit. They can be found in lavender flowers, oranges, hops, pepper, and of course, cannabis. Secreted by the same glands that ooze THC and CBD, terpenes are what make cannabis smell like berries, citrus, pine, fuel, etc.
Jeffrey Raber, Founder of The Werc Shop “Terpenes seem to be major players in driving the sedating or energizing effects.”
Like essential oils vaporized in a diffuser, cannabis terpenes can make us feel stimulated or sedated, depending on which ones are produced. Pinene, for example, is an alerting terpene while linalool has relaxing properties. There are many types of terpenes in cannabis, and it’s worth familiarizing yourself with at least the most common.
“Terpenes seem to be major players in driving the sedating or energizing effects,” Raber said. “Which terpenes cause which effects is apparently much more complicated than all of us would like, as it seems to [vary based on specific] ones and their relative ratios to each other and the cannabinoids.”
According to Raber, a strain’s indica or sativa morphology does not specifically determine these aromas and effects. However, you may find consistency among individual strains. The strain Tangie, for example, delivers a distinctive citrus aroma, while DJ Short’s Blueberry should never fail to offer the hallmark scent of ripe berry.
If you can, smell the strains you’re considering for purchase. Find the aromas that stand out to you and give them a try. In time, your intuition and knowledge of cannabinoids and terpenes will guide you to your favorite strains and products.
Biology, Dosing, and Consumption Method
Lastly, consider the following questions when choosing the right strain or product for you.
How much experience do you have with cannabis? If your tolerance is low, consider a low-THC strain in low doses.
Are you susceptible to anxiety or other side effects of THC? If so, try a strain high in CBD.
Do you want the effects to last a long time? If you do, consider edibles (starting with a low dose). Conversely, if you seek a short-term experience, use inhalation methods or a tincture.
There are many factors to consider when choosing a strain, but if you truly find that indica strains consistently deliver a positive experience, then by all means, keep ‘em coming. However, if you’re still searching for that ideal strain, these are important details to keep in mind.
What Cannabis Strain Is Right for You?
Before choosing indica or sativa, it is important to consider a third cannabis type: hybrid. Hybrids are thought to fall somewhere in between the indica-sativa spectrum, depending on the traits they inherit from their parent strains.
This may seem overwhelming, especially if you’re a budtender whose job it is to guide consumers to the right product. Ironically, the more you know about cannabis, the more questions seem to arise. But understanding the basic properties of cannabinoids, terpenes, and consumption methods will often answer the most fundamental question of cannabis: What product is right for me?
Here are some helpful beginner resources to get you started:
For budtenders, be cognizant of the basis of your recommendation, especially for customers treating medical ailments. Educate yourself on the benefits of different cannabinoids and terpenes, and use that knowledge to make a recommendation beyond the oversimplifications and marketing tactics embedded in the sativa/indica distinction.
“In the future, I’d like to see the terms ‘sativa’ and ‘indica’ be abandoned in favor of a system in which the consumer tells the budtender what s/he would like to have in terms of effects from their cannabis selection, and then study the offerings together,” Russo said. “If a buzz is all that is wanted, then high THC with limonene or terpinolene would be desirable. If someone, in contrast, has to work or study and treat their pain, then high CBD with low THC plus some alpha-pinene to reduce short-term memory impairment would be the ticket.”
Cannabis may not be as simple as we’d like, but its diversity and complexity is what makes it such a remarkable plant and tool for consumers of all types.
Lead image by Amy Phung/LeaflyEDMONTON — Alberta Premier Rachel Notley says the opposition United Conservatives are determined to wreak havoc on working families and bring harm to gay children.
Notley made the comments in a fiery campaign-style speech to party faithful today at a meeting of the Alberta NDP provincial council.
She says voters face a critical choice in the next election that will reverberate for generations, and says it will be won not in the media but on the doorsteps, coffees shops and online.
Notley says the UCP will return to the days of the Progressive Conservatives, where front-line services and help for families were cut in favour of perks and tax breaks for political friends.
Notley said the comment from UCP leadership candidate Jason Kenney that parents should be told if their child joins a gay-straight alliance at school was “super-cruel”.
She says it will lead to children being outed.
Notley also went after Kenney for failing to follow through on his promise to release the list of his campaign donors, saying Kenney either doesn’t agree with transparency or is scared to level with Albertans.This article was originally published on Global Research in June 2017.
These days we rush from one media story to another, trying to keep up with the latest terrorist attack. Yesterday Paris; today London; tomorrow, who knows? These attacks are tragic enough when they are acts of violence by religious extremists who have outsmarted our police and intelligence agencies. But, of course, many of them are actually violent acts facilitated by our police and intelligence agencies, directly or indirectly. The tragedy in such cases lies not only in the immediate human suffering but in the way our civil society and elected representatives are betrayed, intimidated, disciplined and stripped of their power by our own security agencies. The War on Terror, which goes by different names in different countries but continues as a global framework for violent conflict, thrives on this fraud.
But if the very agencies that should be investigating and preventing these attacks are involved in perpetrating them, what is civil society to do to protect itself? Who will step in to study the evidence and sort out what really happened? And who will investigate the official investigators? Over the years, civilians from different walks of life have stepped forward–forming groups, sharing information and methods, creating a tradition of civilian investigation.
One such investigator is Elias Davidsson (image on the right). Some readers will be familiar with his meticulous book, Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11 or his more recent work, Psychologische Kriegsführung und gesellschaftliche Leugnung. Davidsson has now produced a book on the 2008 attacks that occurred in Mumbai, India. The book is entitled, The Betrayal of India: Revisiting the 26/11 Evidence (New Delhi: Pharos, 2017).
To remind ourselves of these attacks–that is, of the official story of these attacks as narrated by the Indian government–we can do no better than to consult Wikipedia, which seldom strays from government intelligence narratives:
“The 2008 Mumbai attacks were a series of attacks that took place in November 2008, when 10 members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamic militant organization based in Pakistan, carried out a series of 12 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks lasting four days across Mumbai. The attacks, which drew widespread global condemnation, began on Wednesday, 26 November and lasted until Saturday, 29 November 2008, killing 164 people and wounding at least 308.”
This description, however faulty, serves to make clear why the events were widely portrayed as a huge crime—India’s 9/11. When we bear in mind that both India and Pakistan are armed with nuclear weapons, and when we consider that these events were widely characterized in India as an act of war supported by Pakistan (Davidsson, 72-74; 511 ff.; 731 ff.), we will understand how dangerous the event was for over a billion and a half people in south Asia.
We will also understand how easy |
experienced spontaneous regression of tumor, after the tumor became infected. In the 18th and 19th centuries, deliberate infection of tumors was a standard treatment, whereby surgical wounds were left open to facilitate the development of infection. Throughout the time period, physicians reported successful treatment of cancer by exposing the tumor to infection including the report of French physician Dussosoy who covered an ulcerated breast carcinoma with gangrenous discharge soaked cloth, resulting in disappearance of tumor.[4][5][6] Observations of a relationship between infection and cancer regression date back to at least the 18th century.[7][8][9] More specifically, observations of an apparent relationship between erysipelas and remission of cancer predate Coley.[10] For example, Anton Chekhov, in his capacity as a physician, recorded such a relationship in 1884.[11]
Coley started his investigations after the death of one of his first patients, Elizabeth Dashiell, from sarcoma. Dashiell was a close childhood friend of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who later indicated that her death was what first motivated his subsequent funding of cancer research.[12][13]
Frustrated by this case, Coley's subsequent research led him to announce evidence of the apparent relationship between infection and cancer regression, which he published in 1891.[14] His initial attempts at deliberate infection were mixed,[15] but in 1893 he began combining Streptococcus pyogenes and Serratia marcescens, based upon research from G.H. Roger indicating that this combination led to greater virulence.[16]
Coley published the results of his work as a case series, making it difficult to interpret them with confidence. According to the American Cancer Society, "more research would be needed to determine what benefit, if any, this therapy might have for people with cancer".[17]
The so-called Coley's Toxins were used against different types of cancer from the year 1893[18] through the year 1963. From 1923 on, Parke-Davis was the only source of Coley's Toxins in the United States. In the wake of the thalidomide controversy and the Kefauver Harris Amendment of 1962, Coley's Toxins were assigned "new drug" status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), making it illegal to prescribe them outside of clinical trials.[19] Since then, several small clinical trials have been conducted with mixed results.[20]
Coley's Toxins were also produced by the small German pharmaceutical company Südmedica[21] and sold under the trade name Vaccineurin.[22] However, production ceased by 1990 because of a lack of re-approval by German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices.
According to Cancer Research UK, "available scientific evidence does not currently support claims that Coley's toxins can treat or prevent cancer".[23] People with cancer who take Coley's toxins alongside conventional cancer treatments, or who use it as a substitute for those treatments, risk seriously harming their health.[23]
From 2009, research has been conducted in Australia and the United States which indicates the presence of an immune cycle.[24]
Rationale [ edit ]
There are multiple rationales proposed for how Coley's toxins affect the patient.
Macrophages [ edit ]
One rationale argues that macrophages are either in "repair mode", furthering the growing of cancer, or in "defense mode", destroying cancer. However, macrophages are in "defense mode" only if there is some recognized enemy. As cancer tissue is not recognized as enemy (but as normal body tissue), there is a need to bring more macrophages into "defense mode" by simulating an infection. The simulated infection results in a real fever. Unlike hyperthermia, real fever not only means heating of the body but also higher activity of the immune system. Thus, fever is seen as a precondition for a therapy using Coley's Toxins to succeed.[7][25][26]
Tumor necrosis factor and interleukin [ edit ]
One of the agents in Coley's Toxin that is thought to be biologically active is a lipopolysaccharide which causes fever.[27] The resulting fever from the lipopolysaccaride is thought to increase lymphocyte activity and boosts tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Tsung and Norton in Surgical Oncology reported that the active agent was thought to be interleukin-12, rather than TNF.[28]
Streptokinase [ edit ]
Another hypothesis argues that streptokinase (produced by bacteria of type "streptococcus" together with plasminogen from the patient) is the active agent of Coley's toxins.[29][30] This hypothesis is supported by the fact that streptokinase has been associated with successful treatment of thromboangiitis obliterans.[31]
In addition to the mechanisms above, Coley's toxins might be antiangiogenic – suppressing the formation of new blood vessels which are vital to the growth of tumors.[32] However, angiogenesis is not a biochemical cause by itself but needs external triggers.
Dendritic cells [ edit ]
A robust fever, which occurs in response to Coley fluid, generates inflammatory factors with co-stimulatory activity, which activate resting dendritic cells (DC), leading to the activation of anergic T cells, possibly accomplished through a second process, where physical damage to cancer cells leads to a sudden supply of cancer antigens to the dendritic cell population.[7][25]
PAMP [ edit ]
Recently (2008), an immunological explanation binding together immunological data with findings about spontaneous regression and epidemiological data indicating a lowered risk to develop cancer later after common infections, has been published.[33] According to this hypothesis, pathogenic substances produced by bacteria, viruses, infectious fungi and other pathogens, but not human tissue, called 'pathogen associated molecular pattern' (PAMP) lead to activation and maturation of tumor-antigen loaded dendritic cells. One PAMP thought to play a major role is the unmethlyated CpG motif found in bacterial DNA. The CpG motif is recognized by toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) and can induce a strong TH1 response.
Availability [ edit ]
MBVax Bioscience, a Canadian Biotech company, produces Coley Fluid for research and clinical study.[34][35] A private biotech company, Coley Pharmaceutical Group, has conducted clinical trials using genetic sequences which may have contributed to Coley's toxin's effectiveness, and was acquired by Pfizer in January 2008.[36] In addition, the Waisbren Clinic in Wisconsin reports they have used Coley's toxin to treat patients since 1972.[37] Coley's toxins are generally not available where approval or licence is required (in particular in the United States and Germany).
Drug makers including Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis are interested in modern versions of Coley's toxins;[38] Pfizer has acquired the Coley Pharmaceutical Group, set up in 1997[39]
Germany [ edit ]
Some specialized medical doctors in Germany apply Coley's toxins to patients. They can do so legally because, in Germany, unapproved medications may be produced, although they may not be sold or given away. Physicians can go to special laboratories and produce Coley's toxins there using their own hands. Coley's toxins may still be applied by a licensed medical doctor, because in Germany there is "Therapiefreiheit" ("therapy freedom"), the legal right to apply whichever therapy a physician considers to be appropriate in the light of their medical knowledge. For example, Dr Josef Issels used several unconventional and controversial treatments, including Coley's toxins, for cancer patients in the second half of the 20th century.
This kind of therapy is offered as "Fiebertherapie" (fever therapy) or better "Aktive Fiebertherapie" (active fever therapy). This term was introduced by E. Göhring in 1985.[40] Hyperthermia therapy or thermotherapy is not the same type of treatment, although sometimes incorrectly called "fever therapy".[citation needed]
Name [ edit ]
There are several names for Coley's toxins or Coley's vaccine. The reason may lie in the difficulty of classifying such a substance under the view of the established medicine:
Coley's vaccine is not a vaccine in the usual sense, namely that it prevents an infection. Rather than that, it triggers infection-like reactions. However, Coley's vaccine may work like many ordinary vaccines: it induces an immune response, in this case against the cancer. In this sense, it predates current attempts to develop cancer vaccines.
is not a vaccine in the usual sense, namely that it prevents an infection. Rather than that, it triggers infection-like reactions. However, may work like many ordinary vaccines: it induces an immune response, in this case against the cancer. In this sense, it predates current attempts to develop cancer vaccines. The term toxin is applied as Coley's toxins contain both endotoxins and exotoxins.[ citation needed ]
Politics [ edit ]
According to an article in the Iowa Orthopedic Journal, Coley's toxins were opposed by the medical establishment despite his reports of good results, because his reports were not believed to be credible.[41]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Hospitals [ edit ]
Hospital for Special Surgery, William B. Coley, Surgeon-in-Chief, 1925-1933
Companies [ edit ]Mikko Koivu, on crutches, met with members of the media after the Wild’s morning skate today. It didn’t take long to get the impression that, while the pain in his surgically-repaired right ankle is already fading, it will take much longer for his frustration to do the same.
He, along with other key Wild players, has to watch his team play. And then there is the question of the upcoming Winter Olympics, where he is expected to captain the Finnish team.
“I’m not going to sit here and say I haven’t thought about it,” said Koivu, who took a puck to the skate in the Wild’s game with Washington Jan. 4. He left the game briefly, then returned long enough to pick up assists on two Ryan Suter goals before ultimately leaving the game for good. He had surgery two days later. The prognosis for his return is about four weeks.
“More than anything, I think it’s just the frustration, when you’re in the middle of the season, you feel good and we were starting to get on a roll again, things like that,” Koivu said. “The frustration, that’s the biggest thing, not being able to do the things with the team.’’
The Washington victory was the team’s second straight after ending a six-game losing streak. Since then the injury-riddled Wild has won two more and is bringing four-game winning streak into tonight’s game with Colorado.
That said, Koivu said he believes he will play in the Olympics, and he is confident he will have returned to action with the Wild before the Olympics begin. Given the general four-week timetable, that will be cutting it close. The Wild plays 13 more games before breaking for the Olympics, with games Feb. 1, 4 and 6.
“I’m pretty confident on the Olympics, that I’ll be there,” Koivu said. “But it’s too early to make that call. What the time schedule will be, I don’t know that right now. I don’t think anyone does. But, talking to people who have had (the same surgery), and talking to the doctors, I think I’ll be playing games here before the Olympics start.’’
Asked if he’d be willing to wear extra skate protection going forward, Koivu wavered, saying he’d heard the protection makes skating less comfortable. “If they can make a good one, make it comfortable? I’m sure I’d wear one,” he said. “But we’ll see.”
Here are some other notes from this morning:
--Josh Harding skated on his own with goalie coach Bob Mason before the rest of the team took the ice Saturday. Wild coach Yeo says it's a good sign for Harding, who has missed the past four games due to not feeling well. Prior to a two-game return in losses to the Islanders and St. Louis, Harding missed another four games to make what was termed "a minor adjustment" to his treatment protocol for multiple sclerosis. Yeo said it was a good sign to see Harding on the ice, but didn’t have a specific timetable for Harding’s return. “I talked to him this morning and he’s been feeling better the last couple days,” Yeo said. “So we’ll look for him to join the group here soon.
--Yeo said there is no specific timetable for Zach Parise to return to practice. Parise, who has a broken foot, has missed eight straight games. Yeo said the hope is for Parise to get back on the ice next week, most likely skating on his own a few times before the decision is made for him to return to practice. “He’s getting there,” Yeo said. “He’s feeling better. Obviously, we’d be very anxious for him to rejoin the group here. So, hopefully, sometime next week we can get him with us.’’
--Defenseman Jared Spurgeon (foot) is scheduled to meet with a doctor some time Saturday evening, after which a timetable for his return to action might be available.
--Yeo said he’d be going with the same lineup tonight as he did in Phoenix, which means defenseman Jonathon Blum will be in the ice again. Yeo wouldn’t say who would start in goal, but it appears Niklas Backstrom will get the start tonight, with Darcy Kuemper going tomorrow in Nashville.10 Vegan Musicians You Need to Add to Your Playlist
Sarah Von Alt |
1. Stevie Wonder
This legendary musician became vegan several years ago and has spoken out about the environmental devastation caused by meat.
2. Moby
For nearly 30 years, music icon Moby has promoted veganism and animal rights. He is an incredible supporter of Mercy For Animals and headlined the world’s first vegan music festival, Circle V.
3. Miley Cyrus
Inspired by the loss of her blowfish, pop star Miley Cyrus went vegan, talked about it on Jimmy Fallon, and promotes veganism through her Instagram account.
4. Mya
Grammy Award-winning artist Mýa is a dedicated vegan advocate who speaks out about her passion for animal rights and the health benefits of a plant-based diet.
5. Tony Kanal of No Doubt
A die-hard animal rights activist and MFA supporter, this famed bassist lent his talents to help produce Circle V music fest.
6. Erykah Badu
Award-winning singer and songwriter Erykah Badu has been vegan for more than 20 years. “Vegan food is soul food in its truest form,” she declares.
7. Diane Warren
Hailed by some as “the most important songwriter in the world,” famed Grammy Award-winner Diane Warren is a true champion for animals!
8. Mark Pontius of Foster the People
The drummer for Foster the People, Mark Pontius is an outspoken vegan, an MFA supporter, and a participant in our #NoAgGag campaign.
9. RZA of Wu-Tang Clan
A prominent figure in hip hop, this rapper and producer is a well-known member of Wu-Tang Clan and promotes a vegan diet.
10. Ariana Grande
This award-winning singer and actress went vegan in 2013 and says, “I am a firm believer in eating a full plant-based, whole food diet that can expand your life length and make you an all-around happier person.”
—
Click here for the vegan celebs that would be in our MySpace Top 8!S Gurumurthy By
Known as ‘Mappillai’ in Tamil and ‘Damad’ in Hindi, all sons-in-law have high standing in Indian families -- religion, caste, region and language regardless.
No surprise therefore that sons-in-law of wealthy, powerful families make news, mostly for wrong reasons. Some months ago, Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi, was in the news for building, in just four years, real estate empire worth couple of billion Dollars [Rs 11,000 crore], according to California’s Celebritynetworth.com, which even the media that adores Sonia Gandhi had to confess as reeking of corruption.
When Arvind Kejriwal exposed the shenanigans of Vadra, for the first time therefore even Sonia-friendly media raised eyebrows about her. But within hours of the exposure, she certified Vadra as honest, directed her party to defend her son-in-law. Yet the media did manage to keep the issue alive.
In April last Haryana Government cleared Vadra of wrong doing. Before the media could scrutinise the fake clearance, the CBI and Law Minister Ashwini Kumar were shockingly caught fabricating CBI report to Supreme Court followed by the CBI catching Railway Minister Pawan Bansal’s nephew selling top posts in the Railways. Vadra went out of the radar even as both ministers made noisy exit.
When the Prime Minister’s head was the next, came the news of spot fixing in Indian Premier League [IPL] cricket matches. All previous scams of lakhs of crores of rupees moved out of the radar as another son-in-law, who held himself out as the owner of Chennai Super Kings team, was caught punting on matches.
Gurunath Meiyappan, the hitherto unknown son-in-law of N Srinivasan who heads the high profile Board of Control for Cricket of India [BCCI] has virtually saved the UPA Government that was being chased by the media and the Supreme Court.
Obviously a smalltime punter, Gurunath is in the news for betting on IPL cricket match results. As per police investigating him, far from making money, he was desperately talking to bookies for tips to bet, win and recover the loss of a crore he had made. Yet see where the two sons-in-law stand now. Gurunath is in police custody for an offence that is yet to be made clear and his father-in-law is fighting to save his seat as chairman of the prestigious BCCI. But Vadra, shaming those who had raised questions of corruption against him as ‘mango people’ [aam aadmi] in banana republic [India], still walks like the President and Prime Minister of the country uninterrupted by security in airports and his mother-in-law pontificates on honesty and calls for war against corruption despite the US based Corporate Insider’s count of her [undeclared] wealth at between $2-19 billions. Media berates Srinivasan as shameless. And celebrates Sonia Gandhi for figuring as the 9th most powerful women in Forbes Magazine’s list last week. It is just a prologue to the interesting and contrasting tale of the two sons-in-law - Vadra and Gurunath. Let us recall the Vadra story and contrast it with Gurunath’s.
On October 5, 2012, the Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan disclosed with prima facie evidence that ‘damad’ Robert Vadra has amassed some 31 properties in the last four years mostly in and around New Delhi, which even at the time of their purchase were worth `300 crore and now over `500 crore when the five companies owned by him had a capital of only `50 lakhs. They said that Vadra got the money almost free from the real estate giant DLF in exchange for favours by Congress government in Haryana to DLF - clearly pointing to corruption. The entire media, visual and print, carried the news extensively and stunned the ruling party into silence.
Seeing no one from the Congress defending Vadra through the day, Sonia Gandhi stepped in to defend her ‘damaad’ saying that there has been no misuse of either of the Gandhi family or any other misuse by Vadra who was a businessman and his transactions are transparent and above board. [Zee news 5.10.2012]. She also asked, like an owner of alsatians does, the Congress party to go after those who went after Vadra.
“Sonia Gandhi tells Congress to defend Robert Vadra against allegations”, said NDTV [5.10.2012]. Then it was a pack of wolves let loose against the mango people and the media. Capturing how the wolves were let loose, wrote The Hindu [8.10.2012] the day most newspapers had front paged the exposure on Vadra, Congress spokespersons were briefing media on economic reforms and the appreciation of the Rupee, and how government was confident of getting the insurance and pensions bills passed in Parliament!
The party had actually distanced itself from Vadra, saying he was not a party member and stressing that his accusers could go to court. But that very evening, with Sonia fiat, everything changed. Ministers and party men vied to defend Vadra. Two days later, the Congress even said that the attack on Vadra was a planned conspiracy not against Vadra an individual but targeted at the entire Congress and its leadership - read Sonia. Meanwhile, on 8.10.2012, Vadra came out with his mango people in banana republic tweet, which Sonia Gandhi explained on 10.10.2012 as not Vadra’s but Varun Gandhi’s!
Soon, the UPA allies stepped in to rescue the first family. Sharad Pawar even dared Arvind Kejriwal to go to court to substantiate his allegations. This was the very man who told N Srinivasan to resign forthwith if he had an iota of honesty! Why then a different rule for the son-in-law of the first family, Mr Pawar?
Lalu Prasad accused Kejriwal of targeting Vadra for “cheap publicity.” Not to be left out the Prime Minister’s Office too came out in defence of Vadra by filing an affidavit in Allahabad High Court on 22.11.2012.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram said that it was just private transaction between two individuals which cannot be questioned on the basis of insinuations, unless there was quid pro quo or corruption. But, if it were two private individuals dealing why should the ruling party, ministers and government defend Vadra? Why did the Congress say that the target was not an individual but Sonia. Then, where were the Opposition? The BJP just stopped short of defending Vadra. Only sections of the media was still trying to keep the issue alive. The Livemint online ran a 38-page coverage of the fraud. The India Today ran a detailed exposure of Vadra [22.10.2012]. Earlier, on 15.10.2012, Ashok Khemka, IAS officer handling Vadra’s case, cancelled sale by Vadra to DLF of the property he had bought at `7.5 crore for `58 crore. He was transferred from his job within 10 days [25.10.2012]. Not as punishment, the CM Hooda asserted. Out of compassion then? This raised a hue and cry. Earlier, on 19.10.2012 the DNA came out with an exposure that Vadra has bought 770 hectares of land in a Rajasthan village at double the market rates during 2009-2011 with inside information about the development plans of the government in that area, with the result the value of the land has shot up by 40 times over the price paid by him.
The Business Standard wrote [9.3.2013] an investigative expose titled ‘How a Rajasthan village lost of Rober Vadra’ detailing how Vadra made a killing in the deal. But came the Haryana government exoneration of Vadra on April 22. 2013.
And with the subsequent scams, now the IPL scam taking over the media headlines, Vadra remains declared an honest business man now and Sonia Gandhi as the Mrs Clean of politics!
Gurunath, whose offence is petty as compared to Vadra’s loot, was not fortunate like Vadra to have had an all powerful in-law family. Obviously Vadra chose the right family to marry. Lesson: those who want to be celebrity sons-in-law must choose the right family to marry before attempting to make wrong money!
S Gurumurthy is a well-known commentator on political and economic issues.
Email: comment@gurumurthy.netI am so thankful for the kindness of others, particularly wealthy corporations. Take for instance; a few broadband Internet service providers (ISPs), whom shall remain publicly nameless to protect the not-so-innocent (call me).
Recently they have begun to offer me a number of wonderful options:
I can now choose my own speed for my Internet access. I used to have only one speed: the fastest possible one. Now I get to choose the slowest one for that same price, but I can have the new fastest one for a great deal more money. Isn’t it wonderful? Oh, how I love having choices!
It was the same with networking. In the old days (late 1990s), Microsoft began packaging a thing called Internet connection sharing (ICS) with their operating systems. This little beauty allowed me to add a whole bunch more computers to my Internet service for FREE! I remember having this one dial-up ISP, whom shall remain nameless to cover their ass (call me).
They neglected to inform me that it was out of the kindness of their heart that I was receiving this new-found free access and began billing me, without asking first, for each and every new computer I added to the network. I felt so ashamed, when I realized I had been taking advantage of them all that time!
Nowadays, it is wireless service providers who have decided we have all been taking advantage of them far too long. Some of us tricky little customers have figured out how to “tether” our cellphone data services to our laptops, tablets, and other devices for FREE! Obviously, us nasty little people need to have our pee-pees whacked by these nameless (call me) corporate behemoths.• A whole backstory told in two tweets. First Bob Mortimer paid tribute to his axed BBC Two comedy, saying: 'I miss Beef and Julie and Eric and Bosh and Racheal #HouseOfFools.' Then producer Lisa Clark fired back: 'It's "Rachel"; I corrected it every time, in every script in every episode.'
• With his drinking, smoking and drug-taking, you might think US comic Doug Stanhope would be the unlikely face of a fitness app. So perhaps that's why he's launched a 'new kind of fitness experience' – promising 'the perfect antidote to compulsive calorie-counting and data-crunching'. The unFIT, newly available for the iPhone and Apple Watch, focuses on 'underachievements' — pointless activities such as leaving work early, getting a snack, or just lying on the couch. Developers This Is Pop claim: 'Ironically, players will discover that it takes a lot of steps, endurance and burned calories to do absolutely nothing. The unFIT personal trainer will challenge users daily with ever-evolving activities like going on epic beer runs, lifting game controllers, standing in long lines for coffee, carrying heavy shopping bags, and singing karaoke all night.' Stanhope fronts videos shot on his compound in Bisbee, Arizona, which depict him engaged in various unFIT acts of his own invention, such as dumping vodka into a juicer full of kale, juggling a treadmill routine with a smoking workout, farting in a communal sauna, and more. You can get it for £3.99 here.
• The bells in Oslo City Hall clock tower will be chiming gout Eric Idle's Always Look On The Bright Side at 6pm throughout the winter.
• Tattoo artist Tom Wagstaff has had the face of Peep Show character Mark Corrigan inked on his leg. His colleague Frances Joyce did the work at their Birmingham studio, and said: 'I haven't been asked to do a Mark Corrigan previously… I have tattooed some celebrity portraits in the past but they tend to be more cult figures.'
You're a social freak. Remain in your compound. Thanks @tomwagstaff #realtattoos A photo posted by Frances Anne (@francesannefaith) on Dec 11, 2015 at 10:44am PST
• The Daily Telegraph website last night BBC ran a story saying 'BBC urged to ban right-wing comedian Andrew Lawrence' based on a Change.org petition that had attracted 65 signatures. Less of a storm in a teacup than natural Brownian motion… The joke at the centre of it was this one:
Given that about 80% of suicides in the UK last year were committed by men, if feminists truly wanted equality, they'd kill themselves ;) — Andrew Lawrence (@andrewlawrence) December 14, 2015
• Margaret Cho owns the bongs that were used in Pulp Fiction.
• Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee Kieran Hodgson has given himself little over a month to learn to play the bassoon from scratch. He's taken up the challenge for the National Orchestra for All's Musical Chairs day, when an impromptu orchestra is formed from 60 members of the public for a single day to rehearse and then perform Beethoven's 5th and Dvorak's New World Symphony. Hodgson is a talented musician, playing first violin with the North London Sinfonia, and he intends his 2016 Edinburgh show to be about his love of Mahler. But he has never played the bassoon before. Nor is he the only comedian linked to the project, as Sue Perkins will conduct the pieces on January 16.
• Want to see the Flight Of The Conchords in Lego? Sure you do!
• It's a question often asked… what does a stand-up director actually do? Well Dec Munro, who worked with Sofie Hagen on her Bubblewrap show this year, says it was taking her possessions hostage to overcome her procrastination. 'My key contribution,' he told blogger John Fleming, 'was to take her out, get her drunk, steal most of her belongings and tell her I would put them on eBay 48 hours later because, for about three weeks, she had told me she would get a script to me and there had been variety of different excuses from I'm hung over to I'm tired to I'm ill… I stole her ear-rings, necklaces, wallet, cards and told her that, at 5pm on Friday, I would eBay all of her possessions that I had unless she sent the script across and I think at 4.57pm she sent it across. I think that was probably the biggest thing I did…'
• Islamic State are getting their ideas from Four Lions now. A supporter of the terror group has suggested turning birds into suicide bombers: strapping 'lightweight' bombs to them and training them to fly into a jet and detonate an explosive, website Vocalic reports. Mind you, it didn't work out to well for the crow in Chris Morris's film…
• Comedian Alfie Brown's certainly on the zeitgest. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has declared '-ism' the word of 2015, which just happens to be the title of his current show.
Tweets of the week
When I see anything that is 69p I imagine it's a threesome but one guy is in a huff because they're not involving him. — Adam Hess (@adamhess1) December 17, 2015
"Naughty or nice", Santa? Really? This is the kind of dogmatic moral absolutism that starts wars — Sanjeev Kohli (@govindajeggy) December 17, 2015
New Star Wars disappointing. Maggie Smith good, but spaceship looks like a van. — Milton Jones (@themiltonjones) December 17, 2015
Published: 18 Dec 2015Parents often receive books at pediatric checkups via programs like Reach Out and Read and hear from a variety of health professionals and educators that reading to their kids is critical for supporting development.
The pro-reading message is getting through to parents, who recognize that it’s an important habit. A summary report by Child Trends, for instance, suggests 55 percent of three- to five-year-old children were read to every day in 2007. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 83 percent of three- to five-year-old children were read to three or more times per week by a family member in 2012.
What this ever-present advice to read with infants doesn’t necessarily make clear, though, is that what’s on the pages may be just as important as the book-reading experience itself. Are all books created equal when it comes to early shared-book reading? Does it matter what you pick to read? And are the best books for babies different than the best books for toddlers?
In order to guide parents on how to create a high-quality book-reading experience for their infants, my psychology research lab has conducted a series of baby learning studies. One of our goals is to better understand the extent to which shared book reading is important for brain and behavioral development.
What’s on baby’s bookshelf
Researchers see clear benefits of shared book reading for child development. Shared book reading with young children is good for language and cognitive development, increasing vocabulary and pre-reading skills and honing conceptual development.
Shared book reading also likely enhances the quality of the parent-infant relationship by encouraging reciprocal interactions – the back-and-forth dance between parents and infants. Certainly not least of all, it gives infants and parents a consistent daily time to cuddle.
Recent research has found that both the quality and quantity of shared book reading in infancy predicted later childhood vocabulary, reading skills and name writing ability. In other words, the more books parents read, and the more time they’d spent reading, the greater the developmental benefits in their 4-year-old children.
This important finding is one of the first to measure the benefit of shared book reading starting early in infancy. But there’s still more to figure out about whether some books might naturally lead to higher-quality interactions and increased learning.
Babies and books in the lab
In our investigations, my colleagues and I followed infants across the second six months of life. We’ve found that when parents showed babies books with faces or objects that were individually named, they learn more, generalize what they learn to new situations and show more specialized brain responses. This is in contrast to books with no labels or books with the same generic label under each image in the book. Early learning in infancy was also associated with benefits four years later in childhood.
Our most recent addition to this series of studies was funded by the National Science Foundation and just published in the journal Child Development. Here’s what we did.
First, we brought six-month-old infants into our lab, where we could see how much attention they paid to story characters they’d never seen before. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure their brain responses. Infants wear a cap-like net of 128 sensors that let us record the electricity naturally emitted from the scalp as the brain works. We measured these neural responses while infants looked at and paid attention to pictures on a computer screen. These brain measurements can tell us about what infants know and whether they can tell the difference between the characters we show them.
We also tracked the infants’ gaze using eye-tracking technology to see what parts of the characters they focused on and how long they paid attention.
The data we collected at this first visit to our lab served as a baseline. We wanted to compare their initial measurements with future measurements we’d take, after we sent them home with storybooks featuring these same characters.
Lisa Scott
We divided up our volunteers into three groups. One group of parents read their infants storybooks that contained six individually named characters that they’d never seen before. Another group were given the same storybooks but instead of individually naming the characters, a generic and made-up label was used to refer to all the characters (such as “Hitchel”). Finally, we had a third comparison group of infants whose parents didn’t read them anything special for the study.
After three months passed, the families returned to our lab so we could again measure the infants’ attention to our storybook characters. It turned out that only those who received books with individually labeled characters showed enhanced attention compared to their earlier visit. And the brain activity of babies who learned individual labels also showed that they could distinguish between different individual characters. We didn’t see these effects for infants in the comparison group or for infants who received books with generic labels.
These findings suggest that very young infants are able to use labels to learn about the world around them and that shared book reading is an effective tool for supporting development in the first year of life.
Tailoring book picks for maximum effect
So what do our results from the lab mean for parents who want to maximize the benefits of storytime?
Not all books are created equal. The books that parents should read to six- and nine-month-olds will likely be different than those they read to two-year-olds, which will likely be different than those appropriate for four-year-olds who are getting ready to read on their own. In other words, to reap the benefits of shared book reading during infancy, we need to be reading our little ones the right books at the right time.
For infants, finding books that name different characters may lead to higher-quality shared book reading experiences and result in the learning and brain development benefits we find in our studies. All infants are unique, so parents should try to find books that interest their baby.
My own daughter loved the “Pat the Bunny” books, as well as stories about animals, like “Dear Zoo.” If names weren’t in the book, we simply made them up.
It’s possible that books that include named characters simply increase the amount of parent talking. We know that talking to babies is important for their development. So parents of infants: Add shared book reading to your daily routines and name the characters in the books you read. Talk to your babies early and often to guide them through their amazing new world – and let storytime help.Five years ago, in one of the very first posts at Football Perspective, I wrote that the new Browns were the worst expansion team in NFL history through 13 seasons. That claim felt a little controversial at the time; it has held up surprisingly well.
After 13 years, Cleveland had a pitiful 68-140 record (0.327). Since then? The Browns have gone 20-68, for a pitiful 0.227 winning percentage. Overall, after 18.5 seasons, the 0-8 2017 Browns have brought the New Browns’ record since 1999 to 88-208, a 0.297 wining percentage.
And things are not exactly trending in the positive direction:
The Browns are on a 9-game losing streak.
The Browns are 1-26 in their last 27 games, which seems almost hard to fathom.
The Browns are 2-33 in their last 35 games.
The Browns are |
block.” [Laughs.]
What's the tattoo on your chest? People draw it on when they imitate you.
It’s praying hands with wings coming off the praying hands, and then right above the hands, it’s holding up a crown that has a GD—a Gangster’s Disciple—pitchfork in the middle. I’m a Disciple. My set is based when you’re locked up. That’s how I got down when I was locked up. That’s the only way you can get down with the set that I’m a part of. It's a branch off of GD.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
A lot of your Vines show you pouring up lean, too. What are you going to do now that Actavis is discontinued?
The main one I was pouring up was codeine—not codeine, promethazine. What I would do mainly is pour up the promethazine, take a Percocet or Oxycontin, break it in half, pop that. It helps me better than having the codeine inside the promethazine.
Are you worried that you're going to gain weight, since you're a bodybuilder? Or, worse, die?
If you see some of my videos, I was gaining weight when I was sipping lean. Lean, what it does to you, what I learned with the codeine kind, it literally slows your body down and then puts your body into where the pain killers start to kick in, and then from the codeine it just starts to, like, you start to pass out. But if you sip just the promethazine and pop half an Oxycontin or half a Percocet, then you’ll be a lot better because it’s getting into your bloodstream as soon as possible.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
Right. Who's your favorite rapper?
I’m rocking with Soulja and my nigga Sosa.
Have you spoken to Soulja before?
I haven’t really reached out Soulja, but he’s reached out to me, giving me a shout out back in 2012. You can actually check out my Twitter and see it. Real recognize real. [He's my favorite but] only when he speaks to the trap shit though. Speak to the streets. I don’t fuck with that female bullshit. When he wants to sometimes rap for the bitches. Naw, man, fuck the bitches. The bitches come with the respect and the money.
Soulja sometimes raps about women. But I take it you’re not a romantic?
I am, but not like that. I’m a hood nigga. I’m street.
You can be street and romantic at the same time.
Nah, you got to stick to one thing because you got to think about it, all that romantic bullshit is played out. You’ve already got songs for all that shit. I’m a promoter. I promote trap music.
POST CONTINUES BELOW
The issue with your Vines is that you're white and you're using the n-word.
Yeah, I’ve earned my right to say that.
How?
From being on the block since I was eight years old. I’ve always had my fun in the streets. While these niggas were hating on the porch, I was having my fun in the streets.
You don't think it's inappropriate?
I think it’s how I say it and all the real niggas rock with me.
Has anyone approached you or confronted you about your use of the word?
No. Never. Ever since I got the respect to say it no one say anything to to me. I’ve been saying that word since I was 11.
My last question: what’s next?
The takeover. Nah. I’m going to take over everything. As my real niggas start to hear my tracks and read into my interests. Real recognize real, it’s real simple.
RELATED: Kid From the #YEET Video Speaks Out, Says He Can Out Dance TerRio
RELATED: The Kids Are Alright: 25 Hilarious Vines of Future Rap FansFind out what happens to the Time Lords' homeworld in Gallifrey: Time War as chaos descends...
Today we can reveal more details for the upcoming story Gallifrey: Time War. Romana, Leela and Ace continue their lives on the Time Lords' home planet as it is thrown into the chaos of the Time War.
1.1 Celestial Intervention by David Llewellyn
The Temporal Powers are under threat. It is only a matter of time before the Daleks attack.
Now CIA Coordinator, Romana must protect the interests of Gallifrey, while dealing with demands from President Livia and an increasingly powerful War Council.
As allies are whittled away, the Time Lords are drawn into a conflict they can no longer avoid…
1.2 Soldier Obscura by Tim Foley
Braxiatel has always planned for contingencies. As hostilities escalate, he takes Ace into a deadly region of spacetime – The Obscura – to locate an ancient research station.
But Ace is about to learn more about Irving Braxiatel than anyone should know.
Some soldiers are ready for this fight, but some will not make it through the first round.
1.3 The Devil You Know by Scott Handcock
The Time War has begun in earnest, and Romana must think the unthinkable. For a most dangerous mission, she selects the most dangerous warrior – the Master.
But he will not be alone. Leela accompanies her old enemy as they begin an unusual interrogation.
What does Finnian Valentine know? And can Leela and the Master ever truly be on the same side?
1.4 Desperate Measures by Matt Fitton
The Dalek Emperor attacks a vital Time Lord outpost. Victory would be a devastating blow to Gallifrey.
Romana is caught in the machinations of a President who sees control slipping away. Is it time to bargain with the War Council, or perhaps to parlay with even more dangerous parties?
The Time War has barely begun, and for Gallifrey, desperate times are already here…
You can pre-order Gallifrey: Time War in advance of its release in February next year at £23 on CD or £20 on download (don’t forget that all CD purchases unlock a download option on the Big Finish site and via the Big Finish app).
Or save money with a bundle. Get Gallifrey: Time War with The War Master, and Tales From New Earth (out in March) for £63 on CD or £54 on download.
Tales From New Earth features four adventures from the New Earth setting of Doctor Who television episodes The End of the World, New Earth and Gridlock – and you’ll be able to find out what the War Master got up to during the Time War.
Don’t forget that there are plenty of other Time War tales while you wait for the release of Gallifrey: Time War.
Two Short Trips tell Nyssa and Susan’s side of the story in a universe at war in All Hands on Deck and A Heart on Both Sides, downloadable at £2.99 each.
And there is also Doctor Who - The Time War 1, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and Rahkhee Thakrar as Bliss. Make sure you pick it up at the pre-order price of £23 on CD or £20 on download before it goes up at the end of this month.MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - OCTOBER 18: Jordan Lewis of the Demons poses for a portrait during a press conference to announce his trade to the club at AAMI Park in Melbourne, Australia on October 18, 2016. (Photo by Adam Trafford/AFL Media)
JORDAN Lewis will wear No.6 after Melbourne announced its jumper numbers for 2017.
The four-time Hawthorn premiership player has moved up three numbers, after wearing No.3 in 264 matches for the brown and gold from 2005-16.
Recently departed key forward Chris Dawes wore No.6 for Melbourne in 2016.
Former captain Frank Davis, club finals record holder Frank Adams and best and fairest winner Glenn Lovett are among the players to have worn No.6 for Melbourne.
Ex-Bomber Michael Hibberd, who like Lewis, joined the club in the recent trade period, will wear No.14, which became vacant after the long-serving Lynden Dunn switched to Collingwood in the off-season.
Dual Brownlow Medal winner Ivor Warne-Smith, popular Demon Rod Grinter and four-time premiership player Trevor Johnson are among those to have donned No.14 for the red and blue.
Former Australian under-19 cricket captain and ex-Giant Pat McKenna has been given No.40, which was vacant in 2016.
No.40 was most recently worn by former ruckman Mark Jamar, who played with Essendon this year.
Rookie Corey Maynard – the son of former Demon Peter – has been handed No.48.
Jack Fitzpatrick, who spent a season with Hawthorn in 2016, was the most recent player to wear No.48 for Melbourne in 2015.
Jamar (155 games) and Fitzpatrick (22) hold the record for the most Melbourne matches in their respective guernsey numbers.
And tough-nut Aaron vandenBerg has switched from No.37 to No.22.
He has taken the No.22, which was worn by midfielder Viv Michie in 2016.
Dual premiership player Bryan Kenneally, Brownlow Medal winner Shane Woewodin and former skipper Shane McGrath all wore No.22 for Melbourne.
The rest of the jumper numbers will be filled at the completion of the NAB AFL Draft and NAB AFL Rookie Draft in late November.
2016 Melbourne numbers
1 – Jesse Hogan
2 – Nathan Jones
3 – Christian Salem
4 – Jack Watts
5 –Christian Petracca
6 – Jordan Lewis (new player)
7 – Jack Viney
8 – Heritier Lumumba
9 – Jack Trengove
10 – Angus Brayshaw
11 – Max Gawn
12 – Dom Tyson
13 – Clayton Oliver
14 – Michael Hibberd (new player)
15 – Billy Stretch
16 – Dean Kent
17 – Sam Frost
18 – Jake Melksham
19 –
20 – Colin Garland
21 – Cameron Pedersen
22 – Aaron vandenBerg (previously No.37 in 2016)
23 – Bernie Vince
24 – Jay Kennedy-Harris
25 – Tom McDonald
26 – Sam Weideman
27 – Liam Hulett
28 – Oscar McDonald
29 – Jayden Hunt
30 – Alex Neal-Bullen
31 –
32 – Tomas Bugg
33 – Jake Spencer
34 – Mitch King
35 – Ben Kennedy
36 – Jeff Garlett
37 –
38 –
39 – Neville Jetta
40 – Pat McKenna (new player)
41 – Mitchell White
42 – Josh Wagner
43 – James Harmes
44 – Joel Smith
45 –
46 –
47 –
48 – Corey Maynard (joined the club late in the 2016 season)NASA, Japan Release Most Complete Topographic Map of Earth
Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov
Steve Cole 202-358-0918
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA and Japan released a new digital topographic map of Earth Monday that covers more of our planet than ever before. The map was produced with detailed measurements from NASA's Terra spacecraft.The new global digital elevation model of Earth was created from nearly 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or Aster, instrument aboard Terra. NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, known as METI, developed the data set. It is available online to users everywhere at no cost."This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world," said Woody Turner, Aster program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This unique global set of data will serve users and researchers from a wide array of disciplines that need elevation and terrain information."According to Mike Abrams, Aster science team leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., the new topographic information will be of value throughout the Earth sciences and has many practical applications. "Aster's accurate topographic data will be used for engineering, energy exploration, conserving natural resources, environmental management, public works design, firefighting, recreation, geology and city planning, to name just a few areas," Abrams said.Previously, the most complete topographic set of data publicly available was from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. That mission mapped 80 percent of Earth's landmass, between 60 degrees north latitude and 57 degrees south. The new Aster data expand coverage to 99 percent, from 83 degrees north latitude and 83 degrees south. Each elevation measurement point in the new data is 30 meters (98 feet) apart."The Aster data fill in many of the voids in the shuttle mission's data, such as in very steep terrains and in some deserts," said Michael Kobrick, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission project scientist at JPL. "NASA is working to combine the Aster data with that of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and other sources to produce an even better global topographic map."NASA and METI are jointly contributing the Aster topographic data to the Group on Earth Observations, an international partnership headquartered at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, for use in its Global Earth Observation System of Systems. This "system of systems" is a collaborative, international effort to share and integrate Earth observation data from many different instruments and systems to help monitor and forecast global environmental changes.NASA, METI and the U.S. Geological Survey validated the data, with support from the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other collaborators. The data will be distributed by NASA's Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center at the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation and Science Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D., and by METI's Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center in Tokyo.Aster is one of five Earth-observing instruments launched on Terra in December 1999. Aster acquires images from the visible to the thermal infrared wavelength region, with spatial resolutions ranging from about 15 to 90 meters (50 to 300 feet). A joint science team from the U.S. and Japan validates and calibrates the instrument and data products. The U.S. science team is located at JPL.For visualizations of the new Aster topographic data, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/20090629.html Data users can download the Aster global digital elevation model at: https://wist.echo.nasa.gov/~wist/api/imswelcome and http://www.gdem.aster.ersdac.or.jp For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.Share. No R&D tax credits for you, gaming industry. No R&D tax credits for you, gaming industry.
Exit Theatre Mode
American creators of “violent” video games beware: Washington D.C. might just take a swipe at you in its upcoming tax reform bill.
According to The Washington Examiner, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee’s “long-awaited” bill reforming the American tax codes singles out the creators of violent video games, refusing them a proposed research and development tax break.
Exit Theatre Mode
“On page 19 of the executive summary,” the newspaper reports, “the committee mentions an improved and permanent research and development tax credit, which has benefitted countless industries from manufacturers to software creators to food producers.” As such, the bill proposes a so-called “improved, permanent R&D tax credit” in order for American companies “to compete against their foreign competition who have long had permanent R&D incentives.”
But as the newspaper states, page 24 of the bill “removes that tax credit from the violent video game industry, under a section about closing loopholes… One of the plan’s provisions: ‘Preventing makers of violent video games from qualifying for the R&D tax credit.’”
The Washington Examiner notes the incredible irony of this statement, “given the fact that on the very next page the summary says the bill ‘stops the practice of using the tax code to pick winners and losers based on political power rather than economic merit.’”
Exit Theatre Mode
Interestingly, the Examiner concludes that the bill “would affect companies like Electronic Arts, which makes violent games like ‘Battlefield’ but also non-violent games like ‘FIFA Soccer’ and ‘The Sims.’” Therefore, companies associated with the development or publishing of violent games – even if some or most of their wares aren’t considered violent – would lose out on the tax credit completely.
The Republican party – in the majority of the House of Representatives – controls the Ways and Means Committee, and is typically known as an anti-tax, small government party. How this particular provision stays in line with the party’s overall viewpoint remains to be seen.
Colin Moriarty is IGN’s Senior Editor. You can follow him on Twitter.Now that TCL is the company behind the physical BlackBerry device, Steve Cistulli, President of TCL Communication North America tweeted that the BlackBerry KEYone (Full review here) is under extremely high demand and is happy to see this level of excitement and momentum surrounding todays KEYone launch.
Heres what Cistulli tweeted today in light of KEYone shortages:
Today has vbeen an extraordinary day for the launch of the @BBMobile #KEYone here in North America. Demand has been extremely high & its encouraging to see this level of excitement and momentum around our BlackBerry smartphone launch. We understand customers are facing issues with stock outs when trying to purchase their #KEYone Were working closely with our retail partners, ensuring additional stock is available ASAP so they can fulfill customer orders.
At the same time, Cistulli admits customers are unable to get their hands on the KEYone as they are apparently flying off the store shelves. In fact, Amazon is already sold out of the KEYone in both CDMA and GSM flavors. The KEYone now holds the #1 Best Seller label in Amazon USA for unlocked cellphones.
Best Buy is also sold out of the KEYone on its website, leaving the only stock available in select Best Buy stores. If you are still trying to get your hands on a KEYone, calling a couple of your local Best Buy stores couldnt hurt.
BlackBerry has already seen huge demand in Canada as the KEYone became the highest pre-ordered BlackBerry ever at Rogers before it launched. Things are looking good for BlackBerry and TCLs future.
Source | Amazon link | Best Buy linkThis opinion piece by members of the Eiffel Group and the Glienicke Group argues that the Greek tragedy must not go on. Europe’s growing frustration with the new Greek government has triggered calls for stopping negotiations and even accepting “Grexit”, Greece’s exit from the euro. Grexit would be a collective political failure. Above all, it would cause a social and economic catastrophe for Greek citizens.
Grexit would be a collective political failure
The Greek tragedy must not go on. Europe’s growing frustration with the new Greek government has triggered calls for stopping negotiations and even accepting “Grexit”, Greece’s exit from the euro. We believe that this would be a mistake. Grexit would be a collective political failure. Above all, it would cause a social and economic catastrophe for Greek citizens.
However, keeping Greece in the euro area at the cost of citizens of other countries, without a serious and credible commitment by the Greek government to reform its economy and its institutions, would be a collective political failure as well. It would not only erode further the credibility of Europe’s institutions and its architecture, but as well the roots of European integration, which was based from the beginning on the respect of common rules. The national sovereignty of each member state must be respected. But in a deeply integrated Europe, sovereignty is increasingly shared, rather than national.
Time is running out quickly for the Greek government. It needs to decide now whether to get serious about reforming the country. It continues to have one major advantage, namely a clear mandate for a fresh start for Greece, not relying on the old elites who ruined the country. But it has also one serious challenge: the fact that it won its political mandate based on contradictory promises that it could not fulfil under any circumstances.
Time is running out quickly for the Greek government.
The idea to call for a referendum in Greece should therefore not be regarded as a threat, but as an opportunity. If Greek voters decide in a referendum to follow through with a serious programme of economic and institutional transformation, the new Greek government would obtain the necessary legitimacy to adjust its agenda. If Greek citizens decide otherwise, they will do so in the full knowledge of the implications, including the possibility of Greece’s exit from the euro.
However, a Greek referendum will not exonerate Europe from its responsibilities. We need to acknowledge that the two support programmes for Greece were a colossal bail-out of private creditors, not least those based in France and Germany, at the expense of European taxpayers. The optimism of the two programmes regarding Greece’s ability to reform and its debt sustainability was deeply flawed. Yet we should also honour our historic responsibility in stabilizing a continent in a peaceful common union. And we should accept that every European country in such a deep crisis, as Greece is in today, deserves solidarity and continued support.
The failure to solve the Greek crisis would have significant costs for Europe. Banking union, financial backstops such as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), closer cooperation on fiscal policy and other firewalls have reduced the likelihood of contagion from Greece to other euro area countries. However, we should not underestimate the potential of spillovers from a switch in the mind-set of market participants which would no longer consider euro membership as an indefinite, irrevocable commitment.
The combined official exposure of Germany and France to Greece amounts to close to €160 bn
In addition, European taxpayers would pay a high price, as loans to the Greek government could no longer be repaid. The combined official exposure of Germany and France to Greece amounts to close to €160 billion, or around €4350 for a German or French family of four. This has to be weighed against the costs and risks of continued support and a third programme. Above all, Europe may have to bear the geopolitical cost of increased instability at its borders, not to mention their weakened global standing, which is highly dependent on its ability to act jointly, speak with one voice and on the strength and credibility of its common currency, the euro.
Solving the Greek question is ultimately a test of Europe’s ability and willingness to work towards a cooperative, functioning monetary union. It is a test of how robust the new institutions and its architecture are, and how much further we need to move to deepen institutional integration of the euro area. Sooner or later, the lessons of the European crisis must also be reflected through changes of the founding treaties.
As concrete actions, Greece first has to commit credibly to economic reforms in exchange for European solidarity in the form of grants for social emergencies and a possible third programme. These reforms must include the creation of an independent tax agency, a much more ambitious privatization plan, a pension reform to render the system sustainable in the long-run, a quick return to a reasonable fiscal primary surplus, and a reform of goods and services markets in order to introduce competition and ensure price adjustments.
Second, we should rebuild trust in the Greek economy in order to trigger domestic and foreign investment in the country. This should involve a clear signal of the Greek government to cooperate, service its debt, and accelerate the reform path of the country. And it should involve a clear signal by its partners to stand behind Greece, through continued financial and technical help, in support of reforms and a clear commitment by Europeans to do whatever is in their power to keep Greece in the euro. Third, the EU should support the creation of a pilot zone within which companies are subject to much less bureaucracy and clearer rules. Creating Greece’s Shenzhens is a way to experiment with new institutions and triggering further institutional change in a country plagued by weak institutions.
Solving the Greek crisis is the ultimate test how European integration can work
Solving the Greek crisis is the ultimate test how European integration can work and whether Europe will be able to reap the benefits from deeper integration. A referendum about the reform path and euro membership should be considered a last-resort option for Greece. But Greece urgently needs to choose its own destiny. Europe owes Greece solidarity and a perspective to thrive within the euro area. But it needs to be prepared for all possible outcomes, including an undesirable and for all costly Grexit.
Signed by the following members of the Eiffel Group and the Glienicke Group:
Agnes Benassy-Quere, Yves Bertoncini, Jean-Louis Bianco, Armin von Bogdandy, Henrik Enderlein, Christian Callies, Marcel Fratzscher, Clemens Fuest, Sylvie Goulard, Andre Loesekrug-Pietri, Franz Mayer, Rostane Mehdi, Daniela Schwarzer, Denis Simonneau, Maximilian Steinbeis, Constanze Stelzenmüller, Carole Ulmer, Shahin Valee, Jakob von Weizsäcker, Guntram Wolff.By Jerry Jordan, Editor
HOMESTEAD, Fla. – With the 2017 NASCAR season coming to a close there is a lot of speculation about what Richard Childress will do with the open seat and charter for the No. 27 car.
During Monster Energy Cup Series practice at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Friday, Childress told Kickin’ the Tires he wasn’t exactly sure what his plans were for his third team, which is being vacated by Paul Menard.
“We haven’t finalized it yet,” Childress said. “We’re still talking about two or three things and haven’t finalized it.”
Asked if the hold-up was a driver or sponsor and Childress said, “it depends on what comes first.”
There has been a lot of speculation that Childress could sell or lease the charter he currently holds for the No 27 car but he was non-committal.
“No, I haven’t offered it,” he said. “One person has asked me and I told them, ‘I don’t know.’ Right now, I don’t have a plan to sell it.”
Another prospect was whether or not a driver with limited financial backing – in the neighborhood of $2 million to $3 million – could find their way into the car. It’s not likely.
“It will take more than that,” Childress said. “A lot more than that. I am just not going to do that. I don’t plan on it anyway. I have talked to a lot of people. There are a lot of good young drivers out there and I have talked to several of them.
“We are trying to put some different things together; hopefully before Daytona.”Stanford men beat Wake Forest 2-0 to make College Cup
In the next eight days, Stanford could win not one but two NCAA soccer championships.
Tomas Hilliard-Arce scored in the first half and Sam Werner added a second-half goal as the Cardinal men, two-time defending national champs, won 2-0 at Wake Forest in an NCAA men’s quarterfinal match Saturday in Winston-Salem, N.C.
In beating the top-seeded Demon Deacons (19-2-2) in the NCAA tournament for the third straight year, including in last year’s title game, the Cardinal (17-2-2) qualified for their third straight College Cup, soccer’s final four.
On Sunday, Stanford’s women will play for their second national title in seven years against UCLA in Orlando, the site of the women’s College Cup.
The ninth-seeded Stanford men open College Cup play Friday in Philadelphia against No. 5 Akron (18-3-2). Indiana and North Carolina will play in the other semifinal. The winners play for the national title next Sunday.
In blanking Wake Forest, the Cardinal extended their NCAA-record postseason shutout streak to 10 games and 1,022 minutes. Stanford last allowed a goal in the NCAA tournament on Dec. 5, 2015, against Wake Forest.
Next weekend, Stanford will try to become the second men’s team to win three consecutive College Cups. Bruce Arena’s Virginia teams won three from 1992 to 1994.
College Cup
WOMEN’S FINAL AT ORLANDO
Stanford vs. UCLA, 9 a.m. ESPNU
MEN AT PHILADELPHIA
Semifinals: Stanford vs. Akron; Indiana vs. North Carolina, Friday (times to be determined) ESPNU
Final: Semifinal winners, 10 a.m. next Sunday ESPN2The political world has its eyes trained on Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) this week, who is expected to resign from his post in the Senate on Thursday amid multiple sexual harassment accusations.
Lost in the media scrum was a major story about a different (and former) member of Congress, ex-Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL).
Brown was sentenced to prison on Monday “for fraud and tax crimes that include raising about $800,000 for a sham charity.” The Florida Times-Union reported:
U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan sentenced ex-U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown on Monday to five years in federal prison for fraud and tax crimes that include raising about $800,000 for a sham charity, a remarkable defrocking of the once-powerful and garrulous Jacksonville Democrat who inspired devotion and vitriol in equal parts throughout her decades in public office. …Under federal sentencing rules, Brown will have to complete 85 percent of her sentence before being eligible for release. A federal report in March said that the roughly 4,100 convicts released after serving fraud sentences completed about 88 percent of their sentences.
As NTK Network reported months earlier, Brown tried to blame the charges against her as a result of racism (“I’m a black woman with a mouth”) and redistricting (“You change my district completely”).
Clearly, a federal judge disagreed.Microsoft’s Netflix Xbox Style game pass is now available for everyone. If you want to get a piece of the action, there is a 14 day free trial offered by the company so you can get antiquated with the service.
With over 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 games in the catalog including Halo 5: Guardians, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, and Payday 2, BioShock Infinite and many many more, you don’t stream these games. Instead, you just download them like a regular game and play.
Microsoft also plans to update their catalog every month and add new games, replacing some other ones in the list. With so many games to play, you may want to invest in an external hard drive to keep all of them.
Best thing is if you enjoy the game you’re playing through the Netflix Xbox service, you can get a 20% discount on the game and a 10% discount on any DLCs. This implies only for the Xbox One games.
If you want to, you can sign up for the Xbox Game Pass here. According to Phil Spenser, the initial sign-ups were “really strong”.
For more updates, stay tuned.Tottenham will consider loan offers for rising attacking midfielder Alex Pritchard in January if fails to make a first team impact.
Pritchard has returned to White Hart Lane following a successful loan spell at Brentford last season and manager Mauricio Pochettino believes he can play an important role in his senior plans his season.
Pochettino, though, has a wealth of attacking talent in his squad and will consider loaning Pritchard out to rival Premier League side early next year if he fails to make the breakthrough.
Alex Pritchard has only made one substitute appearance for Tottenham this season and is set for a loan
Pritchard is a 22-year-old attacking midfield player who has also been on loan at Swindon and Brentford
ALEX PRITCHARD FACTFILE Tottenaham: 2 games, 0 goals Brentford (loan): 47 games, 12 goals Swindon (loan): 43 games, 8 goals England Under 21s: 9 games, 0 goals
Norwich, who tried to land the England Under-21 star on loan last month, will revive their interest if he becomes available in January.
If Spurs decide to let Pritchard leave; Pochettino's preference is for him to join a top-flight side.
However, Queens Park Rangers are understood to be interested, manager Chris Ramsey having worked with Pritchard in Spurs' academy.
The 22-year-old recently signed a new four-year deal at White Hart Lane, an indication of how highly-rated he is at Spurs.
Pritchard (left) scored 12 goals and provided seven assists on loan at Brentford last season
Pritchard has been a regular in the England Under 21 team under Gareth Southgate
Pritchard excelled on loan at Brentford last year, impressing Spurs coaches with his displays.FBI Director James B. Comey prepared extensively for his discussions with President Trump, out of concern that the president was unlikely to respect the legal and ethical boundaries governing their respective roles, according to associates of the now-fired FBI chief.
The associates recounted how worried Comey was about meeting with Trump and recalled conversations in which they brainstormed how to handle moments in which the president asked for details of an investigation.
One associate referred to Comey’s preparation as a kind of “murder board” — a phrase used to describe a committee of questioners that hurls tough questions at someone as practice for a difficult oral examination.
“He was pretty insistent that he would have to find a way to politically not answer it,” one associate recalled. “He was confident that he was not going to sacrifice the independence of the investigation, or his own moral compass, but at the same time, he would not try to purposely inflame his commander in chief.”
The president abruptly fired Comey on May 9, raising questions about whether he was attempting to interfere in the ongoing FBI probe into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russian operatives seeking to meddle in last year’s presidential election.
(The Washington Post)
Comey was very apprehensive heading into a dinner with the president in late January, because of his previous encounters with Trump during the transition and immediately after the inauguration, according to one associate. Comey felt as if Trump did not understand or did not like the FBI director’s independence and was trying to get Comey to bend the rules for him, the associate said.
White House officials have disputed the accuracy of a memo Comey wrote describing what was said at the January dinner. In it, associates said, Comey described an effort by the president to get him to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
[Notes made by FBI Director Comey say Trump pressured him to end Flynn probe]
In his preparation for meeting Trump, Comey made clear to associates that he wanted to be responsive to the president’s questions while declining to discuss sensitive subjects “in a manner that did not come across as a slap in the face,’’ said the associate, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The FBI declined to comment, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Before going to the dinner, Comey practiced Trump’s likely questions and his answers with a small group of his most trusted confidants, the associates said, in part to ensure he did not give Trump any ammunition to use against him later.
The director did not take notes during the dinner with the president, but there were times, one associate recalled, when after meeting with Trump, Comey started writing notes as soon as he got into a car, “to make sure he could accurately record what was said.’’
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Another associate said the notes of the January dinner conversation contained very nuanced quotes from the president and a high level of detail.
Read more:
Trump said he was thinking of Russia controversy when he decided to fire Comey
Comey associates dispute Trump’s account of conversations
The events leading up to Comey’s firingLegal and illegal immigrants will hit a record high of 51 million in just eight years and eventually account for an astounding 82 percent of all population growth in America, according to new U.S. Census figures.
A report from the Center for Immigration Studies that analyzed the statistics said that by 2023, one in seven U.S. residents will be an immigrant, rising to one in five by 2060 when the immigrant population totals 78 million.
The report was provided to Secrets and released Wednesday evening.
RELATED: The killer question of immigration reform
The surge in immigrant population, both legal and illegal, threatens to slam into the presidential campaign as GOP candidates move to figure out what their position is and the president tries to use executive powers to exempt some 5 million illegals from deportation.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker disrupted the debate this week when he said that legal immigration also needs to be reformed to make sure Americans don't suffer by losing jobs to new citizens.
But even more, the CIS report said that the surge in mostly legal immigrants will have a huge impact on the nation and taxpayers.
RELATED: Poll: No, Obama didn't have the authority to grant amnesty
"These numbers have important implications for workers, schools, infrastructure, congestion and the environment," said Steven Camarota, the center's director of research. "They also may have implications for our ability to successfully assimilate and integrate immigrants. Yet there has been almost no national debate about bringing in so many people legally each year, which is the primary factor driving these numbers."
Those numbers are likely to shake up Washington's political debate over the 12 million illegals in America, the expected 70,000 expected to pour over the border this year and the 4.4 million legal immigrants on a State Department waiting list who have relatives or jobs in the U.S.
A protest in California. AP Photo
A key senator steering the immigration debate, Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, has warned that higher numbers of immigrants will hurt the middle class. In a letter to the New York Times Saturday, he wrote, "It defies reason to argue that the record admission of new foreign workers has no negative effect on the wages of American workers, including the wages of past immigrants hoping to climb into the middle class. Why would many of the largest business groups in the United States spend millions lobbying for the admission of more foreign workers if such policies did not cut labor costs?"
RELATED: Obama is losing his greatest asset in immigration push
On Friday, key business leaders including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a group associated with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg plan to pitch for more immigration. Their schedule is below.
The numbers, as seen in the highlights below, will also raise concerns that Washington is giving the keys to the nation to new immigrants:
• The immigrant population will grow four times faster than the native born population, reaching 15.8 percent, or 57 million |
dangers of a rampant AI answerable only to itself and not its human creators was spelled out in early December by Prof Hawking when he said AI had the potential to "spell the end of the human race."
Letting an artificially intelligent system guide its own development could be catastrophic, he warned in a BBC interview.
"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said.As I’ve said many, many times, I have no idea if Jeff Bagwell and/or Mike Piazza ever used performance enhancing drugs. Given the era in which they played and random hearsay which has floated around for years it would not surprise me if they did, but it’s also the case that it would not surprise me if any of their contemporaries did. We don’t know for sure and those who claim to know for sure don’t have enough evidence upon which to hang an actual report.
But one thing that we do know for sure is that the popular narrative which has surrounded Piazza and Bagwell since they became Hall of Fame candidates — that they were no-power jamokes when they were young and that their Hall of Fame-caliber careers came out of a syringe — is a big fat lie.
We know this based on Alex Speier’s story in today’s Boston Globe. There Speier interviewed Ray Fagnant, a Red Sox regional scout who worked with Bagwell when he was a minor league catcher back when Bagwell was in the low minors. He likewise got up close and personal with Piazza in the Florida State League. With both guys, Fagnant says that their power potential was huge and that, even then, they looked like major leaguers in the making.
Two years ago Dan Lewis of Amazin’ Avenue presented even more data on this score, in the form of early scouting reports for a 17-year-old Mike Piazza which, again, showed his clear power potential even at a young age. The bigger takeaway from Lewis’ story, though, is the reminder that the scouting which went into Piazza famously becoming a 62nd round pick was based on him being a poor, right-handed first baseman. A player who profiled like Piazza at the plate but who was a catcher was a 7th round pick. If Piazza had been a catcher then there’s a great chance he goes way earlier in the draft and the “he came out of NOWHERE” narrative that has surrounded his career does not exist.
All of this is information that has been circulating for years, of course. I recall a good bit of this kind of chatter when Bagwell and Piazza were stars and again when their careers wound down. It was forgotten, though, as the more influential columnists of the past decade have concluded that, no, there is NO WAY that Bagwell and Piazza would’ve amounted to anything without PEDs. It’s the ultimate irony, really. The old-line ballwriters were relying on stat lines and projections while ignoring what the scouts had to say.
Again, none of which is to say that Bagwell and Piazza didn’t, at some point in their careers, use PEDs. It simply means that they were not purely chemical creations as is so often claimed. It puts them in the same category as every player of the so-called Steroid Era: the bad ones who took PEDs didn’t suddenly become amazing. The good ones who took PEDs likely would’ve been good without them. A player’s drug use was and remains an ethical consideration on which to chew, but it does not render their on-the-field accomplishments utterly fraudulent.
It may be unfortunate that such a state of affairs robs us of a classic Frankenstein story and those always tasty “good guy/bad guy” narratives, but when the facts trump the narrative, go with the facts.
Follow @craigcalcaterraPHOENIX - Some outraged donors are threatening to pull their support for the Humane Society after it euthanized the beloved cat of a former heroin addict hours after he brought it in for medical treatment.
The Arizona Republic reports that Daniel Dockery's 9-month-old cat, Scruffy, was put down not because of cuts it got from a fence but because the 49-year-old Phoenix man couldn't immediately pay $400 for its care. (Scroll down to see video).
Dockery said that he reluctantly surrendered the cat to the Humane Society on Dec. 8 after clinic staff declined to take a credit card from his mother over the phone or wait 24 hours for her to wire him cash. They told him that the cat only would be treated if he signed over ownership, he said.
Dockery searched for the cat for three weeks at agency shelters and repeatedly asked staff what had happened to Scruffy but learned Tuesday that the cat was euthanized a few hours after he brought her in.
"Now I've got to think about how I failed that beautiful animal," Dockery said. "I failed her.... That's so wrong. There was no reason for her not to be treated."
Humane Society spokeswoman Stacy Pearson said the agency took Scruffy intending to treat it and put it in foster care, but when she was taken to a second-chance clinic with three other cats, doctors were only available to treat two of them.
"It was never intended for that cat to be euthanized," she said. "This truly is a worst-case scenario... and it is one the Arizona Humane Society must deal with every day."
She said that if Dockery paid for the treatment or the clinic had accepted his mother's credit card by phone, Scruffy would not have been taken to the second-chance clinic.
The Humane Society said it is reviewing its credit-card policy because of what happened to Scruffy.
Dockery said that for the past nine months, Scruffy has been his closest companion and has helped him stay off drugs for more than a year, the longest stretch he's ever been clean.
A recovering heroin addict with a lengthy prison record, Dockery has a handful of friends and a caretaking job in Phoenix that provides him with room and board.
He said that as he hand-fed Scruffy even before she opened her eyes at 4 days old, he found that he was nursing his own way back into society. He raised money to have Scruffy spayed. The kitten ate from fresh cans of tuna and slept on Dockery's pillow at night.
Dockery's mother, Donna Koning, of Muskegon, Michigan, said she believes that when her son told the Humane Society workers that he didn't have a real job, they assumed Dockery was homeless and couldn't care for an animal.
"Don't you have enough animals in the shelter that you would not want to take a beloved pet from someone who clearly cares for it?" she asked.
A Republic story on Saturday about Dockery's search for Scruffy led to an outpouring of support, as more than 150 people emailed and called to offer Dockery financial help, new kittens and free veterinarian services.
Residents also expressed outrage on the Humane Society's Facebook page, which was flooded with messages from donors threatening to pull donations.
"Shame on you!" wrote several people.
More from Call 12 for Action in Phoenix:Much has been made of the District's $400 million surplus in fiscal year 2012, which could add fuel to arguments in favor of capping property tax hikes and further lowering speed camera fines. But the new Comprehensive Annual Financial Report contains more than just budget details; here's a numerical breakdown of a few truly important items Mayor Vince Gray will want to be sure to highlight in his State of the District address next week.
Tons of snow removed: 105,487 in 2012, down from 850,000 in 2011 and 5,298,905 in 2010. Chalk it up to a mild winter.
Tons of leaves removed: 5,659, down from 6,914 in 2011 and 8,050 in 2010. Chalk it up to a mild fall?
Number of motor vehicle registrations: 284,674, up from 278,915 in 2011. The war on cars is going poorly.
Number of school buses: 838, up from 802 in 2011 and 753 in 2010. The war on school buses is going just awfully.
Number of volumes in the public libraries: 1,466,010, down from 1,601,581 in 2011 and 2,242,514 in 2010. This despite an increase in the number of library buildings. Those fancy new libraries don't actually have a whole lot of books.
Potholes repaired: 26,233, up from 6,863 in 2011. The bikers and drivers of the District thank the administration.
Number of ambulances: 73, down from 89 in 2011. Try not to get hurt or sick.
Number of medical incidents: 137,643, up from 130,268. You're not trying hard enough.
Number of trees: 148,980, up from 144,000. Despite the derecho's best efforts.
Tons per day of recyclables collected: 133, up from 107. Pat yourselves on the back.The big guns are officially out.
Just yesterday, we recounted the story of "Black Wednesday" when on September 16, 1992, the UK was forced out of the EU’s exchange-rate mechanism, or ERM, when the BOE tapped out and allowed the British pound to float freely, leading to 15% losses in the sterling. As we noted, this was George Soros' infamous trade which "broke the Bank of England" and made the Hungarian richer by over $1.5 bilion.
24 years later Soros is back, and this time he is warning against the kind of devaluation that made him a billionaire and which he believes will be unleashed by Brexit, when in a Guardian Op-Ed he wrote that U.K. voters are “grossly underestimating” the true costs of a vote to leave the EU, saying that there would be an "immediate and dramatic impact on financial markets, investment, prices and jobs."
He predicts that the pound would decline "precipitously", seeing a gargantuan drop of at least 15% and possibly >20% to below $1.15. Considering it has now become trendy for analysts to come up with ever "doomier" forecasts of just how low cable would plunge in case of Brexit, we are surprised Soros stopped there.
Here Soros makes the distinction how the collapse in cable would be different from the one that made him richer by saying that this devaluation wouldn’t be “healthy” like the one in 1992 because BOE wouldn’t cut rates, U.K. has large current account deficit and devaluation unlikely to improve manufacturing exports this time. Just don't tell that to the BOJ, which would gladly leave the EU - twice if it had to - if it meant a 20% devaluation.
“Brexit would make some people very rich - but most voters considerably poorer”; “there are speculative forces in the, markets much bigger and more powerful" than the speculators that profited from the 1967 devaluation at Britain’s expense. "A vote to leave could see the week end with a Black Friday, and serious consequences for ordinary people."
Here is the gist of Soros' scaremongering, from the Guardian op-ed titled "The Brexit crash will make all of you poorer – be warned":
David Cameron, along with the Treasury, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and others have been attacked by the leave campaign for exaggerating the economic risks of Brexit. This criticism has been widely accepted by the British media and many financial analysts. As a result, British voters are now grossly underestimating the true costs of leaving. As opinion polls on the referendum result fluctuate, I want to offer a clear set of facts, based on my six decades of experience in financial markets, to help voters understand the very real consequences of a vote to leave the EU.
Of course, Soros' set of facts may be clouded by his far greater equity stake in equity interests around Europe, and the globe, which would be drastially impacted by not only a Brexit, but by a European Union which is suddenly on the rocks.
From that point on, Soros' entire analysis is on the "worst case" scenario centered around a collapsing pound, something which most ironically every other central bank around the globe is so desperate to achieve:
... sterling is almost certain to fall steeply and quickly if there is a vote to leave– even more so after yesterday’s rebound as markets reacted to the shift in opinion polls towards remain. I would expect this devaluation to be bigger and more disruptive than the 15% devaluation that occurred in September 1992, when I was fortunate enough to make a substantial profit for my hedge fund investors, at the expense of the Bank of England and the British government.
At least he is honest.
It is notable that Soros' warning comes just days after that of Jacob Rothschild himself who said in another Op-Ed, this time for The Times, that leaving the EU could lead to a "damaging and disorderly situation" in the UK as he urged Britons to vote'remain'. Just like Soros, Lord Rothschild, suddenly exhibiting a rare strain of humanitarian concern, said readers should not "risk the wellbeing of our country"and European countries are "better off together".
He said that "at present we enjoy being a permanent member of the UN security council and we are essential to the G8 and Commonwealth. But diplomacy, defence, the environment and our values of being a liberal democracy will all be at risk" adding that "I can see no good reason why we should accept our playing a diminished role on the world stage," especially if his own personal fortune would be jeopardized.
* * *
Finally, completing the doom loop, was none other than Chancellor George Osborne who, according to the Telegraph, "refused to rule out suspending trading on the London stock market if Britons vote to leave the European Union on Friday morning... The threat from the Chancellor, made in an LBC radio interview on Monday evening, after the market had closed could force shares down in London as early as Tuesday morning."
Iain Dale, the presenter, asked Mr Osborne: “If the financial markets do plummet on Friday would you have to consider suspending trading on the FTSE?” The Chancellor responded: “Well look, the Bank of England and the Treasury – Governor Carney and myself – we have of course discussed contingency plans. But the sensible thing is to keep those secret and make sure you are well prepared for whatever happens but if you set them all out in advance then you rather undermine the power of those plans.” Pushed again on the contingency plans, Mr Osborne said: “I have a responsibility to the people listening to this programme to do all I can to protect them. “But I have to tell you that you cannot in the end protect people from the economic shock that leaving the EU would bring about.”
And in case the threat of shuttered markets was not enough, Osborne also hinted at imminent mass layoffs, suggesting that redundancy notices could be issued hours after Britons vote to leave the EU at the vote.
Mr Osborne pointed to warnings from the London Stock Exchange there would be 100,000 job losses in the City after a Brexit. Mr Osborne was challenged about whether redundancies warned by the bank JP Morgan could come as early as Friday – the day after the referendum. Mr Osborne replied: “I think that will start to happen very quickly, sadly.”
Amid all this gloom, Osborne presented the "only" alternative that would not lead to the imminent economic collapse he so forcefully imagines:
"he added that if the UK voted to remain there would be a “quick snap back” for the British economy, he said that “decisions will be taken and investment will come in”. Asked if these redundancy notices would be issued on Friday morning if Britons vote to leave, Mr Osborne said: “That will start to happen very quickly sadly.”
Now if only the people will do what these noble public servants tell to do in their own best interest...
Finally, Osborne also played down claims he could be forced to leave the Treasury after the referendum amid anger form Tory backbenchers over the way he has campaigned, saying: “It’s really not about my job”.
Oh but is George, just like it is in Soros and Rothschild's own self interest for the people to vote "Remain." To suggest otherwise is naive, but it may also be irrelevant. With just three days until the vote, the scaremongering tactic, not to mention the murder of an innocent woman, may have already done its job judging by the reveral in public opinion.
In any case, one can only hope that unlike the case of the failed Greek referendum where the people voted one way only to get the opposite, no matter how the Brits vote, it will truly represent the democratic will of the majority and that particular outcome is what they get.A Paycoin address that investors were told was for testing purposes and was supposed to have its coins burned, has since come to life, sending payments to various addresses and appear to have ended up at various exchanges.
Instead of traditional mining, Paycoin uses nodes called Prime Controllers and Orion Controllers, as well as traditional PoS wallet minting. The Prime Controllers are limited to 52 addresses and are awarded to the highest bidders every six months. The winning bidders become Prime Controllers and receive a much higher stake rate, of either 10% 20% 100% or 350%. The non winning bidders become Orion Controllers and receive the same 5% interest as regular staking, but don’t have to worry about coinage and are allowed to bid on Prime Controllers in the next round.
The address, was staking at a 350% interest rate compounded daily, causing it to quickly shoot up the Paycoin Rich list where is was eventually discovered by a Hashtalkforum user. [First three posts from that thread are missing] When the issue was brought up on the forums, a Paycoin developer, Joe Mordica, stated that the address was a part of a test because some Prime Controllers were not staking properly.
[blockquote style=”2″]This is our address that we are using to test staking with (as there have been some problems with the staking in the past week or so). You can see on the blockchain looking at the other addresses the staking hasn’t been working as expected so this is another node used for testing latest fixes. Thanks.[/blockquote]
Mordica, later said the coins created were to be burned. Burning is the process of sending coins to an address that no one knows the private key for. With no one able to access the coins, they are as good as destroyed.
Mordica has since been absent in the community, according to coinbrief.net. He hasn’t posted on the Hashtalk forum in 27 days and counting.
A few days ago, those coins started to get sent to various addresses. Some of those addresses eventually sent coins to known exchange addresses, including Bittrex, Cryptsy and PayBase. Each known transaction sent to the exchanges appear to be small, less than 100 XPY at a time.
When the issue of the coin movement was brought up on the Hashtalkforums, GAW and Paycoin/PayBase founder Josh Garza stated that there had been some sort of mistake and that they were looking into it. Several hours later, he appeared on the forum to give this explanation.
[blockquote style=”2″]A few weeks ago, a member of GAW was testing coins and told everyone those coins would be destroyed after the testing was done. Through a series of internal communication challenges, this was never completed. The internal issue has been resolved. Additionally, an unrelated issue of coins compounding has been surfaced a few weeks ago. Prime controllers should not be compounding coins. The stake rate should only be applied to the principle coins. This will be resolved as the source for Paycoin is updated in the future. I have asked the team to determine the additional coins that were made as a result of this compounding. My plan is to show the community that math, then have both sets of coins destroyed. We are committed to being transparent and upholding the highest standards with Paycoin. Please continue to keep an eye on the blockchain[.][/blockquote]
The quote did not explain why the coins were not burned immediately as promised, other than the communication issue, or why they appear to have moved to exchanges. Repeated requests for answers on the forum have gone unanswered. Questions asking why the test was done on the mainnet rather than the testnet also went unanswered. We reached out to Mr. Garza, who gave us this comment:
[blockquote style=”2″]Why is it that we have only heard from your publication when there is something interpreted as negative? Otherwise, we never hear from you guys? I was just about to we [sic]write something about this to my 64k twitter followers. Care to comment?”[/blockquote]
[Mr. Garza may have been referring to CoinTelegraph, another publication I write for.]
The extreme interest rate for the Prime Controllers is also a concern, albeit a lesser one that has been known for a few weeks at least. The Prime Controller percentage did seem to increase to 350 % in December, causing rapid inflation of Paycoin. The Paycoin whitepaper states that Prime Controllers will receive a 5 % stake of the coins held in an escrow account that holds the losing bids of the Prime Controller during the six month period that it runs. This was intended to connect demand and creation of Paycoin, as demand grows in theory so will the bids for Prime Controllers, resulting in more staking power and therefore more coin creation.
It has since been revealed that is not the system, but what exactly determines Prime Controller interest rates is not immediately clear.
Once coins enter an exchange address, the sheer volume of inputs and outputs makes it nearly impossible to track. The only option to fix the supply of coins would be for PayBase or GAW to burn an equal amount of coins elsewhere. That, of course, wouldn’t explain why they coins were moved in the first place, or who moved them.
This marks the latest in a string of controversies for the Paycoin and GAW Miners. There was the falling through of the PayBase enforced price floor for Paycoin (eventually replaced by a yet-to-be-launched “honor” system) then reports of an SEC investigation. There is also the aforementioned Prime Controller issue and significant amounts of censorship on the official hashtalk forums.
We have pressed Garza for further comment, who told us he had forwarded to his CMO. He had been active on the forums posts detailing the issues, so it is not clear why he couldn’t give a response himself. We will update this space if and when the CMO responds.Hang on for a minute...we're trying to find some more stories you might like. Close
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The student activity center was packed with enthusiastic students on a cloudy Friday afternoon. You can hear conversation overlapping each other as students munch on pizza and popcorn. Anime club president Kevin Stuckenschneider walks up to the front of the room with a kind smile on his face.
He first shares his appreciation for people attending and ask people to introduce themselves with the following questions; first name, first anime they’ve watched, current favorite anime, and lastly, tell something interesting about themselves. Many shared common interest such as a love of literature and art. Some were dressed as their favorite anime characters.
After introductions, members participated in a club game: pick up blue and red beads with chopsticks. Whoever had the most beads on another set of plates wins. It was an active activity that many participated in. People were competitive yet friendly as laughter and cheering filled the room.
When the game was over, people settled down with individual activities as groups started to form. Members played with decks of cards at one table, some played video games on another, a few bonded over Pokemon plush toys and artwork, while others simply sat and chatted as they watched the anime K-ON playing on the large screen.
Anime first made its debut in late 1917 and since then has developed and expanded over time, according to openculture.com. The club had members of all races, sexes, and age groups; a shining example of anime’s wide influence.
Dylan Noorel, a club member and contributor who helps organize club meetings, plans events, and brings snacks and refreshments for members said, “Otaku in Japanese means, like, a geek culture. It describes people who are into pop culture, like American super heroes, but it’s … an eastern perspective of that taken into Japanese animation and Japanese [cultural aspects] such as social, political, economics, and [its] overall … influences.”
Some members described anime to be an outlet during difficult periods.“My family, we were going through some tough times,” said club member, Amendina Adams, “so a friend of mine suggested I watch anime.”
“I love the Anime Club because there’s just a whole bunch of awesome, weird people that love the same things you do! You’re enthusiastic and you have people who give the same energy back! You love it,” said club member Jonathan Aguilar.
When entering the Anime Club, you’ll see people chatting, laughing, discussing anime’s and other interest, playing games, and more importantly, just coming together. And that’s what the Anime Club is all about.
Anyone who is interested in joining Anime Club can e-mail Kevin Stuckenschneider at kstuchen@montgomerycollege.edu, or attend meetings in the Student Activity Center, CC015, on Fridays at 1p.m.dropping hppa from testing
To: debian-release@lists.debian.org
Cc: debian-hppa@lists.debian.org
Subject: dropping hppa from testing
From: dann frazier <dannf@dannf.org>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 11:24:25 -0700
Message-id: <[🔎] 20110203182425.GB11943@dannf.org>
The Debian/HPPA porters recently had a discussion[1] about the future of the port. We reached the consensus that, due to limited resources and end-of-life hardware, we should no longer spend our energy on maintaining an official debian port, or creating our own "stable" releases. Instead, we will focus our efforts on maintaining an installable/useable "unstable" distribution, likely making use of the debian-ports infrastructure. To that end, I'd like to request that hppa be removed from testing. This by no means reduces our commitment to the support life of the current stable release (lenny), which will still be maintained for at least 1 more year. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-hppa/2011/02/msg00002.htmlA Hamilton couple found New Zealand doesn't treat same-sex couples fairly. What do you think?
A Hamilton gay couple being denied a couples two-for-one deal at a raceway park has raised questions over how New Zealand treats same-sex partners.
The incident involved Hamilton couple Amiria Te Nana and her partner Lava Leituala being denied a two-for-one promotion at Hamilton's Daytona Raceway because they were not man and woman.
Tamati Coffey, a gay former television personality turned politician, says people should ease up on the business which said a same-sex couple couldn't use a partners' deal.
The raceway said it would apologise for the incident.
Coffey, now a Labour spokesperson in Rotorua and an advocate for the gay community, said he was glad to hear that the owners have agreed to apologise.
"Let's not be too hard on the owners - it's the growing pains of a changing, more accepting and diverse society."
MARK TAYLOR/stuff.co.nz Amiria Te Nana and her partner are seeking an apology from Daytona raceway over same-sex discrimination.
"They need to turn this incident on its head and have a lesbian fun racing night - which may achieve both their goals of having more women participating and opening up their business to a brand new market."
Coffey said the promotional deal needed to be "fleshed out" a bit more so it would not happen again.
However, Trevor Easton, the general manager of Outline - a national counselling service specifically for the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, intersex and questioning (LGBTIQ) community - was outraged by the incident.
MARK TAYLOR/FAIRFAX NZ Amiria Te Nana is after an apology after she and her partner were excluded from a couples deal.
"I'm absolutely appalled. I can't believe in this day and age that we live in, that conversation needed to happen. It's a shocker."
Easton said the LGBTIQ community had a high suicide rate, which was not helped by incidences like this.
"I think a heartfelt apology and some form of compensation for the humiliation and anguish."
Te Nana and her partner, Leituala, had gone to celebrate Te Nana's sister's anniversary at Hamilton's Daytona Indoor Raceway, on Tuesday evening.
The group planned to use the Tuesday deal, which on the raceway website states each rider who pays can "bring a spouse or partner and they ride for free".
But when the pair tried to claim the deal Te Nana said the manager told them they had to prove they were in a "legitimate relationship".
The pair, who have been together for a year and a half, showed matching tattoos and were then told the deal was only available to "a man and woman, girlfriends and boyfriends".
Te Nana and the group left the raceway and later posted a complaint to the business's website. She received a response stating:
"Look we are very sorry but the promotion is for a spouse or partner, which in our thinking is husband and wife or girlfriend and boyfriend. We have a lot of people who try it on and say they are a same sex couples and they are not.
"The rule is male and female only end of story. If I let one do it I have to let everyone do it and that was not what the promotion was about."
Human rights commissioner Richard Tankersley said it was unlawful for businesses to treat people differently because of their sexual orientation.
"Anyone who believes that they have been discriminated against in this way may come to the Human Rights Commission for advice", Tankersley said.
Te Nana on Thursday morning said she and Leituala simply wanted to raise the issue of discrimination.
"As a couple we set out to bring light to this issue and hope it doesn't happen to anyone else."
"If the policy has been changed then that's as far as we want to take it."
"We are just going to go back to living our lives privately."
The owner, who refused to provide his name, said the policy had been around for the last 10 years and was originally designed for a husband to bring his wife for a free ride.
"It's not a two-for-one deal, it's for a spouse or partner. We have lots and lots of people trying it on with us, telling us they are same-sex, and basically you know they're not. Because of that we made a rule - it is male and female, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend only."
He said it was not a personal view but had always been the raceway policy.
"How people want to be in a relationship that is up to them, but that is our policy is female and male, husband and wife."
"We never had any issues up until last night. We have never thought about it before."
Riders were not required to provide proof of being in a relationship to claim the deal, which was at the discretion of staff, he said.
"There is no one asked to provide anything, the staff have all been told it is a husband and wife and boyfriend and girlfriend."
"They were told what our policy is and they didn't like it. The rules were made because of so many people trying to get a free ride."
Under the Human Rights Act it is illegal to discriminate against someone in the provision of goods and services because of their sexual orientation.
The raceway planned to scrap the policy and open it up as a "straight two for one deal". The owner said he would also like to apologise.
"At the end of the day we are in a modern society and we do need to change it. I am quite happy to say sorry, if they are upset about it. I did say I was sorry and explained the rules."
"It is quite shocking and has highlighted a fault in our system as well."
Comments are now closed on this story.
Head to our Facebook page for more from Stuff Life & StyleThe Apollo moon missions ended almost 40 years ago. But for lunar scientists, they're gifts that keep on giving. Researchers studying rocks brought back by astronauts have found that the moon’s scarce water has a different chemical signature than Earth water. Which leads to the conclusion that the water probably came from comets. The study appears in the journal Nature Geoscience. [James Greenwood et al., "Hydrogen isotope ratios in lunar rocks indicate delivery of cometary water to the Moon"]
The researchers used what’s called an ion microscope to compare the amount of normal hydrogen in the moon rocks to the amount of the hydrogen isotope deuterium, which carries an extra neutron. They found deuterium at higher levels than it's found in Earth water—but at levels similar to the comets Hale-Bopp, Hyakutake and Halley. Which suggests comets deposited water on the ancient moon, shortly after its formation four-and-a-half billion years ago.
The finding could also explain a mystery of water on Earth—how the oceans got here. Because if comets battered the moon, they probably hit the Earth, too. Ocean water does have more deuterium than water in the Earth's mantle. Maybe, the researchers say, that's because the oceans have an extra dose of melted comet ice.
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
[Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.][Gabe Cazares in 1997]
On August 3, 1976, Gabe Cazares, the Texas-born mayor of Clearwater, Florida, contacted the FBI with a complaint about a letter that had been mailed to several Florida Democratic Party officials.
By the summer of 1976, Cazares had been putting up with several months of intense harassment by the Church of Scientology, and he knew immediately that the letter was just the latest “operation” being run against him.
The letter accused him of being a passenger in a car that had been in a hit-and-run accident in Washington DC and had possibly killed someone. The letter writer claimed that she was behind the wheel during the accident, and that Cazares had been “a good guy” about it, but she worried that their secret was going to ruin his political career. The letter hinted that Cazares had been in the car for illicit reasons, which is why he had asked the driver to keep the accident quiet.
When Cazares heard about the letter from a local newspaper reporter, he knew he had to act, and fast.
The FBI investigation which then took place turned out to be a pretty interesting study in chasing down bad leads and then getting stunning information from a key Church of Scientology defector.
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And now, for the first time, we have the full story of that investigation — as well as some evidence for why it never resulted in criminal charges being filed.
Thanks to our dogged researcher, R.M. Seibert and her use of the MuckRock website, we now have the Gabe Cazares FBI file, and we’re making it public today.
When Cazares died in 2006, this is how the St. Petersburg Times remembered his early life…
Gabriel “Gabe” Cazares was born on Jan. 31, 1920, in Alpine, Texas, one of nine children, and reared in Los Angeles, where he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps. At Los Angeles City College, which he attended on a track scholarship, he set a record for the junior college 2-mile run that stood for 11 years. He also studied at Fresno State College and Texas Christian University, were he earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology, and the University of Maryland. He received a master’s degree in business management from Jackson College in Honolulu. Much of his college work was done in the military. He joined the Army Air Forces in 1941 and rose to lieutenant colonel, retiring from service in 1966 to become a stockbroker. He moved to Clearwater a short time later when, as he once said, “you could count the number of Hispanics on one hand.”
Cazares ran successfully for mayor of Clearwater in 1975, but was already preparing for a run for Congress in 1976 when, early that year, the truth finally came out about a mysterious group that was buying up properties in town.
Calling itself “United Churches of Florida” and “Southern Land Development,” the shadowy group had purchased one of Clearwater’s most well-known landmarks, the Fort Harrison Hotel. The group also bought up the Clearwater Bank building a few blocks away, and other properties.
On a January 26, 1976 radio program, Mayor Cazares wondered why the hotel’s mysterious owners were having it patrolled by security men carrying billy clubs.
Two days later, Scientology finally owned up to being the mysterious group behind “United Churches of Florida” that had purchased the hotel. And its spy wing, the “Guardian’s Office,” began investigating how to smear Cazares with an invented sex scandal.
Details of that plot, named “Operation Italian Fog,” came out in Scientology documents that were seized by the FBI in a 1977 raid. Said one Scientology memo, “The purpose of this op is to actually get real documentation into the files of Mexican license bureau or bureaux stating that the mayor got married in Mexico to some Mexican gal 25 years ago who is not his wife, so puts the mayor in a position of bigamy. This can be accomplished either by a bribe or a covert action. Once the docs are planted it is cleverly exposed that the mayor is promiscuous and a bigamist.”
It’s pretty rich that Scientology dreamed up a plan to frame Gabe Cazares with false documents suggesting that he was a bigamist, since Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was an actual bigamist: He married his second wife, Sara Northrup, in 1946, a year before he obtained a divorce from his first wife, Polly Grubb.
The Guardian’s Office planned other schemes to ruin Cazares, with names like “Operation Cazares Handling,” “Operation Speedy Gonzales,” and “Project Taco-Less.” But its plan to involve him in a hit-and-run accident was perhaps its most elaborate.
Let’s examine it by starting where the FBI file does, and that’s with Cazares making his report to law enforcement.
“On August 3, 1976, victim, who is a Democratic candidate for Florida’s 6th Congressional District |
up 50 on us.’ ”
But in the rematch a little over a month later in the Super Bowl, the Giants prevailed, 17-14, to deny the Patriots a 19-0 season.
“That whole year, Bill Belichick downplayed the undefeated stuff,” Stallworth said by phone. “People started talking about it at 4-0, 5-0. He said to us, ‘I don’t want to hear anything about that around here. Save that for the media, for your family.’ We won two or three games that year we probably should have lost. There was never a doubt in anyone’s mind that we would come back and win that [final regular season] game, and we did. That was the way our season went.
“It was the same thing in the Super Bowl. Even at the end of the game, after Plaxico Burress scored that [game-winning Giants’] touchdown, there was no doubt in our minds we’d come back and win again. I think the Giants just had our number. We had mismatches all over the field. Randy Moss and Wes Welker were obviously great players. The Giants just did enough to pressure Tom and they found a way to win it. After the game, you could hear a pin drop in the locker room. Bill stood there. He was obviously very disappointed. He said, ‘We didn’t coach you guys well enough. We didn’t get it done for you guys.’ ”
Stallworth was only an interested onlooker by the time the Giants beat the Patriots in another Super Bowl, 21-17, at the end of the 2011 season.
“I’d played for the Redskins that year and we’d beaten the Giants twice,” Stallworth said. “We should have beaten the Patriots but we didn’t. So I had a pretty good handle on that game. I remember watching that game and I was like, ‘What is it with the Giants versus the Patriots? Do they have the Patriots’ number?’… I think the Giants had that in their mind, even the guys that hadn’t been there before.”
Will it matter now? The Patriots are averaging a league-best 34.5 points per game and Brady is having another spectacular season, with 22 touchdown passes and two interceptions. A Belichick-coached team is not permitted to dwell on what happened a week ago, much less on games from years ago.
“I’d much rather have won them than lost them,” Brady said when asked by reporters during the week about the Super Bowl defeats to the Giants. “But they won’t have any bearing on this week or what the matchups are. It’s a totally different team and game and situation and so forth. But they just have a great organization.”
The Giants are 5-4 and are ranked 31st in the league in pass defense and 32nd overall. They surrendered seven touchdown passes to Drew Brees of New Orleans in a single game this month. Their pass rush is far from as imposing as it was in past meetings with the Patriots, although standout Jason Pierre-Paul did make his season debut last weekend after returning from his summer fireworks injury.
“The pass rush was actually doing pretty well early in the year,” Toomer said. “They were being creative and finding ways to get to the quarterback. But once people started to figure out some of their blitzes, you saw what happened against the Saints. People wonder why they put Jason Pierre-Paul back in the lineup so quickly. It’s because they need someone who can get to the quarterback on his own.”Toxic Train Wreck Exposes Weakness in Federal Chemical Policy
The August 6, 2012, fire at the Chevron Refinery in Richmond, California, caused by a release of flammable vapor, was one of several recent accidents in an industry with little to no government oversight. (D.H. Parks / Flickr / Creative Commons)
In late November, while other parts of New Jersey were recovering from the superstorm, the quiet town of Paulsboro was blindsided by a very unnatural disaster. A train derailed while crossing a local bridge, sending freight cars tumbling into the water below and releasing a toxic swirl of the flammable gas known as vinyl chloride, used to make PVC plastics. In the following days, chaos ensued as residents hurriedly evacuated. Authorities struggled to manage the emergency response, leaving people confused and frustrated by a lack of official communication about hazards.
Though the derailment came as a shock to residents, this was an accident waiting to happen, environmental advocates say. Paulsboro is just one of the latest in a spate of recent disasters (including others involving vinyl chloride) in industries that handle massive amounts of toxins with minimal oversight.
At a recent community meeting about the aftermath of the incident, residents expressed exasperation at the government’s disaster-response team, accusing officials of keeping them in the dark about toxic risks, reports the South Jersey Times:
“How much is all of our lives worth to you?” Michael Hamilton, a Pine Street resident, asked. “What if somewhere down the line we develop cancer? Who is responsible, and when will you take responsibility?”
Community activists and officials are seeking accountability for the chemical fallout as well. There are immediate concerns—that residents were not adequately informed about the exposure risks, or that in the initial emergency response, workers may not have received appropriate protective gear.
But in the backdrop looms what many see as a chronic government failure to uphold key aspects of federal environmental safety law. In a joint statement following the incident, Greenpeace, the Virginia-based Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ), and the New Jersey Work Environment Council (WEC) renewed their demand for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to revamp chemical safety rules under the Clean Air Act. They want Washington to set new rules to push industrial facilities to implement “inherently safer technologies” or safer chemical processes whenever feasible.
The idea, which would parallel in part New Jersey’s current regulations, is to move the industry holistically toward safer processes that are intrinsically less hazard-prone."We've seen over the past decade, disaster after disaster," WEC Chemical Safety Project Coordinator Denise Patel tells In These Times. Noting that stronger safeguards in New Jersey have goaded companies to take measures to reduce environmental and safety risks, she added, “We know there are safer chemicals, we know there are safer technologies that these companies could be using."
In a petition recently sent to EPA, a coalition of environmental, labor and community groups, including United Steelworkers and Communications Workers of America, argued that weak federal regulation has left industrial facilities vulnerable to severe threats ranging from transport crashes to terrorist attacks. Moreover, the limited scope of federal safety standards means that some facilities, like gas refineries and water treatment plants, suffer from especially paltry oversight.
Broad-based reform of industrial practices, the petition argues, would get ahead of the problem by limiting overall quantities of highly dangerous chemicals, so that “safety is built into the process, not added on, and hazards are reduced or eliminated, not simply controlled.” Mike Schade, a CHEJ campaign coordinator, tells In These Times via email, “There are safer available alternatives which if required would reduce the transport of vinyl chloride and other toxic chemicals. Requiring safer chemical processes at chemical plants is the best way to prevent disasters on rail lines, which carry the majority of the most dangerous substances.”
Meanwhile, the Paulsboro incident falls chiefly under the jurisdiction of federal authorities and is currently under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, though critics stress the need for more preventive, rather than reactive, safety measures.
In addition to guarding against catastrophes like the railway accident, tighter chemical regulation could have a subtler but longer-term impact on the health of workers who deal with occupational exposure everyday. For example, vinyl chloride exposure on the job is associated with cancer and liver disease.
It might be perverse serendipity that the Paulsboro wreck took place in New Jersey. Despite a bad rap as a toxic waste haven, the state has established relatively strong chemical safety mandates under its Toxic Catastrophe Prevention Act, which has led to significant reforms in the technology of facilities that handle toxics.
WEC has played an active role in enforcing these regulations by enlisting labor unions in monitoring facilities and in conducting workplace safety trainings. The group also works with environmental inspectors to make sure worksites are complying with the law.
"The workers who work around the plant are the ones who are the most knowledgeable about what's going on,” said Patel, “so it's actually an incredible asset to the inspectors for them to be able to walk around and say, you know, 'This pipe's been making a new noise for the last month.'"
Still, advocates warn that toxic hazards persist across New Jersey. Even though the state's laws are relatively strong, they still allow facilities to harbor extreme concentrations of toxics. Rick Hind, legislative director for Greenpeace, says via email that the Obama administration can use its authority under the Clean Air Act to strengthen regulations on a nationwide basis without pushing new legislation: “All he has to do is direct the EPA [to] develop the program.”
Obama’s regulatory track record is tepid, however: Contrary to Republican charges that the president represents “big government,” he’s advocated rolling back regulations, and his administration hasn’t been much more active than that of his predecessor in pushing new regulations.
Still, advocates hope that Paulsboro will finally spur federal action before another disaster tests the extent to which the government values people’s lives. Underlying the wreckage of the derailed train, after all, is a derailed regulatory system.By Sahar Aziz, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Sahar Aziz is associate professor at Texas A&M University School of Law where she teaches national security, civil rights, and Middle East law. She serves as president of the Egyptian American Rule of Law Association and is a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. The views expressed are her own.
Egyptian society, once teeming with calls for freedom, justice and dignity, has been replaced with an atmosphere of vengeance. Instead of calls to preserve fundamental human rights, Egyptians now praise their internal security forces for killing and arresting en mass those associated with the Muslim Brotherhood – the newly declared enemy of the state.
That these are the same people who won Egypt’s first freely contested parliamentary and presidential elections is apparently of no consequence. What is consequential, however, is the transformation of a grassroots revolution into an indefinite War on Terror. Rather than challenge police abuses, Egyptians compete to be the most patriotic in supporting the army and security forces’ violent crackdown of the Muslim Brotherhood, while the crackdown's expansion to secular youth groups is met with equal support.
When criticized by the international community for violating international norms, the Egyptian state points to the language of the U.S. government as its exemplar. And, sadly, it is true that the United States’ War on Terror effectively legitimized practices that were once only associated with pariah states.
Prior to the global war on terror, torture, abuse of law to persecute political opponents, and fostering an environment of fear among the populace to justify state-sponsored violence led to nations being stigmatized. Indeed, before 9/11, Egypt’s violent repression of Islamist groups under the auspices of national security in the 1990s was dismissed as a pretext for political oppression and authoritarianism.
Similar accusations could now be leveled against America’s national security practices.
The United States’ open-ended global war on terror initially targeted al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, expanded to the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, then to Ba’athists in Iraq, and eventually encompassed anyone deemed a “jihadi” who opposed U.S. foreign policy. Meanwhile, orthodox Muslims in the U.S. critical of America’s national security policies also became targets in this indeterminate conflict – their charities were shut down in the wake of 9/11, assets frozen, and leaders were prosecuted under laws prohibiting material support to terrorism, even if the allegedly illegal acts had no clear connection to Afghanistan, al Qaeda, or the September 11 terrorist attacks.
More from CNN: Intelligence oversight 'unacceptable'
As Muslims in Guantanamo were tortured and denied basic due process rights, Muslims in America had government informants infiltrate their mosques, businesses, and social gatherings. Muslims were placed under various forms of electronic surveillance and too often treated as a fifth column by virtue of their religious identity. And when they decried violations of their civil rights and liberties, the government propagated fear-based narratives to persuade Americans that such sacrifices were necessary to protect the nation against those intent on killing Americans. We were frightened into believing that civil liberties and human rights were a luxury that a nation at war simply could not afford.
The War on Terror not only led America to stray from its founding principles, but also legitimized practices once reserved for the most authoritarian states.
Applying the logic of the U.S. playbook, the Egyptian military and security forces are currently using a fear-based narrative to justify mass arrests and prosecutions of the leadership of its political opposition – both the Muslim Brotherhood and secular youth groups. The Muslim Brotherhood has been designated a terrorist group, a move that legalized the freezing of the assets of more than 1,000 charities that provide health care and food to millions of poor Egyptians neglected for decades by the state. Labeling the political opposition as enemies of the state has also led to the arrest of hundreds of university students, women, and youth activists whose punishment for opposing the government crackdown is a five year jail sentence.
True, the Egyptian government has taken things further than the U.S., with anti-government protests brutally quashed with indiscriminate shootings of hundreds of unarmed civilian protestors. Yet more than a decade after the War on Terror was launched, Americans are just discovering the extent to which the U.S. government has eviscerated civil liberties, not just of Muslims but for all Americans.
The National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs have proven right the critics’ warning that the War on Terror has served as the pretext for government overreach and suppression of dissent. The reality is that mass government surveillance has now become the new normal in a nation founded on individual privacy and distrust of government.
As we approach the third anniversary of Egypt’s historic January 25 revolution, the Egyptian state has masterfully transformed a revolution for freedom and justice into an indefinite War on Terror. And, rather than make America a beacon of freedom, U.S. government practices now serve as a model for authoritarian ones.REDUCTION, Pa. (KDKA) — Tiny house living is all the rage these days. People are getting rid of their mini-mansions and buying something, well, much smaller.
If you’re interested in that kind of lifestyle reduction, a place actually called Reduction, located in Westmoreland County, is the place you want to to. But you can’t just buy one house there; you have to buy them all.
The town of Reduction is one street with 19 small, single-family rentals. For the people there, it’s the perfect place to live.
“Everybody back here is nice they’re friendly and it’s safe,” said Ashley Kudlik, a resident of Reduction. “We can let kids outside, we know they’re safe, everybody comes through here slow.”
“It’s peaceful; there’s no crime,” says Diane Trotter, another resident.
Reduction got its name from the “reduction,” or nearby garbage recycling plant in the early 20th century. The homes were former company housing for the workers.
In 1948, the Stawovey family bought the homes, but now they’re looking to get out of the property management business, so Reduction, the entire village is on the market for $1.5 million.
“I’m not happy about it. I hope to live back here forever,” said Kudlik.
“It’s going to be bittersweet because we know all the neighbors. They’re all good people,” said Trotter. “I’m going to cry. We’ll miss it, if they sell it.”
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Rent is low and pets are allowed, but for the people who live in Reduction, there is so much more to the town that was once called “The Village That Garbage Built.”
“Hopefully, whoever buys it next, keeps us all in mind when they come in here, and hopefully we can keep living back here ‘cause we like it,” said Kudlik.
There are so many things up in the air regarding where the people of Reduction will end up, but the people who own the village now say they’re going give them a year to find a new place to live if they want.A farmer walks past a field near new residential buildings in Jianxing, about 60 miles from Shanghai. William Hong / Reuters
New initiatives in Jiaxing and Shenzhen offer alternatives to top-down, centralized planning.
It’s been almost 40 years since China’s leaders sat down to seriously plan the country’s cities. Back in 1978 at the Central Urban Work Conference, officials were more concerned with how to fund these potential hubs of economic growth than live in them. The resulting car-centric, concrete sprawl, based on a Soviet template, has created huge wealth while turning life for city dwellers into an endurance test. Series City Makers: Global Shifts Go livable. Because more than half of the country’s population now resides in cities, and the government wants 100 million more rural residents to move there by 2020, planning must become more sophisticated, officials say. Yet even the most passionate of China’s urban experts find it difficult to envision how cities can become better while continuing to grow bigger. “The laws in this field make it very hard to innovate,” says Jinkui Li, a senior researcher at the China Development Institute, a think tank based in Shenzhen. “Every city is made by the planning authority, under the existing planning management system, according to existing standards. They all share one law. That’s why they are all the same.”
So what will it take to do things differently?
Less than an hour away from populous Shanghai is the eastern city of Jiaxing. With about 1 million residents, it is the kind of place where the central government would like people to move—away from the strained infrastructure of the four megacities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Four years ago, Daan Roggeveen from MORE Architecture began working in collaboration with AIM Architecture on a mixed-use building to become part of a residential development on the edge of Jiaxing. What they designed—and is now being built—is a multi-purpose complex, with several buildings connected by walkways and containing a hotel, urban farm, restaurant, art gallery, and sport facilities (including a pool), all surrounding a central plaza. For Roggeveen, Jiaxing Island was an exercise not just in architecture but in small-scale urbanism. “The brief was a clubhouse, but we were able to define the program ourselves, which is very unusual,” he says. (His client was a development company, Jiaxing Huazhang Real Estate.) Most developments in China are top-down and large-scale, but Roggeveen and his team were able to apply an alternative, human-centered approach to this micro-sized project. With no cars inside it and a square that’s intimate rather than grand, the design is atypical of Chinese residential projects.
“As Jiaxing is a smaller city, so the collaboration with government departments was easier. We also pushed a few boundaries,” Roggeveen notes. “For example, planning rules specify that a certain percentage of land be green space. But as the complex was in the middle of a green field, we put all green on the roofs, which also creates insulation. But officially, roof gardens don’t count as green space.” Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... Such flexibility and cooperation is rare in city planning, say experts. “Usually, departments are very siloed,” explains Jasmine Tillu, an urban planner based in Beijing. “There’s no requirement for collaboration, even though you need approval from each one. This happens in the West, too, but in China, I think it’s a lot worse.” “At the moment, you have leaders saying ‘Make urban planning more sustainable,’ but the actual on-the-ground policies don’t allow for it.” Tillu has been working on retrofitting public spaces with biking and walking networks, which were left out of original city plans. She points out that structural changes at a high level are needed to give policy-makers the flexibility to act within a highly centralized system. “At the moment, you have leaders saying ‘Make urban planning more sustainable,’ but the actual on-the-ground policies don’t allow for it. For example, a sustainable city needs densely built road networks, but certain road width standards and policies prevent this. So existing policies do not incentivize policy-makers to develop sustainably. They’re caught in a dilemma, of wanting to do good but not being able to.” Since 1978, the number of Chinese cities has leapt from 193 to 653, but city design that caters for vast numbers of new urban residents largely hasn’t kept up—with one exception. Shenzhen was the first city in China to pilot market reforms that would turbocharge the country’s economy for successive decades. The former fishing town is now a supercity with 17 million residents.
It contains 320 “urban villages.” Chaotic and mazelike, these neighborhoods are a far cry from the austere tower blocks that form the backbone of most Chinese cities. Yet experts says they are key to developing urban fringes in a livable way. “An urban village is a low-barrier entry point for those migrants who come to the city with nothing,” explains Tat Lam, CEO of Shanzhai City, a social development incubator. “People come from the countryside, pay little rent and live here for a year, where they make contacts, friends, earn some money... and then move on to a more expensive place to live. It’s the reason Shenzhen is so popular for migrants.” Within these urban villages, local government is pioneering projects to help new city dwellers. In Dalang, a migrant area north of the city center where there are 500,000 young factory workers, town officials have developed the “Third Eight Hours” project—referring to the hours left over after work and sleep.
In Dalang, a new facility called the Youth Dream Center puts on cultural and athletic events, as well as education and training. Local NGOs, charities, socially-minded companies, and universities have all been encouraged to partner with the community facility to provide everything from law advice and loans to counseling and education. Li believes that as Chinese cities grow bigger, they need to take on feedback from residents. “Chinese city [planners] lack the experience and tradition of inviting citizens to discuss plans, which makes it hard to make sure that city planning is down to earth.” But for all the obstacles facing China, the country’s positive desire for change is attracting urban experts from abroad. “I came to China [from New York] because of all this change that’s happening,” Tillu says. “It’s an exciting place for urban planning. In other cities around the world, a lot of infrastructure is already built and determined. But in China there are new cities literally growing overnight.”In what appears to be a brief respite in the ongoing wave of gentrification freakouts, million-dollar car company Pagani is not in fact opening a showroom on Valencia Street. Originally reported in Mission Local as looking to move into the space formerly occupied by ArtZone 461, the manufacturer of the $1.6 million sports car was in reality hoping to bring a fancy Italian boutique to the location.
Modern Luxury (of course) reports the luxurious details:
The rumored ultra-luxury car showroom on Valencia Street is not happening after all. In fact, it looks like the whole thing was a big misunderstanding, and the Italian automakers were stymied by San Francisco’s famously Byzantine zoning regulations. Via email, Pagani sales director William Collick explained that Pagani had hoped to open a boutique for their non-car products on Valencia, saying that they consider themselves a design company first and that the proposed store would have featured jewelry, luggage, leatherwear, and even home furnishings from Pagani’s design team. “In no way, should the Pagani Concept Space be confused with a car dealership.”
And now it seems that even the fancy boutique plan has been abandoned. According to San Francisco Magazine, “Collick complained that (unspecified) planning department rules made the venture untenable.”
It seems that Valencia will be spared the ignominious fate of becoming a destination spot for boutique shopping.
Oh, wait.
[Photo: Pietari Grohn]The wild seventh inning between the Blue Jays and Rangers is getting its own TV special.
Fox said Thursday that it will air an hour-long program recapping the frame full of bizarre plays from Game 5 of the AL Division Series. "The Unforgettable Inning" will be hosted by former pitcher CJ Nitkowski and broadcast at 6 p.m. EDT on Friday on Fox Sports 1.
The 53-minute seventh Wednesday in Toronto started with the teams tied 2-2. In the top of the inning, Texas' Rougned Odor scored the go-ahead run with two outs when Blue Jays catcher Russell Martin's throw back to the mound hit batter Shin-Soo Choo, and the ball rolled up the third-base line. Fans pelted the field with debris during an 18-minute delay.
In the bottom of the inning, the Rangers committed three straight errors to help Toronto tie the score, and Jose Bautista hit a three-run homer, complete with an emphatic bat flip, for a 6-3 lead. Benches cleared twice during the half-inning. Toronto advanced to face the Royals in the ALCS, which starts Friday night on Fox.About This Game
GAME FEATURES
Story-Driven Adventure: Explore a strange and surreal world as Richard seeks to find his way back to reality
Mind-Twisting Puzzles: Manipulate objects to uncover clues and find a way through
Designed for VR and PC Alike: Experience reality and unreality in a truly immersive fashion
Immersive Eye Tracking: Chart a trail to the answers you seek via object highlighting and environmental event triggers in non-VR mode at launch, with Tobii support also coming for VR
Full Controller Support: Tracked controllers, gamepad, and keyboard/mouse are all supported
Set off on an amazing journey through Unknown Fate, a strongly story-driven first-person adventure with many puzzles to solve and enemies to beat. Become Richard, who suddenly passes seamlessly from the real world into a surreal universe. You’ll encounter strange characters, unfamiliar artifacts and scenes resembling Richard’s former life, of which he has lost all memory. Yet, he knows that this is not where he is supposed to be. The world he has come to inhabit is strange and distant. He feels the urge to find out more about this surreal universe and the creatures inhabiting it, in order to find a way out – out and back to his real self, his real life that he knows he has yet to fully recall.Engulfed in mystery, you take cautious steps deep into the unknown, only to have your mind swept away by yet more questions, nibbling at your grasp of what you think is real and true – your certainties will start to crumble.With no way back and a strong urge for answers beating in your temples, you push on, striving to get a grip on the odd difficulties surrounding you, eagerly awaiting the moment your mind will become untangled when the thread of your journey finally unravels all the way. But there is some way yet to go…CLOSE Comedian Eric Andre offers tips for how to shoot great hidden camera videos. The host of Adult Swim's "Eric Andre Show," specializes in man-on-the-street segments shot in backpacks and through coffee cups.
Comedian Eric Andre hosts Adult Swim's "The Eric Andre Show." (Photo11: Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY)
HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Eric Andre, the host of Adult Swim's bawdy The Eric Andre Show, believes the world of anonymous comments have gone too far.
He's just yanked his YouTube channel and Facebook page, to direct fans instead just to his ericandre.com website and Twitter.
"They don't have comments for movies and TV shows," he says. "Why should there be comments for online videos?"
Removing his videos from YouTube and Facebook eliminates his clips from being "censored," he says. "I don't need a bunch of racist 12-year-olds to tell me I suck every five seconds on YouTube."
The world's No. 1 video site has become a "platform for teenagers to mouth off," he continues. "They're trolling and want attention. … I don't want to know about views; I don't want to know about comments. Just watch it or don't watch it. You watching it is the comment."
Eric Andre shows off his rings. (Photo11: Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY)
SMARTPHONE ADDICTION
Another issue in the real world — turning off the phone.
"The blue light that radiates off the phone scrambles your brain," he says. "Experts say you shouldn't look at your phone after 8 p.m. because you won't be able to get to sleep.
"I believe that. I'd be more productive if I wasn't checking my Twitter every five seconds," he says. Constantly looking to see new tweets and likes is "chasing the dragon, chasing a ghost that doesn't exist."
Eric Andre decided to do a "crazy" pose during a photo shoot. (Photo11: Jefferson Graham)
USING TECH TO MAKE COMEDY
His wild man-on-the-street segments for the Adult Swim series are mostly shot with hidden cameras, tiny GoPros that are hidden in a variety of places.
"You can hide a camera pretty much anywhere," he says. "Backpacks are nice and big. You can put a camera in a coffee cup. It's scary how easy it is to film people without them knowing." Want to do this at home kids? "Put (a GoPro) in a cup, and draw little circles around it, so it just looks part of the graphic design of the coffee cup," Andre says.
Comedian Eric Andre prefers the standard definition look for comics. HD is too wise, he says. (Photo11: Jefferson Graham)
HOLIDAY GIFT WISH LIST
As a lover of "dinosaur technology," Andre jokes that he'd love to get a VCR rewinder, or possibly a combo VCR that plays both VHS and Betamax tapes.
"I have an old Commodore 64 and Laserdisc machine," he says. "Those silver discs looked so ridiculous."
A proud owner of an iPhone 5, he's not planning to succumb to the new iPhone 6.
"I'm a conspiracy theorist," Andre says. "As soon as the iPhone 6 came out, my 5 started breaking down. I think they put software in my phone so you're forced to buy the 6. You know what will be better than the 6? The iPhone 7. It's just a perpetual cycle. No matter what, the 6 will be irrelevant."
Comedian Eric Andre (Photo11: Jefferson Graham)
Follow Jefferson Graham on Twitter
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1xZe4HKImage copyright Reuters Image caption A Palestinian man, in clothes stained with his father's blood, mourns at a hospital in Khan Younis
Almost 1,900 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed since the launch of Israel's Operation Protective Edge at the beginning of July.
Some 66 Israelis - all but two of them soldiers - have also died in the mission to destroy rockets and tunnels used by the militant Islamist group Hamas.
What do we know about who died and where they were killed?
According to figures from the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), up to 6 August, 1,890 Palestinians had lost their lives in the conflict.
The men, women and children who died
Note: Figures up to 6 August
The proportion of civilian men over 18 killed seems high and it is not immediately obvious why Anthony Reuben, BBC Head of Statistics Read more
Among the dead were 414 children and 87 men and women over the age of 60.
The youngest to be killed was 10 days old, while the oldest was 100.
While the UN puts the number of militant dead below 200, Israel claims about 900 Palestinian militants were killed in the fighting.
Palestinians were killed right across Gaza - a strip of land 40km (25 miles) long and 10km wide. The highest numbers lost their lives in Khan Younis, in the south of Gaza, and Gaza City in the north.
Many took refuge in shelters run by the United Nations, including schools. However, these UN schools also came under fire, including in North Gaza, Jabaliya and Rafah.
Meanwhile, two Israeli civilians were killed - one near Dimona and the other near the Erez border crossing into northern Gaza; and a Thai farm worker was killed in Netiv Haasara, which borders Gaza.
Where people were killed
Produced by Christine Jeavans, Lucy Rodgers, Gerry Fletcher and Laura Cantadori
Correction 15 October: Locations of the deaths of civilians in Israel have been changed after being incorrectly reported in an earlier version.gen·tri·fi·ca·tion [jen-truh-fi-key-shuhn] noun
the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses. an instance of gentrifying; the condition of being gentrified.
Or, when white people move into your city and take over!
Spike Lee recently ranted about what he calls the “Christopher Columbus Syndrome”, that is not only being seen in boroughs of New York City, like Brooklyn and Harlem, but also in every major city across the country.
Kelly grew up in an upscale Prince Georges County neighborhood in Maryland, but her former stomping grounds of Washington, D.C used to be called “Chocolate City”, but right about now, it’s more like “White Chocolate” City.
While Deidre thinks gentrification is just amazeballs, Kelly realizes that there are more consequences to getting a Whole Foods than not having a Whole Foods. It doesn’t even matter to her that most will think she’s just one of those darn gentrifiers…or maybe she just doesn’t realize it.
Read today’s comic by clicking here: http://passingthecomic.com/comic/gentrification/The Canadian Press
OTTAWA -- The singer-songwriters behind the enduring success of the band Blue Rodeo headline a talented cast of new appointments to the Order of Canada.
Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor will be celebrated as Officers of the Order in a ceremony later in 2014, along with 88 other new or promoted appointees, Gov. Gen. David Johnston announced Monday.
Those being honoured include actors Colm Feore and Sarah Polley, author Douglas Coupland, journalists Steve Paikin and George Jonas, historian Michael Bliss and fashion TV host Jeanne Beker.
Former Conservative deputy prime minister Don Mazankowski and retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps are among four eminent Canadians who are being promoted to be Companions of the Order of Canada, the highest honour.
Cuddy, 58, and Keelor, 59, have been making music together since teaming up in high school, a lasting if sometimes combative duo whose relationship Cuddy once called "incendiary."
"It's like being between a rock and a hard place," longtime Blue Rodeo bassist Bazil Donovan once said of the pair.
Together their sound -- described variously as roots rock and alt-country -- has pushed more than three million discs, a collaboration that includes 12 studio albums, three live recordings and a greatest hits compilation.
And it was 20 years ago this past October that they released Blue Rodeo's biggest selling album, "Five Days in July."
The band has often been a counterpoint to the pop hit sounds of the day, starting with its work in the late 1980s when overblown production was the norm.
"We started out to be the anti-music of that kind of music," Cuddy told The Canadian Press in a 2012 interview.
"What we learned was we never, ever ceded control to anybody again for our records."
Cuddy and Keelor are being cited by Rideau Hall for "their contributions to Canadian music and for their support of various charitable causes."
The Order of Canada over the years has included a who's who of Canadian music -- from Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to Oscar Peterson, Maureen Forrester and Stompin' Tom Connors -- but it doesn't often invest multiple band members together.
Notable group appointments include the 1996 investiture of Rush's Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart and the 1993 investiture of sisters Kate and Anna McGarrigle.
The latest recipients will be invited to a ceremony at Rideau Hall to accept their insignia at a later date.Marion Bartoli ( French: [maʁjɔ̃ baʁtɔli]; born 2 October 1984) is a French former professional tennis player. She won the 2013 Wimbledon Championships singles title after previously being runner-up in 2007, and was a semifinalist at the 2011 French Open. She also won eight Women's Tennis Association singles and three doubles titles.[2] She announced her immediate retirement from professional tennis on 14 August 2013.
Bartoli defeated three reigning world No. 1 players in her career: Justine Henin in the semifinal of the 2007 Wimbledon Championships, Jelena Janković in the fourth round of the 2009 Australian Open, and Victoria Azarenka in the quarterfinals of the 2012 Sony Ericsson Open. She also recorded wins over other top players such as Venus and Serena Williams, Ana Ivanovic, Lindsay Davenport, Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, Dinara Safina, Caroline Wozniacki, Petra Kvitová, Samantha Stosur, and Kim Clijsters.
She is known for her unorthodox style of play using two hands on both her forehand and backhand. On 30 January 2012 she reached a career-high ranking of No. 7 in the world; she returned to this ranking on 8 July 2013 after triumphing at Wimbledon. Bartoli reached at least the quarterfinal stage at each of the four Grand Slams. Her win at Wimbledon made her only the sixth player in the open era to win the Championships without dropping a single set.[3] She is also the only player ever to have played at both the WTA Tour Championships and the WTA Tournament of Champions in the same year, in 2011.[4]
Early life and personal life [ edit ]
Marion Bartoli was born on 2 October 1984 in Le Puy-en-Velay, Haute-Loire.[5] She is of Corsican descent;[6][ |
University of Mississippi. Although she reviewed the study’s findings and methodology, neither she nor her organization necessarily endorses the conclusions.
Acknowledgments
The Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project would like to thank the school nutrition directors and community members for their generous assistance with this research. Thanks also to the staff of ChangeLab Solutions, including Ben Winig, Alexis Etow, Saneta deVuono-Powell, and Sara Bartel, for conducting the interviews and legal research. The project is also grateful to current and former Pew colleagues Jessica Donze Black, Sara Brinda, Jennifer V. Doctors, Kyle Kinner, Matt Mulkey, and Danielle Ruckert for their assistance with production of this brief.
EndnotesWe recently published a post about how Jake Arrieta increased his slider and curve usage against the D-backs Wednesday night. But there was another significant, noteworthy observation that came to light with the revelation of further pitch data. So important, in fact, that I think this is perhaps the result of a mechanical change or intervention with Chris Bosio.
Arrieta’s fearsome breaking ball has been described as baby slider or “slutter” because it doesn’t sweep across the plate like normal sliders do. Rather, the sharp-moving pitch is thrown upwards to 92 mph and with around 3.5 inches of horizontal movement. Brooks Baseball’s pitch classification algorithm categorizes Jake’s slutter as a slider, not cutter. That changed Wednesday night.
For the first time in Arrieta’s career, his 14 slutters against Arizona were categorized as cutters.
Why did Brooks Baseball suddenly change its classification of the pitch? Could it be velocity? Or horizontal movement? Vertical movement? No to all. Using those three measurements, there is no significant difference between Arrieta’s cutter from this most recent start and what has been called a slider throughout his career.
The difference was his release point.
This could be a very important trend, so much so that I need you to stop what you’re doing and really focus on the graph below. The data illustrates Arrieta’s horizontal release point since 2014 on a game-to-game basis. Bright red represents sliders, and the single dark red dot on the far right is the former Cy Young winner’s cutter against the D-backs. Notice how there is a YUUGE difference between his “cutter” release point and career “slider” release points. This graph shows that Arrieta was letting go of the pitch farther away from his body against Arizona.
The error bars, which represent the degree of variability among all pitches thrown in the single game, between Arrieta’s slider and cutter don’t even come close to one another. This suggests that this observation is so significant that the chance of this just being a fluke is roughly equivalent to the chance of the Phillies winning the World Series this year.
Again, Brooks Baseball has never before classified Arrieta’s slutter as a cutter, and the reason for this new classification likely has to do with the ginormous release point difference between Wednesday night and every start prior to it. Since his release point was so significantly different from his career norm, perhaps Arrieta made a conscious effort to change something.
The cutter classification of Arrieta’s slutter night makes it one of the rarest pitches in MLB since the league started tracking this kind of data. The bearded righty’s cutter release point hewed more toward third base than over 99.9 percent of cutters thrown since the genesis of the PitchFX era. Hitters simply have never seen something like this before. Ever.
This is a big deal.كان لافتاً إفتتاح الرئيس التركي رجب طيب أردوغان جسراً جديداً على مضيق البوسفور، والذي سجّل أرقاماً قياسية عالمية جديدة دافعاً بتركيا إلى المراكز العالمية الأولى. والمقارنة مع مشروع توسيع أوتوستراد جونية يُوصلنا إلى حقيقة مرّة أن هذا المشروع سيكون هدراً للمال دون فائدة حقيقة. فهل يكون المثال التركي هو الحلّ؟
أقرّ مجلس الوزراء اللبناني في جلسته بتاريخ 30 حزيران/ يونيو 2016 مشروع توسيع أوتوستراد جونية من نهر الكلب إلى طبرجا، على طول 10.5 كم. ووفق المعلومات، فإن الدراسة التي تمّت في العام 2006، نصّت على زيادة ممر على كل جهة من الأوتوستراد. وهذا يعني أنه يتوجّب إستملاك العقارات المُتاخمة للطريق، من الجهتين والتي قدّر مجلس الإنماء والإعمار كلفتها بـ34 مليون دولار. وبالتالي، فإن كل جهة من الطريق ستحوي على ثلاثة ممرات (بدل إثنين) يفصلها عن مواقف المحال التجارية جدار إسمنتي بارتفاع 80 سم. ولتمويل المشروع، قامت الحكومة بالتوقيع على قرض بقيمة 70 مليون يورو من البنك الاوروبي للإستثمار EIB.
ووفق تقديرات مجلس الإنماء والإعمار، يدخل بيروت كل يوم 500 ألف سيارة، منها 294 ألفاً من مدخلها الشمالي (أي جونية)، 126 ألف من المدخل الجنوبي و95 ألف من المدخل الشرقي.
إذن، وبحسب المشروع، سيتم زيادة قدرة إستيعاب أوتوستراد جونية بنسبة 33% مما يُخفف من الزحمة الخانقة التي يعيشها 294 ألف سائق يقصدون بيروت كل يوم صباحاً. لكن ما غاب عن البال أن المشروع الذي تمّ وضعه في العام 2006، لم يأخذ بعين الإعتبار الزيادة في عدد السيارات والتي تُقدّر بـ50 ألف سيارة سنوياً، دون إحتساب سيارات النازحين السوريين والسيارات غير المُسجّلة.
يعني ذلك أن المشروع المُتوقع أن يبدأ العمل فيه في حزيران 2017، سيستغرق بناؤه 4 أعوام، وبالتالي عند الإنتهاء منه سيكون الوضع على ما هو عليه حالياً، أي زحمة سير خانقة لأن عدد السيارات سيزداد حكماً.
هذا المشروع هو كارثي من نواحٍ عدة:
أولاً، لعدم قدرته على إستيعاب عدد السيارات عند الإنتهاء منه.
ثانياً، إن الزحمة التي سيتحمّلها السائقون خلال فترة العمل في المشروع ستكون أعظم وأسوأ من الزحمة الحالية، ولن تنجح الحلول المؤقتة في الحفاظ على وضع مقبول نسبة إلى زحمة اليوم.
ثالثاً، الضرر الذي سيُصيب التجار الموجودين على جانِبَي الأوتوستراد. وهنا السؤال عمّا إذا كانت التعويضات ستكون كافية للبدء بأعمال في أماكن أخرى.
رابعاً، هناك مُشكلة تقدير هذه التعويضات والتي ترك مجلس الوزراء للبلديات حرية التقدير فيها. فهل ستكون هناك شفافية كافية في هذه التقديرات؟
في الماضي، تمَ طرح مشروع جسر بحري يربط طبرجا ببيروت. هذا المشروع تمّ وضعه في أدراج مجلس الوزراء، والسبب يعود وفق المعلومات إلى الكلفة العالية. لذا، قمنا بدراسة الجدوى الإقتصادية لهذا المشروع وأتت النتائج على النحو التالي:
إقترحنا جسراً بحرياً يربط طبرجا قرب كازينو لبنان ببيروت عند الكرنتينا (بين مرفأ بيروت ومكب برج حمّود). يبلغ طول هذا الجسر 15.74 كلم وعرضه 30 متراً وعلوه عن سطح البحر 10 أمتار، لكي يسمح للبواخر الكبيرة بالعبور. يحوي الجسر على خطين (ذهاباً وإياباً) مع 4 ممرات في كل اتجاه، حيث أن ثلاثة ممرات تكون للسيارات والرابع للتراموي أو للتوقف الإضطراري. ويتمتع هذا الجسر بإكتفاء كهربائي ذاتي من خلال الطاقة الشمسية.
ويسمح الجسر بعبور 30 ألف سيارة كل ساعة، أي أن 5 ساعات كافية لتمرير نصف عدد السيارات التي تدخل بيروت من المدخل الشمالي.
وبالنظر إلى المشاريع المشابهة لهذا الجسر في العالم، نرى أن كلفة هذا المشروع لا تتعدّى 750 مليون دولار مع كامل تجهيزاته (إنارة، تراموي، إشارات...). ومُقارنة هذا المشروع بمشروع توسيع أوتوستراد جونية يُوصلنا إلى الإستنتاج الآتي: أن الإستمرار في مشروع توسيع أوتوستراد جونية هو هدر للمال بكل ما للكلمة من معنى.
الجسر هو حلّ جذري في حين أن توسيع الأوتوستراد حلّ مؤقت. أضف إلى ذلك، أن العمل على هذا الجسر لن يؤثر على السير خلال فترة الأعمال كما هي الحال مع مشروع توسيع أوتوستراد جونية. ويحتاج إتمام هذا المشروع إلى عامين مقارنة بـ4 سنوات لمشروع توسيع أوتوستراد جونية.
إن الخسارة السنوية للإقتصاد اللبناني طبقاً لحساباتنا والناتجة من زحمة السير تفوق الملياري دولار أميركي. هذه الخسارة يُمكن محوها أو تقليصها، بواسطة مشروع الجسر البحري. ما يعني أننا قادرون خلال عامين على إسترداد كلفة الجسر.
كذلك، يُمكن وضع تعرفة (دولار مثلاً) لكل سيّارة تعبر الجسر وبإعتبار أن هناك 100 ألف سيارة تعبر الجسر ذهاباً وإياباً في اليوم، فإن مدخول الجسر سيكون 37 مليون دولار سنوياً تسمح بتمويل أعمال الصيانة عليه. وهذه التعرفة لن تكون إضافية على السائق الذي سيوفّر أكثر من ذلك من تفادي زحمة السير، وما ينتج عنها من إستهلاك الوقود.
ولكل من يرى أن الكلفة عالية نقول: هل يُعقل أنه تمّ إقرار مشروع تنظيف 10 كلم من نهر الليطاني بكلفة 840 مليون دولار أميركي، ولا نُقرّ مشروع إنشاء جسر بطول 15,74 كلم يُوفّر على الإقتصاد ملياري دولار وبكلفة 750 مليون دولار كحدّ أقصى؟After a divorce, child discipline can become an ongoing source of tension. Disagreements range from small differences, such as the consequences for failing to complete chores, to major differences in rules regarding homework, dating, and internet usage. In an ideal world, parents would agree on disciplinary structures. Unfortunately, many divorced parents struggle with differing views on child discipline and struggle to find compromises.
Challenges to Child Discipline
For some divorced parents, disciplinary matters are complicated by the terms of the divorce, which may affect:
The emotional impact of a divorce on a child. After a divorce, many parents may change their house rules to accommodate a child’s emotional state. This outlook can come from a place of understanding in which a parent wants to let a child process the divorce without additional stress. It can also come from a place of manipulation, in which one parent tries to earn a child’s favor by embracing leniency.
of a divorce on a child. After a divorce, many parents may change their house rules to accommodate a child’s emotional state. This outlook can come from a place of understanding in which a parent wants to let a child process the divorce without additional stress. It can also come from a place of manipulation, in which one parent tries to earn a child’s favor by embracing leniency. Logistics. Two parents with equal child custody rights may not always have equal amounts of time with a child. When a child spends more time with one parent or the other, trying to create and enforce disciplinary boundaries becomes more difficult.
. Two parents with equal child custody rights may not always have equal amounts of time with a child. When a child spends more time with one parent or the other, trying to create and enforce disciplinary boundaries becomes more difficult. Children’s needs. Discipline changes as a child grows older. After a divorce, parents typically grow further and further apart and may not continue to work together to create a consistent set of boundaries.
. Discipline changes as a child grows older. After a divorce, parents typically grow further and further apart and may not continue to work together to create a consistent set of boundaries. Children using information as leverage. When parents fail to agree on rules, children quickly pick up on any strong feelings one parent may harbor against the other. They can use that information to play parents against each other using arguments such as, “Dad lets me do this, so why can’t I here?”
Over time, disciplinary problems at home can transfer to other environments, including school and social situations. A lack of boundaries can result in an increased risk of poor school performance and an increased risk of engaging in risky behaviors. These obstacles to child discipline can make post-divorce life difficult, but creating a strong plan for handling discipline early on can help.
Tips for Handling Child Discipline
When it comes to discipline, divorced parents need an agreed-upon plan of action. Ex-spouses do not need to agree about everything, but they should have an understanding of the other’s rules and respect parental boundaries. Use these tips for successfully handling child discipline:
Find common ground regarding outcomes. Parents often have differing views about disciplinary methodologies, but many can agree on the primary goals. Every disciplinary action should focus on a child’s wellbeing and fair limitations. Try to find areas you do agree about to inform the disciplinary process.
. Parents often have differing views about disciplinary methodologies, but many can agree on the primary goals. Every disciplinary action should focus on a child’s wellbeing and fair limitations. Try to find areas you do agree about to inform the disciplinary process. Share information about house rules. Parents often disagree about homework, chores, and technology usage, and that’s okay. However, each parent should have an understanding of the house rules where a child will spend time. Understanding and showing respect for house rules ensures that parents reinforce each other, even if they aren’t together. Discuss any concerns about house rules as needed.
. Parents often disagree about homework, chores, and technology usage, and that’s okay. However, each parent should have an understanding of the house rules where a child will spend time. Understanding and showing respect for house rules ensures that parents reinforce each other, even if they aren’t together. Discuss any concerns about house rules as needed. Avoid changing the rules. For parents who are together or apart, consistency matters. Another parent’s house rules should not make you bend or change your rules. Keep the rules and consequences clear, and act on them consistently.
. For parents who are together or apart, consistency matters. Another parent’s house rules should not make you bend or change your rules. Keep the rules and consequences clear, and act on them consistently. Don’t expect to enforce rules outside your home. If the other parent is unwilling to enforce a consequence, enact a short-term penalty or wait until the child is back under your roof. Some parents may agree to enforce another parent’s consequences outside of the home. Choose a solution that you and your ex-spouse can consistently follow.
Discipline in any situation is a challenging area of parenting. When ex-spouses create a foundation of respect, compromise, and individual autonomy, they can overcome the most common disciplinary challenges associated with post-divorce life.A central staircase rises through split levels in this narrow house in Osaka by Japanese architect Shintaro Fujiwara.
Located in the residential Showa-cho area of the city, the project aims to create a spacious atmosphere by leaving gaps between each floor and maintaining sight lines from front to back.
The street outside is visible from all levels through a glazed facade, while a tree planted in front of the property will grow to provide increasing privacy.
Here's some more information from Fujiwara:
A House in Showa-cho
Showa-cho is a quiet place even though it is downtown. There are many people residency from a long time ago. The design of the residence has a narrow frontage, which is a part of a row house (17.89m ×3.94m).
The design of the residence is that the street in front of the house could be a part of scenery rather than to be closed towards the street.
A big problem in the progress of the planning was that it could take only less than 3 meters for effective flange width inside when it was built in such a long narrow lot.
According to this condition, it was studied many times on how it could have an expansive feeling and continuity from the street side to the end of the back of the house.
The main solution was to use cross section construction.
From the south side that faces the street, a tree (Ternstroemia gymnanthera) was planted.
The living room has 5.6m of ceiling height”, “stairwell and stairs spaces”, “4 layers of construction from basement to 3rd floor each rooms”, “a small outside stairwell”. Each floor is not piled up, but adopted the skip floor method, which made a gap.
This method made it possible to see the outside street from the back rooms so, that it could be unified with outside of the house and create a larger atmosphere.
Despite the stairs being in the center of the house it is not blocking the view of outside. Glass was used for every partition wall. Slits were also made on the floors and ceilings. From these effects, the house can be unified with the outside and therefore create a larger atmosphere within the house.
In general, when constructing on a small plot of land, planning tends to take on the idea of making the property spacious, but keeping privacy inside within the property. In such a case, the façade would normally be built with a wall, but then it would create an enclosed and pressured atmosphere.
Since the Showa-cho property is a small plot of land, the house was constructed with a courtyard to follow the building coverage ratio by using almost all of ratio.
In this case, the house in Showa-cho, deliberately included the city side to scenery and made façade by planting a tree in the space in front of the house that made it could be seen inside of the house, too.
See also:
.A plan to quadruple its Canadian presence to 40 stores has hit a snag for Whole Foods Market which confirms it will not proceed with planned store openings in Calgary and Edmonton.
The gigantic American natural and organic foods supermarket chain says on its website it has a total of 12 Canadian stores: five each in the Vancouver and Toronto areas, one in Ottawa and a new store that opened in Victoria in November.
“Whole Foods Market is committed to expanding in Canada with two stores in development, but we will not be moving forward with the Calgary or Edmonton store locations,” wrote spokeswoman Beth Krauss in a one-sentence email late last week.
In a followup email Monday, she said the two stores in development are in Toronto and North Vancouver, both slated for 2017 openings, but did not respond to a request to explain why the Alberta stores aren’t going ahead or clarify longer range expansion plans.
Two years ago, CEO John Mackey told reporters at a Montreal conference the chain would eventually grow to 40 Canadian locations from 10, without giving a specific timeline. He said the chain was then actively looking for a Montreal location.
Whole Foods announced in February 2015 it would open a 42,000-square-foot location in south Edmonton by the fall of 2016, along with a new store in Calgary by the summer of 2017. It said each store would create an estimated 150 jobs.
In September, a Whole Foods spokeswoman confirmed published reports that the chain had terminated a lease deal for a store in Calgary’s Northland Village Mall due to “timing challenges” but said the company remained committed to expanding in Canada with four stores in development.
Maureen Atkinson, a partner with retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group in Toronto, said Whole Foods’ financial results have been slowed by competition throughout North America as grocery competitors including Loblaws and Walmart introduce organic food sections whose offerings are often lower priced.
“I don’t think formally they’ve made any announcement that they’re not going to continue to expand in Canada but my guess is they will be very careful about where they do that and more selective … than maybe two years ago,” Atkinson said.
She added the low value of the Canadian dollar versus the greenback makes it difficult for U.S. firms to justify expansions in Canada because the payoff will come in “75-cent dollars.”
Kevin Grier, a retail analyst based in Guelph, Ont., said the poor Alberta economy, hit hard by low oil prices, likely also played a role in Whole Foods decision.
“An upscale store like that needs a critical mass of affluent, confident shoppers and the fact they are cancelling or postponing stores tells me it’s indicative of the market there,” he said.
He added Canadians love of grocery flyers and bargains — and the fact Statistics Canada reported average grocery prices actually fell in 2016 — would also discourage the American company.
On its website, Whole Foods says it has 467 stores, all in the U.S. except for the 12 Canadian stores and nine in the U.K. It started out with one store at its home base of Austin, Texas, in 1980.
In a regulatory filing for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Whole Foods said its international stores contributed three per cent of its overall annual sales revenue of $15.7 billion U.S.
On a conference call in November, CEO Mackey said the company had adopted a plan to cut operating expenses by $300 million U.S. per year to deal with an “increasingly competitive marketplace.”
He also reported the company had opened its first three “value format” stores, called 365 by Whole Foods Market, in the U.S. and would be opening more there.As the West applies sanctions on Moscow, the Russian oil giant Rosneft appears to be scrambling for cash to cover a canceled loan-for-oil, according to a leading oil analyst. In piecing together how Rosneft’s situation has deteriorated over the last month, oil analyst Philip Verleger estimates that the company is sitting on a hole of up to $10 billion needed to cover repayments of loans next year.
The immediate cause of the cash shortfall appears to be that two Swiss trading houses are putting a squeeze on Rosneft. But the story goes back a bit further, to Rosneft’s $55 billion deal last year to buy TNK-BP, a Russian-based joint venture between BP and four Russian oligarchs. The transaction turned the company into the world’s largest publicly traded oil producer.
In transforming itself into an international player, Rosneft had to go into the market to borrow some $40 billion. Among the largest lenders were Vitol and Glencore, two of the world’s largest trading houses, which together provided Rosneft $10 billion in cash as an advance payment toward some 280,000 barrels of oil a day for five years.
But on July 14, the US and Europe slapped sanctions on Rosneft (among other Russian entities) that forbid loans longer than 90 days in duration. Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin said the sanctions would not hurt the company because it had $20 billion in the bank, including the advance payments from Vitol and Glencore plus other pre-payments from China. Sechin said this money would cover (paywall) $20 billion in loan repayments due by the end of 2015. Yet, just a month later, on Aug. 14, Sechin went public with a request that the Kremlin lend the company $42 billion in what he described as help to cope (paywall) with the sanctions.
Verleger thinks he knows what happened during that month. He recalls watching the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) when Vitol and Glencore originally hedged the loan last year. “The short position of the merchant trade category shot up from 700,000 contracts to 1 million contracts,” Verleger told me in an email exchange. “The increase was clearly tied to the Rosneft deal.”
Now, looking at the latest ICE reports, Verleger is seeing similarly dramatic movements and, combining it with Sechin’s request for the $42 billion loan, thinks the trading action is again related to Rosneft. “Rosneft is panicked,” he says, which he attributes to Vitol and Glencore having likely exercised a right to cancel the loan and demand the money back.
In Verleger’s chart below, you see the plunge in short positions that he noticed on ICE right around the time of the sanctions.
Philip K. Verleger
He also observed a steep drop in the number of available oil futures contracts (about 300,000 fewer) in April and December 2015. In other words, having no further need for the hedge, Vitol and Glencore were rapidly unwinding their joint short position. “Declines in open interest in forward contracts of such magnitude are very unusual,” Verleger writes. Going back almost three decades, Verleger said he recalls only two similar plunges.
“A firm liquidating its loans to Rosneft would want to close its hedge,” he wrote in his note to clients. “It would do so by purchasing futures.”
Of course, the loan itself is not exposed directly to the sanctions since the contract was signed last year, and the sanctions affect only future lending. But Verleger said Vitol and Glencore are watching the direction of events and fear more sanctions that could threaten their money. From his email:
I think the deal is being undone because the buyers are worried that they may be unable to take delivery of the oil in the future if further sanctions are imposed on Russia. The last thing you want to have is a large short position in a futures contract if you cannot get your oil. Vitol and Glencore could see the [oil] price go up, requiring large margin payments, while they are unable to sell the oil they are offered.
A Vitol spokesman declined to comment. Glencore did not respond to an email.
Oil prices will drop further
One consequence of the liquidation has been to prop up the price of oil futures, Verleger says. But over the coming few weeks, Vitol and Glencore will finish their liquidation, thus removing the price support. Oil prices already have been dropping fast because of a global supply glut, with Brent crude plunging to $101.79 today. Now they will drop further, Verlerger said.
In need of cash, Rosneft is likely to turn to the Chinese for help. A deal last year with China National Petroleum Corporation provides Rosneft with about $63 billion in advance payments by 2018. It is not immediately clear how much of that will arrive by the end of next year, but confirming the sum presumably has been on Sechin’s to-do list.George Pimentel / Wire Image/ Getty Images
The United States government recently granted Shera Bechard, a Canadian-born model and Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend, a so-called genius visa. We suspect that the visa was not granted for her appearances in Playboy magazine. The grant is meant for “individuals with extraordinary ability,” and though it certainly takes an extraordinary individual to agree to date Hugh Hefner, we don’t think that’s the reason she got the visa either.
Perhaps it’s her entrepreneurial spirit: She did start “Frisky Friday,” a twitter trend in which women post risqué pictures of themselves every Friday on twitter. Playboy’s Frisky Friday site then ranks the best pictures each week. Apparently, this is what qualified her for an O-1 visa, which grants immigrants who may have won “an internationally recognized award, such as a Nobel Prize” up to a three-year stay in this country.
(PHOTOS: A Brief History of the Playboy Club)
Don’t think Frisky Friday is Nobel Prize-worthy? Well, here’s a look at the rest of her resume: She was named Playboy’s Miss November in 2011 and starred in the film Sweet Karma. The plot of that film (according to IMDB): “A mute Russian girl infiltrates Toronto’s underground sex trade to avenge the death of her sister.”
O-1 and EB-1 are the new visas of choice for entrepreneurs, especially those in technology circles. The O-1 grants up to a three-year stay that can be extended. The EB-1 is similar but leads to a green card and permanent residency. There is no cap on the number of O-1s handed out each year. Last year, the government issued 12,280.
MORE: 10 Questions for Hugh HefnerCurrently there is a great deal of hilarity over a video of an antifa fascist who was nailed in the groin by a sharpshooting policeman. Here is the video, via InstaPundit:
Protester gets hit in the nuts to the tune of "I will always love you" @benshapiro pic.twitter.com/Ol3nRPBfym — Nick Raff (@NickRaff85) August 23, 2017
I have a few comments.
1) Anyone who wears a gas mask to a political “rally” probably deserves what he gets.
2) It was only a rubber bullet. Come on, man!
3) The guy who led our hero offstage wore a Colin Kaepernick jersey. Is that fitting, or what?
The antifa fascist’s response to being hit in the groin by a rubber bullet was predictable, but not heroic. If I were not so modest, I might contrast it with my own reaction when I was kicked in the groin by a kangaroo a little over a year ago. I wrote about my close encounter with an alpha kangaroo here:
Kangaroos, as I said, are generally friendly, and their faces give them a sympathetic, anthropomorphic aspect. However, there are exceptions: when we entered the area where the kangaroos were, and my wife and the others were starting to feed them, the biggest and strongest male in the group (or pack or herd or whatever it is), who later pushed others out of the way so he could get more food, hopped directly up to me–ignoring the four women I was with–and kicked me in the groin. I don’t believe it was coincidence!
I am pretty sure he wanted to make certain I knew my place. But–here is the key point–did I drop like a sack of coal upon being kicked with lightning speed, like the antifa fascist in the video?
Well, yes, actually I did. But–let’s reset the key point–I got rapidly up again and didn’t require a confederate to hustle me off the stage. Rather, having resumed a standing position, I promptly smacked the kangaroo in the jaw fed the kangaroo from a bag of treats.
So the distinction is very clear. If you are wondering why people think it is funny to see a guy shot in the groin by a rubber bullet (or kicked by a kangaroo), Popular Science, via InstaPundit, has a possible explanation.AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd just had another brush with the law, as the musician was taken to Tauranga police station in handcuffs in a police car. The musician appeared in court today, where he was cited for breaching his bail after an incident Thursday morning in which he apparently had a confrontation with a potential witness in his upcoming trial.
According to New Zealand's Stuff publication, an eyewitness spotted Rudd being placed in a police car after a morning incident (Dec. 4) outside a coffee shop in a shopping center.
Staff at the shop stated that Rudd was in a dispute with "a huge guy" who appeared to have been the drummer's former security guard. Apparently, the man told Rudd, "I don't work for you anymore," and Rudd got confrontational before the man pushed the drummer in the chest forcing him to fall backwards. From there, the eyewitness stated that Rudd "went nuts."
Another eyewitness explained to the New Zealand Herald, "He was out and bloody dancing around and carrying on and … led back to the cop car and was driven away."
Apparently, two cars were pulled over by police, after one car was chasing the other. Rudd was eventually detained outside the Tauranga Girls' College. Video footage can be seen of Rudd being handcuffed by police here.
Rudd was not arrested, but he was taken into court where his lawyer acknowledged that Rudd breached his bail agreement by having contact with potential witnesses in his upcoming trial. The judge set a new bail that called for a new condition in which Rudd is not allowed to consume illegal drugs, explaining that the drummer's behavior has been erratic.
The musician's lawyer said of the Thursday morning incident, "It was a meeting with somebody he wasn't meant to associate with in a shop. It was a chance meeting and then there was contact from that."
It's been an eventful few months for Rudd, who has recently been in court for allegedly "threatening to kill" another man and for alleged possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. He is due back in court on Feb. 10 to face those charges. Rudd had also been charged with hiring a hitman to commit a murder, but that charge was quickly dropped.
The rocker's lawyer entered a "not guilty" plea to the charges earlier this week and it was revealed that Rudd would likely face a "judge-alone" trial next year.
Though Rudd did drum on the newly released AC/DC album 'Rock or Bust,' his future with the band remains cloudy. After his string of recent legal issues, the group revealed the trouble they had getting Rudd to the studio and admitted that the rocker needs to " sort himself out " before continuing. AC/DC have already announced their intent to tour in 2015 regardless of Rudd's status.
You Think You Know AC/DC?A History Of 'Snake Oil Salesmen'
"Snake Oil Salesman." The phrase conjures up images of seedy profiteers trying to exploit an unsuspecting public by selling it fake cures. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary defines snake oil as "a quack remedy or panacea." What the OED does not note, however, is that the history of snake oil is linked to an often forgotten chapter of Asian-American history.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jagrap/Flickr Jagrap/Flickr
Because the words "snake oil" are so evocative, it has been a favorite go-to phrase for politicians and lobbying groups on both sides of the aisle. Earlier this month, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell called his opponent in the Republican primary, Tea Party candidate Matt Bevin, a snake oil salesman in a campaign mailer. While campaigning for a second term last year, President Obama referred to the Romney-Ryan tax plan as "trickle-down snake oil" at a rally. In 2008, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund took out full-page ads in The Washington Post to denounce then-President George W. Bush's plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, calling it "100 percent snake oil."
But what, exactly, is snake oil? And why is peddling it such a terrible thing?
The 1800s saw thousands of Chinese workers arriving in the United States as indentured laborers to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. According to historian Richard White's book Railroaded, about 180,000 Chinese immigrated to the United States between 1849 and 1882. The vast majority of the workers came from peasant families in southeastern China and were signed to contracts that ran up to five years for relatively low wages (compared with their white counterparts), wrote David Haward Bain in his book Empire Express.
Among the items the Chinese railroad workers brought with them to the States were various medicines — including snake oil. Made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation, snake oil in its original form really was effective, especially when used to treat arthritis and bursitis. The workers would rub the oil, used for centuries in China, on their joints after a long hard day at work. The story goes that the Chinese workers began sharing the oil with some American counterparts, who marveled at the effects.
So how did a legitimate medicine become a symbol of fraud? The origins of snake oil as a derogatory phrase trace back to the latter half of the 19th century, which saw a dramatic rise in the popularity of "patent medicines." Often sold on the back pages of newspapers, these tonics promised to cure a wide variety of ailments including chronic pain, headaches, "female complaints" and kidney trouble. In time, all of these false "cures" began to be referred to as snake oil.
As word of the healing powers of Chinese snake oil grew, many Americans wondered how they could make their own snake oil here in the United States. Because there were no Chinese water snakes handy in the American West, many healers began using rattlesnakes to make their own versions of snake oil.
This set the stage for entrepreneur Clark Stanley, aka The Rattlesnake King. In an 1897 pamphlet about Stanley's life and exploits, the former cowboy claimed he had learned about the healing power of rattlesnake oil from Hopi medicine men. He never publicly mentioned Chinese snake oil at all. Stanley created a huge stir at the 1893 World's Exposition in Chicago when he took a live snake and sliced it open before a crowd of onlookers.
Joe Schwarcz, the director of McGill University's Office for Science and Society, described the scene in this 2008 article:
toggle caption Wikimedia Commons
"[Stanley] reached into a sack, plucked out a snake, slit it open and plunged it into boiling water. When the fat rose to the top, he skimmed it off and used it on the spot to create 'Stanley's Snake Oil,' a liniment that was immediately snapped up by the throng that had gathered to watch the spectacle."
There were two major problems with Stanley's claim about his oil:
First, rattlesnake oil was far less effective than the original Chinese snake oil it was trying to emulate. A 1989 letter to The Western Journal of Medicine from psychiatrist |
his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond…
This episode of the Drabblecast kicks of H.P. Lovecraft Tribute Month. It begins with a reading from Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth. In the feature, an impoverished student is forced to take an apartment in an almost empty building on the mysterious Rue d’Auseil. One of the other tenants, a viol player named Erich Zann, lives alone on the top floor and plays strange, otherworldly music at night. The student, drawn to his music, eventually gains Zann’s trust and learns catastrophic secrets.Talk about irony, eh? The very same day American voters in two states legalize, the Stephen Harper government in Canada brought into force tough new mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana.
As Washington and Colorado both on Tuesday approved measures loosening their pot laws, drug measures in the Conservative government’s Safe Streets and Communities Act, passed last spring, came into full force in Canada, reports Bruce Cheadle of The Canadian Press
Canada’s new marijuana law dictates a mandatory six-month jail term for growing as few as six cannabis plants — which is twice the mandatory minimum for luring a child to watch pornography or exposing oneself on a children’s playground.
“Today our message is clear that if you are in the business of producing, importing or exporting of drugs, you’ll now face jail time,” crowed Justice Minister Rob Nicholson on Tuesday. By day’s end, Coloradans had voted to allow adults over 21 to grow up to six marijuana plants in private, and Washingtonians had voted to permit state-licensed stores to sell adults up to an ounce of cannabis at the time.
Nicholson wasn’t available for comment on Wednesday, but his spokeswoman said in an email that “our government does not support the decriminalization of the legalization of marijuana.”
“People have begun increasingly to realize the current system, the use of the criminal law, imports terrible, terrible collateral harms — and it doesn’t stop people from using drugs,” said Eugene Oscapella, who teaches drug policy and criminology at the University of Ottawa.
“It’s not a pro-pot measure,” Oscapella said of the American votes. “This is a pro-sensible drug policy measure, looking at minimizing the harms of drugs in our society.”
Canada’s Liberals are the only party in the country with an official policy of supporting legalization. That came after delegates to last January’s party convention voted 77 percent in favor of legalizing, regulating and taxing cannabis for personal use.
“Any public opinion poll I’ve seen shows that Canadians believe there is a profound futility in the current punitive approach of the law, that we’re filling our jails without people who shouldn’t be in there, and that the law does not serve a practical purpose,” said Bob Rae, the interim Liberal Party leader.
Legalization is “a direction the country needs to take and will take over time,” according to Rae, who said the Conservative government is “swimming against the tide.”Upon its publication in 1974, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War instantly became an iconic piece of science fiction allegory. The novel tells the story of William Mandella, a soldier who witnesses the entirety of a future war that ought never to have happened, and who, through the tricks of time dilation and relativity, returns home to find his world impossibly changed.
The echoes of Vietnam were hardly subtle, especially given Haldeman’s own experiences as a soldier wounded during that conflict. The novel was just as vital, and just as timely, in 1988, when Haldeman collaborated with legendary Belgian artist Mark van Oppen (better known as Marvano) in order to create a graphic novel adaptation of the story that became a much-admired work in its own right. In the present, war hasn’t gotten any less complicated and we’re not much better at helping our soldiers adapt to life after conflict. Titan Comics has a new edition of the groundbreaking graphic novel alongside a variety of bonus materials, and Joe Haldeman was kind enough to have a quick chat with us about the graphic novel and its themes.
Can you talk a little bit about working with Marvano? I’m curious about how the two of you came together to work on this.
Mark sought me out at a Worldcon, I think in England, and showed me some of his work. He asked whether he could do a comic of The Forever War, and I said Sure!
Was it something that you’d ever envisioned as a graphic novel previously? Any background or interest of your own in comics?
When I was a kid I drew comics, even adventure stories dozens of pages long. My father threw them out, unfortunately, when he cleaned out my room when I left for college.
I’m fascinated by process, especially for a book like this where two big names in their respective fields come together. How did the two of you collaborate?
We used various methods over the years. This was before easy email, so we often faxed drawings and letters back and forth. Unfortunately, the faxes turned brown and disintegrated with time.
I didn’t read the two side-by-side, but the GN parallels the original novel pretty closely. Was there any temptation to update or change anything?
I don’t recall any temptation.
I’m thinking of a couple of big themes of the book (in my mind, anyway): the willingness to go to war so easily over willful misunderstandings being a big one. That was a potent warning in the ’70s, and again in the ’80s with the graphic novel. How has that evolved, do you think? Are we better or worse off than we were 20 or 30 years ago?
I think we’re in a safer place now, actually. But that can change with the whim of one leader.
The troubling experience of Mandella upon returning home is another evergreen topic. We talk about PTSD more, but have we learned anything?
Clinically speaking, we’ve learned a lot, especially about the clinical aspects of the disease. As a society, our attitude toward PTSD seems more sympathetic, largely because of education.
The depiction of homosexuality in the novel was groundbreaking, even if it wasn’t a major theme in and of itself. The graphic novel carries much of that over, and I’m curious if there was blowback about a GN with the same not-negative depiction of a gay society?
A very few crackpot letters. Commonplace now, of course.
The Forever War graphic novel is available tomorrow. Here’s a trailer to get you ready to launch.Today, the U.S. U-17 MNT were crowned champions of the 2016 Nike International Friendlies after capping off an undefeated tournament today with a 3-0 sweep of Brazil.
Leading the team in scoring for the tournament along with two other U.S. teammates, was Atlanta United’s own Andrew Carleton. The Atlanta Homegrown started all three matches, scoring two in the opening 7-1 rout of Portugal and followed up by netting twice again in their second matchup against Turkey, which included both the equalizer and the go-ahead strike that eventually lead to a 5-1 victory. Some would say he’s on fire (see below)
Between signing an MLS Homegrown contract, showcasing Atlanta United’s first ever kit, receiving NCSAA Player of the Year, and tallying 12 goals for his country, Carleton will always remember 2016 as a major milestone in his career… and keep in mind, he’s only 16-years-young.There are many reasons to be thankful for the benefits of modern living ― antibiotics, airplanes, velcro... Another subtle but essential item is our calendar. It may have some frustrating moments, but consider how months used to work. Take heed of Mercedonius.
In the days of the Roman calendar, an intercalary month was added in leap years and a few other times as well. This month was called Mercedonius, but it was also known as Intercalaris.
(The insertion of a leap day, week, or month into some years is called “intercalation.” Intercalation is done to align the calendar with the seasons or moon phases.)
The name Mercedonius comes from the Latin word “merces,” which means “wages.” It got its name because workers were paid at the time of year Mercedonius occurred, around the month of Februarius.
The addition of Mercedonius didn’t happen automatically. The decision was made by the high priest of the College of Pontiffs, who was also known as the Pontifex Maximus. The Pontifex Maximus, Latin for “greatest bridge-maker,” was the head honcho of the ancient Roman religion.
(As we end January, learn the name of the unusual Roman god who is the month’s namesake, and the meaning behind his two faces, here.)
The Pontifex Maximus was supposed to base the decision whether to include Mercedonius in any given year so that the calendar would correspond with the seasons. Politics, however, are said to have motivated his decision making. For example, Mercedonius was sometimes inserted to allow a government official to stay in office longer.
You can imagine the confusion that this caused. If you were living outside of Rome, you might have no idea what the current date was.
In 46 BC, Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar and did away with Mercedonius. Can you guess the month that was named in honor of him? Find the answer, here.Ronald James Lyons, 52, Newport – 30 counts Draw a Lien without a Legal Basis, 30 counts Forgery $250,000 or more. Bond $150,000. (Photo: Courtesy of TBI)
When Newport police cited Ronald James Lyons' bar in Newport for liquor sales without a license, Lyons walked into the police station and informed the chief his business wasn't subject to U.S. law.
"He tried to serve me with a handwritten trespass notice," Police Chief Maurice Shults said. "I explained to him that as long as he lived in or operated a business within the city limits, if there was a violation of the law we'd be there."
Based on court records, Lyons didn't take the hint. A Davidson County grand jury indicted him and nine other East Tennesseans arrested this week as part of a crackdown on adherents to the so-called "sovereign citizens" movement.
All face charges of forgery and of filing bogus liens against various public officials, a common tactic employed by members of the movement, who deny the legitimacy of federal, state and local authorities, thumb their noses at the law, and often delight in waging private legal wars against those who challenge them. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, calls the strategy a form of "paper terrorism."
Some of the liens amounted to as much as $12 million, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which handled the case with help from the FBI. The push for charges, filed in Nashville because that's where the liens were filed with the Tennessee Secretary of State's Office, got its start last year when Lee Harold Cromwell, accused of a backward driving rampage through a crowded Oak Ridge parking lot that killed a father of two, filed a series of multimillion-dollar liens against everyone from the officer who arrested him to the district attorney general and the judge presiding over his case.
TBI agents served Cromwell with the indictment Wednesday, just before an Anderson County jury found him guilty of vehicular homicide. Officers across the region rounded up the others on the same day.
The liens – easy and cheap to file online but time-consuming and expensive to fight – can ruin victims' credit and unleash a swarm of financial difficulties. Lyons filed 30 such liens, according to the indictment.
Filing a bogus lien carries a felony charge punishable by up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3,000.
He also filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court accusing Cocke County Sheriff Armando Fontes, General Sessions Judge John Bell and his creditors of "slavery, slavery-like practices and crimes against humanity" and demanded an "international human rights investigation" after being served with a judgment for failing to pay debts.
Sovereign citizens cling to a patchwork mythology in which the U.S. government at some point became illegally subverted from a constitutional system to one based on "admiralty law" and international commerce that turned free citizens into slaves. The income tax, the Federal Reserve and the gold standard tend to figure prominently in such histories.
The movement's believers fight back by refusing to pay taxes and reciting incomprehensible legal jargon, often cut-and-pasted from online forums, that they see as a talisman to somehow exempt them from the law and help them reclaim their sovereignty. They often refuse to carry government documents and draw up handmade driver's licenses, car tags and passports.
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Lyons, for example, filed a "certificate of non-United States citizen status" in Cocke County Circuit Court, replete with misspellings, random capitalizations, clashing fonts and legal nonsequiturs.
"The U.S. Government is a foreign corporation," the notice reads. "Any and all record of my being a 'U.S. citizen' is in error and must promptly be corrected.... Thank you very much for your prompt and courteous compliance with this request."
A Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper pulled over Austin Gary Cooper, another of those indicted, on state Highway 61 in Anderson County in April and cited him on a charge of driving without a license. Cooper blew off a court appearance, according to records, and filed liens against Sheriff Paul White and General Sessions Judge Don Layton.
Cooper, 68, of Clinton, has spent more than a quarter-century as a roaming apostle of the movement, records show. He was convicted in 1990 in Florida of failing to pay federal income tax but went on to set up a foundation, Take Back America, that charged clients $1,600 to learn what he billed as a secret legal formula for ducking taxes. Before coming to Tennessee, he served prison time for criminal contempt of court in 2006 after he violated a federal judge's order to stop hawking his scheme.
"I am a man, on the land, a lawful man, capable of bearing an oath," Cooper wrote in an "affidavit of truth" that denounced all federal courts as "legal fictions" and followed the familiar sovereign citizen script. "There is no evidence that I am a U.S. citizen... and I believe none exists."
The others charged in the case – Michael Robert Birdsell, 54, of Andersonville; Victor Douglas Bunch, 72, of Powell; Christopher Alan Hauser, 51, of Del Rio, Tenn.; James Michael Usinger, 64, of Greeneville; John Jeffrey Williams, 50, of Powell; George Edward Williams, 76, of Powell; and Kenneth Ray Foust, 73, of Clinton – have left a similar trail of bogus liens and frivolous litigation across the region, authorities said.
Court dates have not yet been set.
State Rep. William Lamberth, R-Cottontown, and state Sen. Brian Kelsey, R-Germantown, have introduced legislation that would make fighting fraudulent liens easier for public officials. Those bills remain in committee.
Read or Share this story: http://knoxne.ws/2m7hutBThe NCAA will consider moving to a centralized replay review system after the controversial ending to Saturday’s Duke-Miami game, NCAA officiating head Rogers Redding told Fox Sports’ Stewart Mandel.
The NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB all have central replay command centers where reviews are conducted in games all around the country. The NCAA’s current model relies on replay officials situated in the stadium’s press box to review calls.
Redding said that while he has discussed changing the replay model with conference officials, “In the big picture, the replay process is in good shape.”
Redding added that the large scope of college football (128 FBS programs) would make it difficult to institute a single replay center.
• Duke coach: NCAA should allow results to be overturned
Miami beat Duke on Saturday after a kick return touchdown with no time remaining that saw the Hurricanes lateral the ball eight times before crossing the goal line. Replays showed that one runner’s knee was on the ground before he passed the ball, but the touchdown was upheld on review.
The ACC announced Sunday that the officiating crew from the game has been suspended for two games after the conference determined the crew made four errors on the play.
- Dan GartlandMartin "Cerebral" Shkreli made international news earlier this year when he bumped up the price of an important pharmaceutical drug by nearly 5,500 percent. Shkreli, chairman of the League of Legends Team Imagine, was in the news again when he purchased the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan's latest album, and then bragged about it.
This morning Shkreli got another dose of media coverage following his arrest by federal agents in connection with securities fraud tied to his defunct hedge fund, MSMB Capital Management, Bloomberg reports.
Shkreli is accused of illegally using money from his biotech company Retrophin to pay off debts incurred by MSMB Capital Management. New York lawyer Even Greebel was also arrested Thursday, accused of conspiring to help Shkreli in the scheme, Bloomberg reports.
Reached Thursday afternoon, Shkreli's attorneys declined to comment on the arrest.
Jacquelyn Heard, communications director for Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP where Greebel was formerly a partner, declined to comment on the arrest.
"It would be inappropriate to comment on a former partner," she told Polygon.
Calls to the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office were not returned this morning. Team Imagine has not returned emails seeking comment. We will update this story when they respond.
In August, Shkreli bought the rights to a drug used by people with compromised immune systems, including those with AIDS, and then bumped its price from $13.50 a tablet to $750 a pop.
Earlier this month, news broke that Shkreli was the secret winning bidder of the only copy of Wu-Tang Clan's latest album.
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was pitched as a piece of Wu-Tang Clan produced art, an album that will only ever exist as a single record owned by one person. Shkreli, who is rumored to have paid $2 million for the album, told Bloomberg News that he wanted to pay more musicians to make exclusive music for him and that he hasn't yet listened to the fabled album that he paid so much for. He's waiting, he said, for a time when he needs his spirits lifted.... or maybe a request from Taylor Swift for a private listening session.
Shkreli got into eSports as a team owner in April when he created the team Odyssey. That team merged with Imagine in August.
You can read the full SEC complaint right here.
Update: Updated to include responses to our requests for comment, and a link to the SEC complaint.REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- A judge has ordered officials to unseal an affidavit used to obtain a search warrant for the home of a popular tech blogger who posted images of an Apple iPhone prototype online.
A San Mateo County superior court judge on Friday granted the requests of The Associated Press and several other media organizations to make the document public.
Among other information, the affidavit reveals that on April 19, the very same day Gizmodo published its story on the "next iPhone," Apple CEO Steve Jobs personally reached out to Brian Lam, Gizmodo's editor, to ask for the return of the lost iPhone prototype. Lam, however, refused.
According to an email, Lam told Jobs he would return the phone only if Apple provided "confirmation that it is real, from Apple, officially,"
CNET offers details on the exchange:
"Right now, we have nothing to lose," Lam wrote. "The thing is, Apple PR has been cold to us lately. It affected my ability to do my job right at iPad launch. So we had to go outside and find our stories like this one, very aggressively." (Gawker Media has offered to pay anyone who gave them or lent them Apple prototypes.)
The court documents also confirm that Apple initiated the investigation. The company told investigators the "prototype was so valuable a price could not be placed on it," writes CNET.
Investigators with a special high technology police unit last month searched the Fremont home and car of Jason Chen, an editor at Gizmodo.com, in connection with the suspected theft of the 4G iPhone. Chen's company said it paid $5,000 for the device to someone who claimed to have found it in a bar.
No one has been charged. San Mateo County prosecutors said making the affidavit public would jeopardize the investigation.
Find out more about the investigation into the lost iPhone prototype here.Fellow WR Jaelen Strong high on new Texans teammate Will Fuller
The Texans' top draft pick, Notre Dame wide receiver Will Fuller, dons his new Texans hat as he walks through baggage claim at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Friday. The Texans' top draft pick, Notre Dame wide receiver Will Fuller, dons his new Texans hat as he walks through baggage claim at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on Friday. Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle Photo: Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 30 Caption Close Fellow WR Jaelen Strong high on new Texans teammate Will Fuller 1 / 30 Back to Gallery
Years before the Texans drafted Notre Dame star wide receiver Will Fuller in the first round, the All-American was simply a young football player befriended by Jaelen Strong.
Both Texans wide receivers and newly minted teammates grew up near each other in Philadelphia, where Fuller was an all-city, all-state and Catholic League Most Valuable Player at Roman Catholic.
"I knew Will was special from the beginning - I knew he was real special," Strong said Friday after attending Fuller's introductory press conference. "He's a baller, and I'm excited. I'm so excited I feel like I got drafted today."
Drafted 21st overall, Fuller caught 144 passes for 2,512 yards and 30 touchdowns. He caught 62 passes for 1,258 yards and 14 touchdowns last season.
"A complete receiver," Strong said of his friend.
Fuller and Strong share similar backgrounds, making it out of Philadelphia and being drafted into the NFL. Strong was the Texans' third-round draft pick last season.
"It's a lot of hope," Strong said. "It motivates a lot of people."Bokeh allows interactive update of their plots in a notebook env. Note that you will have to run this example in your own jupyter notebook, If you want to share a real-time bokeh plot to friends, you will have to work with a web framework (as bottle) and a bokeh server (see https://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/docs/user_guide/embed.html#server-data). You can also use only a bokeh server and serve a python file as a bokeh app.
This document will only focus on real time stream in a jupyter notebook environment. The example will be the continuous temporal evolution of a population.
The temporal evolution is described by a simple ordinary differential equation called continuous-time model of logistic growth:
\begin{equation} \frac{\partial N}{\partial t} = -r\,N\left(1 - \frac{N}{K}\right) \end{equation}
We will use the dedicated scipy sub-library for the resolution and Bokeh for real-time plotting.This news made my brain throw up a “404 File Not Found” page as a form of self-defense. It just couldn’t reconcile this with reality. I’m so tired, guys. I need to lie down for a moment.
Here’s what Zack Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter:
I have been working on The Fountainhead. I’ve always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something. Warner Bros. owns [Ayn Rand’s] script and I’ve just been working on that a little bit.
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Just sitting at home noodling on Ayn Rand’s script for a The Fountainhead movie. Like you do. On the one hand, seeing her words interpreted by his visual style would probably be the anti-life equation. On the other hand, imagine Snyder giving The Fountainhead the Sucker Punch treatment. I’m sorry. It turns out both hands are bad.
I’m in no way surprised that Snyder identifies with a book about a man whose revolutionary new ideas are anathema to the orthodoxy of his time. But I find it hilarious that the part of Rand’s story that was about lavish, impressive styles being empty inside didn’t strike a chord.
If ever there was a project that should stay in development hell, this is it.Brendan Rodgers oversaw his first Merseyside derby victory as Liverpool manager on Tuesday night - and afterwards dedicated a ruthless 4-0 win to the supporters.
His Reds side were rampant from the very first whistle, harrying Everton into errors and driving forward with a deadly sense of purpose.
Steven Gerrard epitomised Liverpool's hunger when he towered highest in the penalty area, powered a header home and then sprinted to the fans to celebrate in the 21st minute.
Daniel Sturridge was clinical, clipping the second over Tim Howard before improvising from the edge of the area two minutes later to lob the American for 3-0.
Luis Suarez notched an obligatory strike, speeding half the length of the field before calmly rolling home the fourth in front of the Kop.
Reflecting on the Reds' biggest win over their rivals since 1982, Rodgers said: "I'm delighted for the players and obviously the supporters.
"I know that feelings run high here on Merseyside for the derby games. It was a brilliant team performance. There was good defensive organisation. We were outstanding on the counter attack and we controlled our spaces really well.
"We were clinical in front of goal. We scored four and could have had arguably two or three more. It was a brilliant win for us and I'm delighted for everyone.
"It's obviously really special because of the nature of the game - it was two teams that have been doing outstandingly well and doing the city proud throughout the course of the season.
"It was a combination of the players and the supporters - they were brilliant again tonight. I'm delighted for them because I know how special the derby games are here and how special they are for the supporters.
Watch the video here »
"For them to get that win and the victory, and for the players to perform how they did, was really special. We've got a real focus and concentration going into every game.
"This was a massive game tonight as everyone who came to the ground knew, so for us to score goals, defend like we did and attack with that efficiency was very pleasing.
"We knew it was going to be a big match. I'm more delighted for the players and supporters. For me, it's three points; I'll be more delighted at the end of the season if we can arrive in the top four. I'll probably overanalyse the performance and see the areas we can improve on going forward."
Rodgers' side could have had more goals during a second half in which they attacked the Kop with constant menace.
Sturridge saw his penalty go over the bar after Raheem Sterling was brought down in the box by Howard - and the Reds carved a host of opportunities to extend their advantage beyond four goals.
"For us, it was a tireless performance," said the manager. "To win the big games like these here, you've got to attack and defend together, and I thought our unit - right the way from the goalkeeper to the front players - worked tirelessly at filling the spaces. Then, when we had the ball, we looked a real threat.
"All wins are important, but especially against your rivals. We know there's still a wee bit to go, but psychologically it was a big, big win for us and one that can reiterate the confidence and belief in the squad.
"We've just got to keep putting our foot to the floor, keep giving these performances and keep scoring goals."
The victory moves the Reds four points clear of their neighbours, who are currently embroiled in the race for a top-four position in the Barclays Premier League.
Rodgers said: "I think we've shown all season that we're going to be in contention for fourth place and we know that there's going to be one or two other teams fighting for it.
Watch the video here »
"We've shown a wonderful team spirit here [at Anfield]. We've had various players missing at various times. But we've been able to structure the team so that we're not relying on any one player.
"It's really about the ethos of the team and that was seen tonight. Our attacking players were filling in the spaces and putting the work in."
Rodgers chose to withdraw Sturridge in the 71st minute, introducing Victor Moses in his place - and the boss explained how his decision to substitute the England international was purely a tactical one.
"It wasn't a difficult decision to take him off," said the Northern Irishman. "I thought his two finishes were sublime. He was outstanding in the game.
"He's always a threat. He looks like he can score in every single game that he plays in and he normally does, but I just wanted to shore the game up. We'd put the risk in the game for that first hour or so and we had to balance out on that side.
"Jordan Henderson had to put a real shift in to get across. So it was time, I felt, to make the change and balance the team back up again and then there was no problem.
"As a coach, to get Sturridge and Suarez into the same team, it's a bit of a risk because others have got to fill in. But I'd rather do that to give us that offensive threat.
"Then we have to look to close the door somewhere else with other players in the team. Everyone has to work together and that was important for us tonight."
Gerrard set the ball rolling for a famous victory with a powerful header in the 21st minute. The 33-year-old went on to dominate the game from a deep-lying central position.
Watch the video here »
Afterwards, his manager was full of praise for a commanding performance that will rank among the skipper's finest against the Blues.
Rodgers said: "Those of you who have seen him over 31 games in the derby, where has been all action and his influence in these games has been wonderful - he was equally as good tonight, but from that deeper position.
"He has really taken to the role, he understands it and we speak a lot on it. You saw his responsibility in the role, he's organising the team on the field. He scored a goal and is such an unselfish guy, a really generous man.
"A local guy in a derby game, to give away a penalty [to Sturridge], shows the mark of the man he is. He led the team marvellously well and was outstanding."The Chicago Tribune reports:
[Chicago Alderman] Proco “Joe” Moreno announced this week that he will block Chick-fil-A’s effort to build its second Chicago store … following company President Dan Cathy’s remarks last week that he was “guilty as charged” for supporting the biblical definition of marriage as between a man and woman…. The alderman has the ideological support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values,” the mayor said in a statement when asked about Moreno’s decision. “They disrespect our fellow neighbors and residents. This would be a bad investment, since it would be empty.” Moreno is relying on a rarely violated Chicago tradition known as aldermanic privilege, which dictates that City Council members defer to the opinion of the ward alderman on local issues. Last year Moreno wielded that weapon to block plans for a Wal-Mart in his ward, saying he had issues with the property owner and that Wal-Mart was not “a perfect fit for the area.” … The alderman, serving his first full term, dismissed any First Amendment concerns. “You have the right to say what you want to say, but zoning is not a right,” he said, adding that he also had concerns about traffic in the area….
In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino reportedly took a similar view [UPDATE: but has since recanted]:
Mayor Thomas M. Menino is vowing to block Chick-fil-A from bringing its Southern-fried fast-food empire to Boston … after the family-owned firm’s president suggested gay marriage is “inviting God’s judgment on our nation.”
But denying a private business permits because of such speech by its owner is a blatant First Amendment violation. Even when it comes to government contracting — where the government is choosing how to spend government money — the government generally may not discriminate based on the contractor’s speech, see Board of County Commissioners v. Umbehr (1996). It is even clearer that the government may not make decisions about how people will be allowed to use their own property based on the speaker’s past speech.
And this is so even if there is no statutory right to a particular kind of building permit (and I don’t know what the rule is under Illinois law). Even if the government may deny permits to people based on various reasons, it may not deny permits to people based on their exercise of his First Amendment rights. It doesn’t matter if the applicant expresses speech that doesn’t share the government officials’ values, or even the values of the majority of local citizens. It doesn’t matter if the applicant’s speech is seen as “disrespect[ful]” of certain groups. The First Amendment generally protects people’s rights to express such views without worrying that the government will deny them business permits as a result. That’s basic First Amendment law — but Alderman Moreno, Mayor Menino, and, apparently, Mayor Emanuel (if his statement is quoted in context), seem to either not know or not care about the law.
Of course, if Chick-Fil-A actually discriminated in their serving or hiring decisions in Chicago in a way forbidden by Chicago or Illinois law, they could be punished for this violation, and possibly even denied future permits based on such illegal behavior. But the stories give no evidence of any such actions, and suggest that the city officials’ statements are based on the Chick-Fil-A president’s speech, not any illegal conduct on the company’s part. Finally, note that the government may generally insist that, when it hires people to communicate a government message, those people use that government money only for the government-selected speech (see Rust v. Sullivan (1991)); but that power of the government to control its own speech is far removed from the government’s attempt in this case to retaliate against businesses for their owners’ speech. Thanks to commenter CalderonX for the pointer.
UPDATE: Just to make clear, I think the government has even less power to control the speech of those it regulates than its (already heavily limited) power to control the speech of those to whom it awards government contracts. The Court, for instance, has repeatedly protected the rights of even heavily regulated businesses to speak; that the government may regulate the business in various ways, or even bar it from being in business, doesn’t mean that the government may restrict the speech of the business. See, e.g., Consolidated Edison Co. v. Public Service Commission (1980) (holding that even status as a heavily regulated monopoly doesn’t strip the speaker of First Amendment rights). And just as the government may not restrict speech by businesses that are already operating, so it can’t deny a business a license to operate based on its owner’s speech.
FURTHER UPDATE: To be precise, the permit is “to divide the land so it can purchase an out lot near Home Depot”; I call it a building permit as shorthand, because it’s a permit that would be needed for Chick-Fil-A to build and open its restaurant. In any case, nothing turns constitutionally on whether the case involves a building permit, a subdivision permit, a business license, or what have you.
STILL FURTHER UPDATE: The ACLU of Illinois likewise condemns the Chicago alderman’s statement.A giant of anime, Minami-san has produced some of the biggest titles and founded BONES INC.
Masahiko Minami was born on August 24, 1961 and is from the Mie Prefecture in Japan. After graduating from the Theater Arts Department of Osaka University of the Arts, he joined the anime production company Nihon Sunrise (now SUNRISE INC.) and produced several shows such as: Whirl Wind! Iron Leaguer, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Escaflowne, and Cowboy Bebop.
In 1998, he decided to leave SUNRISE to start BONES INC., with animators Hiroshi Osaka and Toshihiro Kawamoto, where he now doubles as both the President and a Producer. Under BONES, he has produced Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, Fullmetal Alchemist, Eureka Seven, My Hero Academia, Space Dandy, Mob Psycho 100, and many more!I recently got my hands on data from the 500 Cities Project, a research project that collected tons of public health data from cities across the United States.
I love visualizing data with maps, so I figured I’d aggregate some of this information by state and share it here!
First, let’s take a look at the CDC’s five deadly sins: binge drinking, smoking, physical inactivity, obesity, and insufficient sleep. See if you’re guilty of any:
Binge drinking: Have you had five or more drinks (men) or four or more drinks (women) on an occasion in the past 30 days?
Smoking: Have you smoked ≥100 cigarettes in your lifetime and currently smoke every day or some days?
Physical inactivity: During the past month, did you participate in any physical activities or exercises such as running, calisthenics, golf, gardening, or walking for exercise?
Obesity: Do you have a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30.0 kg/m² (excluding pregnant women)?
Insufficient sleep: Do you usually get insufficient sleep (less than 7 hours a night)?
Each city had a prevalence value for these five behaviors, representing the proportion of people who responded “yes” to each one.
To get a single value for each state, I averaged the five percentages within each city and then took the median from among all cities in the same state. So who’s leading the least healthy lifestyle?
It probably shouldn’t surprise you that Utah leads the nation in clean living.
But is all that |
The new Law of righteousnesse, and therein I declared it; yet my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me that words and writing were all nothing and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.”7
Despite their ultimate defeat, a brief exploration of the Digger movement can demonstrate how some working-class English men and women responded to the ravages of early modern agrarian capitalism, and how organic intellectuals like Winstanley rooted a critique of existing social relations in a radical plebeian ecology. In so doing the True Levellers can contribute to the growing historical literature on ecosocialism, and at the same time provide inspiration and ideas to new generations of activists. At a time when the appropriation of the earth and indigenous knowledge for private profit is accelerating, and the global working classes are struggling to construct viable socialist alternatives, it is worth revisiting the theory and practice of what was the first organized anti-capitalist movement in history.
Origins and the English Revolution
In the spring of 1607, thousands of people in the Midlands of England rose to prevent the enclosure of their common lands. Participants (mainly rural laborers, artisans, and small farmers) referred to themselves collectively as “diggers” and “levellers”—up to that time terms of elite derision and contempt.8 Anti-enclosure riots were not, however, new to the early seventeenth century. Large-scale popular opposition to enclosing (the privatization of common lands) and engrossing (the amalgamation of two or more farms into one) dated to the fifteenth century. The conversion of arable to pasture land with the expansion of the cloth industry, a rapidly growing population, and changing class relations in the sixteenth century signaled the rise of agrarian capitalism in the English countryside.9 It is often forgotten that Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was in large part a work of social criticism aimed at landholders who enclosed the commons for the production of woolens. The idle English nobility and gentry enclosed all land possible, leaving nothing for food production. Former tenants whose labor was no longer needed in the fields were forced to wander, beg, or steal for their survival, and many found themselves unemployed in “hideous poverty.”10 Though More himself was no revolutionary, popular rebellions were a constant feature of Tudor society, as a new class of capitalist yeomen emerged at the expense of the traditional nobility and peasantry.11 The revolts of 1607 were part of a long tradition of peasant protest in England; four decades later the Diggers would take this tradition in a dramatically new direction.
The English Revolution was a complicated affair. Most traditional accounts emphasize the political and religious conflict between Parliament and King Charles I, with the execution of the king in 1649 followed by a period of political instability that ended with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Yet the century preceding the outbreak of war witnessed dramatic economic and religious change in England. King Henry VIII’s establishment of the Anglican Church in 1536 was accompanied by the dissolution of the monasteries, which led to the systematic transferal of property that benefitted large landowners and the royal state.
Between 1580 and 1620 the enclosure movement resulted in a massive upward redistribution of wealth, while the 1590s and 1630s were decades of severe subsistence crises. The years 1646–1650—the period that witnessed the creation of the Digger movement—saw the worst run of bad harvests of the seventeenth century, as well as the lowest real wages for working people; starvation was reported in the north of England.12 Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England saw the unprecedented creation of nationwide laws that legislated wages, apprenticeship, and poor relief; over the same period numerous petty crimes against property were made punishable by death.13 By the middle decades of the seventeenth-century England’s social, economic, legal, and religious landscape had been profoundly transformed.
The first Diggers’ colony appeared on St. George’s Hill near Cobham, Surrey at the beginning of April 1649, seven years after the outbreak of civil war and two months after the beheading of Charles I. Though initially just five Diggers began to plant “parsenipps, and carretts, and beanes” on the admittedly barren commons, their numbers grew thereafter. From such modest beginnings it was envisioned would emerge a revolutionary movement, for the ultimate goal of the Diggers on St. George’s Hill was no less than to make the earth a “Common Treasury” for all, through shared agricultural labor on commonly held land. The Diggers would thus till the commons and wastes of England collectively; withdrawing their labor from commercial society they would decommodify social relations and establish the True Levellers’ relationship with the earth. Once the common people saw the success of the Digger experiment, they would refuse to labor for wages any longer, and would work to create free associations of communist commonwealths in England and throughout the world. By “labouring in the Earth in rightousnesse together,” the True Levellers intended to “lift up the Creation from that bondage of Civill Propriety, which it groans under.”14
Officials and writers were unsure what to make of the small group of radicals digging on St. George’s Hill. The Royalist newsbook Mercurius Pragmaticus made fun of “Prophet Everet’s”—a reference to William Everard, an early leader of the Diggers—intention to convert “Oatlands Park into a Wildernesse, and preach Liberty to the oppressed Deer,” while implicitly acknowledging the group’s potential threat to social order.15 Though officials of England’s New Model Army concluded the Diggers were not at that time a serious threat, some local residents commenced attacking the group almost immediately. Local lords like Francis Drake and freeholders organized gangs to attack the commune, and Winstanley responded in writings addressing the persecution and specious arrests for trespassing leveled against the Diggers. Despite incarcerations, the pulling down of houses, and the destruction of their spades and hoes, Digger numbers continued to grow. Yet finding local courts on the side of their oppressors, the group was forced to abandon St. George’s Hill in August of 1649, just five months after the digging commenced.16
The Diggers then moved to nearby Little Heath in Cobham, where they cultivated several acres of land, a number of houses were built, and new pamphlets were composed. Local hostility at Little Heath was less marked than at St. George’s Hill, as a number of Diggers had ties to the community and the parish of Cobham, and a history of local social tensions may have contributed to popular sympathy for the True Leveller colony. Yet official repression was more pronounced in Cobham than at St. George’s Hill; in October the community was harassed by local officials, and in the following month Digger houses were again pulled down by soldiers and organized thugs. Though local gentry, supported by justices of the peace, the county sheriff, and detachments of soldiers led a highly organized campaign against the group, they were unable to mobilize local commoners against the colony. As Digger communities in other parts of England sprouted into existence, the Little Heath group began to thrive—despite repression and a particularly brutal winter in 1649–1650. Yet their financial resources were dwindling, and in March 1650, as the Commonwealth government became increasingly concerned over the revolutionary social experiments being conducted by Diggers, the Council of State sent a military detachment to disband the community at Cobham, while other True Leveller colonies were also suppressed. In the midst of numerous legal actions against the Little Heath Diggers—including indictments for riot, trespass, illegal assembly, and the illegal erection of cottages—the radicals at Cobham disbanded in the summer of 1650.17
Winstanley’s most important works were composed under substantial duress over the short period of 1649–1650. Despite severe persecution, the True Levellers paradoxically sought a restoration of humankind’s natural equality by engaging in a dramatically new social experiment. As Winstanley formulated his unique vision, Diggers attempted to establish autonomous agricultural communities on the commons of England, to sustain themselves free of market relations, and to demonstrate to the laboring classes throughout the world that the power to emancipate themselves from slavery existed in this world. Whatever the practical limitations of the communities (and there were many—not least their mistaken belief that the ruling class could be persuaded voluntarily to relinquish its dominion), the Digger colonies show how common people could, through direct action and cooperation, formulate a radical alternative to existing social relations.
Winstanley’s Ecology
Though the Digger experiments were in large part a response to profound socio-political and religious crises, Winstanley’s ideas were formulated during a period of unprecedented cultural and intellectual ferment. As official censorship of the press in England lapsed in 1640 (only to return with the monarchy in 1660), common people for the first time were able to publish criticisms of the state and the official Anglican church, while interpreting religious doctrine in new, more egalitarian, ways. Although critics like the Puritan supporter of Parliament Thomas Edwards denounced the “Ecclesiasticall Anarchy” resulting from “all sorts of illiterate mechanick Preachers, yeah of Women and Boy Preachers,” what were traditionally subterranean anti-clerical beliefs among the common people were nonetheless expressed openly for the first time during the 1640s.18 In addition to the anti-hierarchical religious views of groups like Anabaptists and Seekers, anonymous early Digger petitions like Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1648) would influence the development of Winstanley’s thought—particularly the notion that “inclosers” had historically monopolized the earth’s natural bounty, creating inequality and class oppression among humankind.19 Winstanley, however, diverged from other radicals of the revolution in his novel interpretation of the relationship between the environment, property, social relations, and how to remedy the injustices that pervaded the world.
The idea that God had given mankind dominion over the earth and its creatures, and that the fall of man destroyed the natural equality of Eden,20 were truisms for most people in early modern Christian Europe. Though Winstanley, like many radical Protestants of the time, drew on these beliefs, his religious views were highly unorthodox, and would have been punished as heretical in earlier periods. His use of the Bible was often allegorical, and his allegories were filled with natural imagery; the Garden of Eden, for example, was the inward spirit of humanity which had been filled with weeds—pride, envy, covetousness, and hypocrisy.21 From his earliest pre-Digger writings Winstanley also displayed a tendency towards a pantheism that would significantly shape his ecological outlook in later writings. These initial leanings were influenced by the belief in some radical circles (notably among Seekers, whose beliefs foreshadowed those of the Quakers) that God—or Reason, Winstanley’s substitute for God—dwelled within all human beings and throughout the natural world. In the pre-Digger work The Breaking of the Day of God (1648), Winstanley stressed that humankind was part of “one flesh, or one earth,” and that heaven was not to be sought in the skies as the histories had written. Rather, heaven could be found wherever God dwelled—which was to say, in every part of the material world.22 Early in 1649, prior to the establishment of the Digger colony on St. George’s Hill, Winstanley wrote that before the existence of private property and hierarchy “every creature walked evenly with man, and delighted in man, and was ruled by him; there was no opposition between him and beast, fowls, fishes, or any creature in the earth.”23
Winstanley’s Digger writings nonetheless diverged in important ways from his early works. Most importantly, his increasingly materialist orientation brought about a rethinking of humans’ relationship with each other and the earth—which necessarily led to the idea that liberation must come in this world. The foundation of these ideas were laid in the first Digger manifesto in 1649, The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced. Here it is revealed that in the beginning of time the “great creator Reason” made the earth to be “a common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Man.” With the invention of private property, classes were created, establishing societies in which the majority labored in servitude and slavery for a minority that monopolized the land and goods it produced. Utilizing biblical evidence and symbolism, and dividing history into seemingly millenarian epochs (with great emphasis on the Norman conquest of England in 1066), Diggers declared their intention to liberate both humankind and the earth from the oppression of the ruling order: “we have now begun to declare it by action in digging up the common land, & casting in seed that we may eat our bread together in righteousnesse.” The figurative way in which Winstanley used the Bible, and the extent to which ecology informed Digger belief, was demonstrated in the Standard’s injunction to honor thy father and mother.24 Father here symbolized the “Spirit of Community,” while Mother was “the Earth, that brought us all forth.”25 Religion was by this time useful largely as an educative device; community and the earth had taken primacy in Winstanley’s now thoroughly materialist philosophy.
Traditional religious belief also stressed that with the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden the curse of labor was inflicted on humankind by a vengeful God.26 Though a popular belief in the dignity and virtue of honest labor had existed for millennia, Winstanley turned many traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs regarding labor on their head. For the Diggers the physical act of labor was no longer a painful reminder of humankind’s sinful fall from grace. On the contrary, “labouring the Earth in righteousnesse” collectively, without wages, would liberate humans and the earth from oppression and the bondage of individual ownership. More radical still, the Standard recognized labor’s contribution to wealth/value, stressing that “the poor by their labour lifts up tyrants to rule over them,” as riches were transferred from producers to the thieves of labor’s produce. Winstanley therefore called on all those who labored for wages to refuse to work any longer, in effect demanding self-emancipation of the laboring classes through a general withdrawal of their labor (i.e., a general strike).27 At the root of this critique and call to action was the materialist notion that as Mother Earth brought forth all creatures, so all, “according to the Reason that rules in the Creation,” had an equal right to the fruits of the land. The True Levellers were self-consciously attempting to put into practice a program of liberation based on challenging deprecatory traditional beliefs regarding the “curse” of labor. Laboring in common for subsistence and comradeship was in fact “righteous,” and was associated with “universall Liberty and Freedome,” rather than with human sin and punishment.28
Winstanley continued to develop the ideas first expressed in the The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced over the following year, despite the severe repression experienced by the Diggers on St. George’s Hill and at Little Heath.29 The most complete expression of Winstanley’s evolving materialist philosophy was published in 1652, however, after the successful elimination of the Digger communities. The Law of Freedom was a blueprint for what Winstanley termed a “free Commonwealth,” in contrast to the “Kingly Government” that still prevailed in England, despite the execution of Charles I in 1649. Many Digger themes were evident in the work: the rich had obtained their wealth through the oppression of the laboring classes, after the appropriation of the earth had led to the establishment of class society and legalized domination. Official religion and ideas about heaven and hell were the creation of a national ministry designed to keep the people in ignorance and fear. The communist commonwealth would restore true freedom, and this freedom was rooted in Digger earth ecology: “True Freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the Earth.”30 Since private property had created oppression and exploitation, as one part of an interrelated ecological system the liberation of human society required the deliverance of the earth from the bondage of individual ownership. And, though his treatise was famously dedicated to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, Winstanley stressed that with the abolition of private property the people would be sovereign; the Commonwealth’s leader (at the time of the Rump Parliament) was vividly reminded that “The Earth wherein your Gourd grows is the Commoners of England.”31
The originality of the Law of Freedom lay in its program for a secular society characterized by equality, democracy, and a spirit of free inquiry. The work is also a complex mixture of hope and despair—the Digger communities had been destroyed, and Winstanley stressed to Cromwell that now “I have no power.” Though scholars have pointed to the patriarchal and harsh disciplinary measures evident in the work, it should be kept in mind these were rational, if severe, responses to anticipated criticisms from a dominant culture obsessed with “idleness” and social order.
In contrast to social convention, in the free Commonwealth women would marry whom they desired, and throughout his writings Winstanley, like the Quakers after him, was far more radical than most contemporaries in arguing for woman’s natural equality with man.32 Although in the free Commonwealth those unwilling to labor would be forced to work, the “idle” from the popular perspective were not the poor and unemployed; they were traditionally the “rich men” who lived at ease, “feeding and clothing themselves by the labors of other men.” Production in the free Commonwealth would be organized along uniquely democratic lines. Regulators of crafts and agriculture would oversee a system of apprenticeship, and these overseers would be annually elected by the workers themselves, “to prevent the creeping in of Lordly Oppression.”33 If an earlier Digger call for working-class self-emancipation was necessarily absent, Winstanley’s consistent hostility to class society and exploitation were expressed in a new blueprint for a society based on equality and democracy.
Similarly revolutionary was the Law of Freedom’s educational system, which was rooted in experimental science, human reason, harmony with nature, and the widespread dissemination of knowledge. Private property and the exploitation of natural resources were in fact linked to the historical suppression of knowledge. If “the Earth were set free from Kingly Bondage,” and all were guaranteed a livelihood, the wonders of nature “would be made publike” instead of being monopolized by professors; with the establishment of the free Commonwealth knowledge will “cover the Earth, as the waters cover the Seas.” In keeping with Winstanley’s uncompromising anti-authoritarianism, a class of educated professionals was anathema, for the gatekeeper of information was “he who puts out the eyes of man’s knowledge, and tells him he must believe what others have writ or spoke, and must not trust to his own experience.” “Ministers” (like the overseers of trades and agriculture) would be elected annually; they would deliver secular lectures on history, law, and the sciences—though all would be free to address topics involving knowledge of the earth and movement of the stars and planets. Understanding of the material world was fundamental, for in nature “all true knowledge is wrapped up.”34 Winstanley’s plan for a communist commonwealth combined an absence of private property and exploitation, respect for the natural world, and an educational system whose focus was rational scientific inquiry rather than superstitious speculation. Rooted in his radical ecological vision, the True Leveller’s last published work sought to lay out a vision based on substantive social and environmental justice.
The Diggers’ Contemporary Relevance
In 2010 the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth adopted the “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth,” and submitted it to the United Nations for consideration.35 Though the English Revolution occurred prior to the emergence of eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses regarding natural rights, many of the issues emphasized in the Declaration resemble in fundamental ways ideas articulated by Winstanley and the Diggers in the late 1640s. The interrelatedness and interdependency of all living things, and the fundamental incompatibility of capitalist social relations with a sustainable and peaceful future for humankind emphasized in the Declaration’s preamble, would not have sounded strange to True Levellers. In contrast to a dominant view in early modern Christian Europe regarding human’s dominion over the earth and its resources, the Diggers, like the People’s Conference, recognized that “Mother Earth is the source of life, nourishment and learning and provides everything we need to live well.” Diggers’ call for the recognition of the earth as a common treasury, and for the “Birthright” of “universall Liberty and Freedome” among all peoples, presaged modern rights ideas in ways worth revisiting.36
C.B. Macpherson wrote that what distinguished Winstanley and the True Levellers or Diggers from the Levellers was “Winstanley’s utopian insight that freedom lay in free common access to the land. For Winstanley that was the key to freedom, for that was the only way to assure freedom from exploitation of man by man. The only natural right of the individual that Winstanley recognized was the natural right of men to labour together and live together, governing themselves according to a natural law of self preservation.”37
The Digger experiments and the ideas of Winstanley are also relevant in their call for self-organization among the working classes, and for emphasizing the intelligence and dignity of commoners often portrayed by elites as needing guidance and discipline. Liberation, as Winstanley frequently claimed in his Digger writings, would only come when working people throughout the world (not just in revolutionary England) withdrew their labor from market society, and set up a social system in which exploitation and poverty no longer existed. Winstanley frequently responded to elite criticisms regarding the emergence of “mechanick preachers” during the 1640s by noting that the biblical scriptures were written by “the experimentall hand” of shepherds, farmers, fishermen, and others of the laboring classes.38 With the Law of Freedom, Winstanley made clear the radical democratic elements of his philosophy in his call for a secular education for all citizens of the commonwealth. In their revolutionary ideology, rooted in a radical ecological vision and centered on the self-emancipation of the oppressed through “righteous” collective labor and the sharing of knowledge, the Diggers have much to offer modern ecosocialist theory and practice.
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Good luck, lovelies! xoxoxoxxxxxPre-Orders now open for The Body Politic • Howard Tayler
Pre-orders are now open for Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic, the ninth volume in the massively-serial space ope-- what am I saying? You people know all of this. I mean, you're here, right?
This volume is different from every other volume we've done. There is no bonus story.
There is, however, a lot of other bonus material, including a bunch of new footnotes (I lost count), some single-panel comics I did for WorldCon that year, and the entirety of the Strohl Munitions Plasma Cannon Safety Activity Book (four pages of coloring book per page in this volume.) That pretty much had to be there, since it was mentioned during the storyline.
We are offering numbered, customer-choice sketch editions for $10 more, but those are only available while supplies last.
Here are direct links:
If you would like to order other things at the same time, you may! We'll ship the whole order at once, just as soon as the appropriate books have been signed and/or sketched. The challenge coins are among the other things you may choose to put in this package. We minted enough of those to keep inventory on hand through (hopefully) the holiday season this year.
We plan to ship your books to you later this month. Inventory arrives in the next couple of weeks, and then the sketching will begin in hand-wrought earnest.
Why no bonus story? Well, I worked and worked on the story that felt right ("Dog and Pony Show" was brainstormed here by the Writing Excuses crew), but after all the hammering (and a few pages of art) it just wasn't any fun. That's a bad sign. Or maybe it's a good sign that the reader won't have fun either. So I devoted my energies to having lots of fun adding a dozen fresh, fat footnotes. I expect that these will bring you lots of joy.
Have I set a bad precedent for bonus stories going forward? The jury is still out. There is a bonus story in the works for Longshoreman of the Apocalypse (book 10,) but it's going to be a lot different than anything you've seen from me before.On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued liberals arrest their alleged rapists while conservatives elect the alleged rapists on their side.
While discussing the allegations against Alabama Republican Senate nominee Judge Roy Moore during his opening monologue, Maher said, “I’ve got to defend my tribe here a little bit, liberals vs. conservatives. Because certainly, sexual harassment is absolutely the one thing we see now is totally, truly bipartisan, maybe the last thing that is. But no liberal defended Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey, who might be going to jail. Anthony Weiner is in jail. Louis CK, we hear, this week, did horrific things. Compare that to Trump and Roy Moore. We arrest our alleged rapists. They elect them.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchettSince the 1940s, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has been considered the most effective intervention for severe mood disorders.1 To my knowledge, no treatment, pharmacological or otherwise, has matched ECT in speed or likelihood of remission of major depressive episodes. Electroconvulsive therapy is equally effective in unipolar and bipolar depression and has profound antimanic properties.2 Several long-term follow-up studies have suggested that patients who receive ECT have reduced mortality of all causes relative to non-ECT control patients.3
There was a dramatic decrease in ECT use once antidepressant medications were introduced. While this decrease may have slowed in recent years, only a small fraction of potentially appropriate patients receive ECT in the United States. In this issue of JAMA Psychiatry, Slade et al4 found across 9 states that only 1.5% of general hospital inpatients with severe mood disorder received ECT during their index admission. Historically, the 2 major clinical considerations thought to limit ECT use were its adverse cognitive effects and propensity for relapse. In recent years, both limitations have been substantially addressed.
Marked progress has been made in refining the ECT electrical stimulus. In the era of sine-wave stimulation (1940-1980s), the time to recover full orientation following seizure induction averaged several hours, with many patients developing continuous disorientation.5 The introduction of titration of the ECT electrical dose to the individual seizure threshold and brief pulse stimulation reduced the time to orientation recovery to about 45 minutes for bilateral and 30 minutes for right unilateral ECT.6 The introduction of ultrabrief stimulation further reduced recovery time to approximately 15 minutes for bilateral and 10 minutes for right unilateral ECT.7 The most severe and persistent adverse cognitive effect of ECT pertains to memory for past events (retrograde amnesia), and orientation recovery time predicts the magnitude of this long-term amnesia.8 With the advances in ECT technique that reduced recovery time, there was a parallel decrease in the severity of long-term retrograde amnesia. Recent work has failed to detect any adverse effect of high-dose, ultrabrief pulse right unilateral ECT in memory or other cognitive assessments conducted within days of ECT course termination.7 In a 2016 large multisite study in geriatric depression, this form of ECT resulted in a 62% remission rate.9
At the time of the introduction of antidepressant medications, it was estimated that 50% of patients with depression would relapse within 6 months if given placebo following remission with ECT and that only 20% would relapse if administered continuation antidepressant pharmacotherapy. Electroconvulsive therapy samples have become increasingly composed of patients with treatment-resistant depression. It is now estimated that nearly 85% of patients relapse if ECT is followed by placebo and that approximately 50% will retain benefit for a year whether treated with aggressive continuation pharmacotherapy or continuation ECT.10,11 However, recent work also indicates that, as in the short-term treatment of the major depressive episode,12 the combination of ECT and pharmacotherapy as continuation treatment is more potent than either intervention alone. In their randomized study in geriatric depression, Kellner et al13 demonstrated that the combination of pharmacological treatment with venlafaxine and lithium and individualized administration of high-dose, ultrabrief pulse right unilateral ECT was superior to pharmacology alone and resulted in a 6-month relapse rate of less than 15%.
A salient contribution of the STAR*D study14 was the recalibration of expectations regarding antidepressant medication efficacy. The STAR*D study found that after failing to benefit from 2 antidepressant treatments, the conjoint probability of remitting with a third or fourth medication regimen and sustaining that remission for a year was, in each case, less than 5%.14 It is now widely recognized that approximately 30% of patients with mood disorders present with treatment-resistant depression. Even if the recent findings of Kellner et al13 are dismissed and a more conservative rate of sustained remission is adopted, ECT has a several-fold advantage over the level 3 and level 4 STAR*D pharmacological strategies, both in the likelihood of remission with short-term treatment and likelihood of sustaining the remission for a year (eg, 60% remission rate × 50% sustained rate = 30% remission and sustained rate). The growing awareness of the limitations of our interventions for treatment-resistant depression, the strong efficacy of ECT, and the fact that ECT can now be routinely conducted with minimal cognitive consequences compel renewed interest in this intervention.
Slade et al4 have added another piece of evidence supporting the efficacy of ECT. While controlling for a variety of patient-level variables, such as age, sex, and length of index hospitalization, they found that the rate of readmission for mood disorder within 30 days of hospital discharge was about half in patients who had received ECT (6.6%) compared with the much larger sample of inpatients not treated with ECT (12.3%). This finding is of consequence because the study examined the entire population of inpatients with mood disorder diagnoses in general hospitals in 9 US states and thus was free of sample selection bias. The finding is also of note because 30-day readmission is a metric commonly used by regulatory and funding agencies to evaluate the performance of mental health systems. The major limitation of the study was the use of a “quasi-experimental design.”4 Patients were not randomized to ECT or no ECT, and patient characteristics that compel use of ECT (or not) may independently predict outcome. Slade et al4 could not examine a host of clinical features that may affect course following hospital discharge and that likely distinguish ECT recipients from others. Such considerations include the degree of baseline functional disability and symptom severity, extent of treatment resistance, psychotic depression subtype, comorbid personality disorder, and comorbid substance abuse. This research also focused only on use of ECT among inpatients, which significantly underestimates the overall use of ECT; as its cognitive effects have receded, ECT has increasingly become an outpatient procedure.
The findings of Slade et al4 should be interpreted in the context of a large and diverse body of evidence regarding ECT efficacy. This includes randomized trials comparing ECT with sham treatment (anesthesia alone), randomized comparisons of the effect of ECT technical factors on clinical outcomes, randomized comparisons with pharmacotherapy, and large, prospective patient series in research and community settings. The evidence indicating that ECT is effective in the treatment of mood disorders is diverse, long-standing, and incontrovertible. In both the short term and long term, it appears to exert greater benefit than pharmacological alternatives.
Perhaps the most important contribution of this study is documentation of the extraordinarily low rate of ECT use and the demographic characteristics of those who receive it. Previous research demonstrated marked geographic variability in ECT availability, and nearly 9 of 10 US hospitals do not offer this treatment. Slade et al4 found that while the percentage of inpatients receiving ECT was small (1.5%), individuals with private or Medicare insurance coverage and white, non-Hispanic individuals were especially likely to receive the treatment. This concurs with earlier research showing that ECT is used more frequently in private compared with municipal, county, state, or federal health facilities. The findings are also consistent with national survey data indicating that among general hospital inpatients, ECT recipients are older, more often white, more likely to have private insurance, and more likely to live in more affluent areas.15 Contrary to its portrayal as a treatment inflicted on the poor or destitute, ECT is disproportionately administered to those more well-off.
As Slade et al4 note, there are likely a variety of factors that contribute to the low and uneven rate of ECT use. Perhaps the most important considerations are the stigma associated with receiving the treatment on the part of patients and in recommending or administering the treatment on the part of professionals. Nonclinical economic, cultural, and political factors greatly affect the availability and use of this intervention. Were we able to overcome these barriers, it is likely that untold numbers of patients would experience better outcomes by receiving an intervention that is often life altering and, for some, lifesaving.
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Corresponding Author: Harold A. Sackeim, PhD, Department of Psychiatry, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, 1051 Riverside Dr, New York, NY 10032 (has1@columbia.edu).
Published Online: June 28, 2017. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.1670
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Sackeim has served as a consultant for LivaNova (vagus nerve stimulation), MECTA Corporation (electroconvulsive therapy), and Neuronetics (transcranial magnetic stimulation). In the past, he has also consulted with or received research support from the brain stimulation companies Brainsway, Cyberonics, Cervel Neurotech/NeoStim, Magstim, NeoSync, and NeuroPace and from the pharmaceutical companies Cambridge Neuroscience, Eli Lilly and Company, Forest Laboratories, Hoffman-La Roche, Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, Novartis International, Pfizer, Warner-Lambert, and Wyeth-Ayerst. He is the originator of magnetic seizure therapy and is the inventor on a nonremunerative patent for focal electrically administered seizure therapy. He is also the inventor on a nonremunerative pending patent on titration in the current domain as a method for seizure threshold determination in electroconvulsive therapy. No other disclosures were reported.Firefox 3 displays five bars at the top of the application window before it displays the contents of the website loaded in the tab.
There is the title bar, the menu, the navigation toolbar, the bookmarks toolbar and the tabs of course.
They take up about 132 pixels in height on the screen which is more than a fourth of the screen estate of an Asus eeePC 7 and still an eights of the popular 1024x768 screen resolution.
If you analyze the toolbars in the Firefox header you may notice that there is lots of free space there. and if space is of a premium, you may consider it wasted space.
Update: Note that Mozilla modified the Firefox layout quite a bit. Recent versions of the browser show only three toolbars (title bar, address bar and tab bar). You can however display the menu bar with a tap on the Alt key or enable it permanently. Not all suggestions described in this guide can still be applied as a consequence.
The following article is going to show you how to save more than 60% of that header space. It is not necessary to apply all the changes. If you feel that you need the title bar or the status bar then you are of course free to keep them. The article however will be radical and outline how to use minimal screen estate in Firefox.
All the changes outlined are applied by customizing Firefox toolbars and installing several add-ons.
Links are provided when needed. Let us start:
Here is a picture of the default Firefox interface:
And here how it can look like after making the changes
The minimal interface combines several toolbars into one bar and removes the title and status bar.
The status bar and the tab bar are set to automatically hide. They will appear when they are needed.
1. Install Tiny Menu
Tiny Menu compresses the Firefox menu that lists the File, Edit etc entries into one menu item that can be displayed as text or as an icon.
2. Merging the Navigation Toolbar with the Menu bar.
We are now starting to merge toolbars to get rid of some of them. A right-click on blank space in the Menu toolbar will open a menu with the option to customize. Select that option.
Now drag and drop all elements that you need from the Navigation Toolbar (Reload, Home, Stop, Address Bar and Google Search) to the right side of the menu bar.
3. Remove the Navigation Toolbar
The |
June 20, found that NGOs often fail to adequately protect LGBT refugees and asylum seekers. Many NGOs either ignore the refugees’ plights or are ill equipped to work with LGBT people.
“Refugees fleeing persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender identity face further harm from the culture of silence in the international refugee protection system. They are placed in housing where they are exposed to violence, or are compelled to hide the true reason they were persecuted, which puts their legal status in jeopardy,” said Neil Grungras, ORAM executive director. “Among the most pervasively and violently persecuted in the world, LGBTI individuals are virtually invisible in the international refugee protection realm.”
“There appears to be a vicious cycle,” said Indiana University sociologist Oren Pizmony-Levy. “Many NGOs do not welcome LGBTI refugees and the asylum seekers don’t approach them. NGOs think that persecution based on sexual orientation or gender identity is not serious and NGOs tend to overlook the problem.”
ORAM, for World Refugee Day, offered recommendations, including:
• NGOs should create non-threatening and welcoming environments for LGBT individuals, encouraging staff to openly engage with issues of sexual orientation and gender identity while avoiding stereotypes and assumptions.
• NGOs should adopt codes of conduct preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
“No once chooses to be LGBTI and no one wants to become a refugee. ORAM calls on those working with refugees to recognize … World Refugee Day by taking steps to ensure LGBTI refugees feel safe in the hands of those tasked with protecting them. Only then can we help those who are forced to flee find safety, regain hope and rebuild their lives,” said Grungras.
The report was based on a survey of 384 NGOs from 100 countries.
Download a PDF of the current issue of Wisconsin Gazette and join our Facebook community.Walter Allen (far right), the business partner to Mick Beatovic (middle) and Adam Allan, both former owners of the West Milwaukee gun store, are seen in court during the Badger Guns trial in a Milwaukee County Court. Credit: Mike De Sisti
By of the
A jury late Tuesday found Badger Guns and its owner liable in the wounding of two Milwaukee police officers in a first-of-its-kind verdict that was being watched nationwide.
Jurors found Badger Guns broke four laws when a clerk sold a gun that was used to shoot Officer Bryan Norberg and former Officer Graham Kunisch in the head in 2009.
After nine hours of deliberation, the jury announced a verdict that included nearly $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages to the two officers. There will be an appeal.
This high-profile case was only the second of its kind nationwide to make it to a jury since Congress passed a law a decade ago holding gun dealers and manufacturers immune from such lawsuits. In the first, a jury found in favor of a gun store in Alaska.
The officers' attorney, Patrick Dunphy, said Norberg was "overwhelmed with emotion" by the verdict, while Kunisch, who suffered from brain damage in the shooting, was stoic — as he was for all of the trial. Norberg and Kunisch left the courthouse without commenting.
Dunphy said he knew the case would be tough because of the strong opinions around guns, but it was important to hold this business accountable for making a gun sale so riddled with red flags.
"I didn't want to send a message, I wanted to represent my clients, these two police officers," Dunphy said. "Will it change the way things are done around the country? Time will tell."
Shoddy practices cited
Brett Heaton Juarez, the jury's foreperson, said the jurors all agreed the business practices of Badger Guns were shoddy. He recounted testimony from the owners that they didn't train workers, didn't have policies and procedures they regularly followed, had not read federal regulations and didn't even know everything that was required on federal gun-selling forms.
"A responsible business owner would do more and everyone agreed on that from the start," he said. "Gun dealers have to do more than what we saw in this instance."
Heaton Juarez, of Milwaukee, who works in the financial sector, said the jury figured out damages by averaging jurors' opinions. They ranged from no money for the officers to much more than what was awarded. The jury awarded Kunisch about $3.5 million, Norberg $1.5 million and $730,000 in punitive damages.
The owners of Badger Guns, and its predecessor, Badger Outdoors, were not in court for the verdict.
A statement from Badger Guns' attorney James Vogts said, "When this case was filed, we knew it was likely to end up in the appellate courts. Significant legal issues were decided in the case that impacted the evidence the jury was permitted to consider and the legal standards they were told to apply. We will appeal."
Norberg and Kunisch were among six police officers wounded with guns sold by Badger Guns and Badger Outdoors. Two other officers have their own lawsuit set to go to trial next year, also in Milwaukee County courts. It's unclear if that trial will go ahead, Dunphy said.
The federal law passed in 2005 guarantees broad immunity to gun dealers. It allows for lawsuits when there are violations of the law by a gun shop, and that is what the Milwaukee officers alleged in their 2010 lawsuit.
In addition, Norberg and Kunisch contended that Badger Guns, Badger Outdoors, and their owners conspired to keep the gun-dealing operation going when federal regulators recommended revoking the license.
The jury found that Badger Guns had broken four of the five laws proposed to them in selling the gun and that the store "negligently entrusted" the firearm used to shoot the officers.
The jury did not find the owners of Badger Guns and Badger Outdoors conspired to sell guns unlawfully. On several questions, there were dissenting jurors. It required 10 of 12 jurors to find for the plaintiffs.
The conspiracy allegation rose out of how the store went from being Badger Outdoors to Badger Guns in 2007.
In 2006, regulators from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recommended revoking Badger Outdoors' license. But there was no revocation.
The players then took on new roles and a new license was issued to Adam Allan, the son of former owner Walter Allan, creating what one federal official called a "clean slate," a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found. The other owner of Badger Outdoors, Mick Beatovic, said he always planned to retire.
The jury did not hear evidence about that recommended revocation because the owners said they didn't know about it until they read it in the Journal Sentinel.
Heaton Juarez said the jury of eight women and four men wondered if Badger Outdoors was in jeopardy of losing its license when the store changed hands. He said had they known revocation was recommended, they may have found in favor of the officers on that question, too.
Top crime gun sellers
Badger Guns and Badger Outdoors were top sellers of crime guns recovered in Milwaukee for more than a decade. In 2005, Badger Outdoors was the top seller of crime guns in the nation with 537 such weapons recovered.
Such gun trace data has not been released recently because of a secrecy measure passed by Congress.
Badger Guns' license was revoked by ATF in 2011 but the Jacob Collins transaction was not cited as a violation, so the jury did not hear that the store's license was revoked.
Michael Allan, Walter's other son, now runs a gun store in the same location.
Much of the nearly three-week trial focused on the events on a Saturday in May 2009. Collins came to Badger Guns on that day to buy a gun for Julius Burton, who was too young to buy a handgun from a store.
Dunphy laid out what he called telltale signs of a straw buy: Burton was in the store and pointed to the gun he wanted; Collins initially marked that he was not the buyer of the gun on the form, but was allowed to change that — and also change his address; Collins and Burton left the store to get more cash to pay for the gun; Collins didn't present an ID when he picked up the gun.
After the verdict, Dunphy said he thought the most telling testimony came from Badger Outdoors co-owner Beatovic, who said there were red flags in the sale of the gun to Collins.
Attorneys for the West Milwaukee gun dealer countered at closing that the evidence in the trial failed to show the clerk who sold the gun or the store owners had reason to believe the person was buying the gun for someone else. They said the blame falls on the man who shot the officers.
Norberg and Kunisch were shot by Burton during a routine stop on Milwaukee's near south side a month after the gun was sold. Burton is serving 80 years while Collins already finished his two years in federal prison.
At a news conference following the verdict, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett predicted the verdict would have national implications and called the actions of the owners a "clear cut case of negligence."
"They recognized way too late that what they were doing was wrong," Barrett said.
Jesse Garza of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.Over the years however, we have never made our way into the Montauk Brewing Company. When Ryan suggested we go out to Montauk to visit the brewery I jumped at the opportunity. Without knowing what to expect we got on the train and began our trip out to my favorite place. We arrived before the brewery opened at noon, which was okay with me because we were able to go down to the beach! Then, it was finally time to head to the brewery.
It was a lot smaller than I had expected; a small red house with a lot of outdoor seating and beach house charm. We walked inside and again, the tasting room was a lot smaller than I had imagined. There was a short bar right in front with 6 taps flanked by two high top tables. The setup complemented the “beach town” escape that Montauk offers, and I immediately felt an inviting vibe. There were a few other couples already at the bar so we quickly walked up, claimed our seats, and ordered two flights.BISHO – Six people have died since the start of the initiation season in the Eastern Cape, the provincial health department said on Monday.
Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said five of the deaths took place in the OR Tambo region, while one boy died in the Chris Hani region over the past week.
He said one boy from Port St Johns had a septic penis and a swollen knee, while a 29-year-old initiate from Qumbu was suspected to have died as a result of defaulting on his chronic medication.
”On the latest deaths, an 18-year-old died on the way to hospital on Friday after circumcision at an illegal school,” said Kupelo.
“The second young man, aged 22, died on Saturday. He attended a registered circumcision school in Tsolo. We await postmortem results to accurately confirm the causes of deaths.”
No arrests have been made.
The initiation season is usually associated with numerous deaths stemming from complications arising from botched circumcisions.
Last year, more that 25 young people died and more than 60 were hospitalised across the Eastern Cape. The department blames greedy traditional surgeons who have hijacked the custom to make a quick buck, putting the youngsters’ lives at risk.Seven years ago Thuba Sithole was accused of committing an armed robbery. Two years after that he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in Leeuwkop Prison. But the story uncovered by the Wits Justice Project shows shoddy police work, dodgy eyewitness testimony, a dismissive magistrate and a careless defence lawyer resulted in an innocent man being put behind bars. By RUTH HOPKINS and KYLA HERRMANNSEN.
In 2007, Thuba Sithole’s life was very structured. The then-23-year-old woke up every morning to walk an hour to his job at the Pick ‘n Pay store at the Bright Water Commons mall in Randburg, Johannesburg. When he knocked off work, around 7pm, he would walk back from the store to his uncle’s flat in Windsor East where he lived during the week. He would get home just in time to catch the soap Generations on television. Every month, he sent R500 – one fifth of his salary – to his one-year-old daughter who lived in Mpumalanga with her mother, and he would visit her twice a month. According to his uncle, Elias Nyalungu, Sithole’s life revolved around work, church and his daughter. He hardly drank and didn’t smoke. Whenever he headed out with his best friend and Nyalungu’s son, Mussa, they were back home before 8.30pm.
But one night, on 31 August 2007, Sithole did not come home. His uncle was instantly alarmed. “When he phoned me and told me he had been arrested, I was shocked,” he says.
Sithole was walking down Elise Road in Randburg when a male and female police officer stopped him. The man pointed a gun at him. “Tell me where your friends are’, she asked me,” said Sithole, who is currently serving a 15-year sentence at Leeuwkop prison in Bryanston.
Sithole was accused of playing a part in an attempted hijacking or ‘driveway robbery’ on nearby Gemsbok Road in Robinhills. Two young women, Shannon Sutton and Simone Almond, pulled up outside their friend Lisa Kennedy’s house in Gemsbok Road at approximately 7.15pm in the evening to fetch her en route to a live music gig in Kempton Park. While the young women were waiting for Kennedy in the driveway, three men came running towards them, one wielding a firearm. The one man pushed Sutton to the ground and held a gun to her head, while the two other men rummaged through her handbag to find her car key. But, despite locating the car key and turning the key in the ignition, they were unable to release the gear lock and could not drive away. Kennedy’s stepmother saw the commotion from inside the house and called the police who arrived at the scene just minutes later. The three men dropped the car keys and ran away on foot in the direction of Fountainbleu, carrying Sutton’s handbag.
Kennedy and Almond got into one of the police vans to assist the police in pursuing and identifying the suspects. The young women and the police saw three men standing on the pavement at the corner of Blesbok and Eland Road. The men started running in the opposite direction immediately after seeing the police van. The police officers then got out of the van and gave chase on foot.
Sithole and his co-accused, Ayanda Nene, were caught, handcuffed, put into the back of the police van and later detained at the Linden police station. The police never found the man in possession of the gun, who was described as wearing a white pinstriped shirt.
Sithole and Nene were charged with armed robbery, their bail application was denied and on 6 December 2007, they were brought before a magistrate at the Randburg Magistrate’s Court. The magistrate struck the case off the roll because Sutton, one of the three witnesses, was in the United States at the time. Kennedy, however, testified before he threw the case out.
“The magistrate said the suspects would not spend Christmas in jail if the main witness was not present. When he said that, a group of men in the public gallery of the court jumped up and shouted. I looked around and saw the man who had held the gun and who got away. I pointed this out to the police officers who were present, but they said there was nothing they could do,” Kennedy says.
Sithole thought this was the end of the matter and he went back to Pick ‘n Pay where he was rehired as a cook in the deli department. Ephraim Maluleke was his manager at the time. “Thuba was a quiet, polite guy. He was always on time and pleasant, never rude. He was a good employee. None of my colleagues thought he had done it. The manager who rehired him knew he was arrested for an armed robbery; it says a lot that they took him back.”
Sithole went back to his structured life and in his spare time, he followed a course to become a security officer, a job that would make him more money. Part of the certification process required by the Security Officers Board (SOB) is a background check for criminal records. “I thought the robbery case had been finalised, but they told me that there was still a case open against me,” said Sithole. What Sithole didn’t know at that point was that Sutton had returned from the US, which reopened the case for prosecution. When Sithole walked into the office of the investigating officer, detective Mr Rigardo Peach, on 11 April 2008 to find out what was going on, he was arrested on the spot.
Meanwhile, the other suspect, Nene, had vanished into thin air. The police did not manage to track him down, so on 24 February 2009 Sithole appeared alone before magistrate Phanuel Mudau at the Randburg Magistrate’s Court. And this is where plot thickens.
Sithole, represented by a Legal Aid attorney, Nasima Khan, pleaded not guilty. First on the stand was Sutton who described the events of the attempted robbery and then said of Sithole, “I think the gentleman with the red shirt is the gentleman here.” But later, when pressed to give a clear answer about Sithole’s role in the crime, Sutton admitted, “I cannot say beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is him. I do not know.”
Almond was up next. She testified: “…I do not know what to say but I just recognise him.” She said that she could not remember what happened exactly five times, explaining that it was too long ago and she was in shock. The third complainant, Kennedy, also testified that the man in the dock was in her mind the same red-shirted man from the scene of the crime, but she was equally unspecific in her description of Sithole.
The arresting officer, Craig Cowey, testified: “The one suspect that I caught ran down Eland road. (…) I asked my suspect where he was going to and he said he had just come back from Pick ‘n Pay at the Waterfront where he works.” However, Cowey told the Wits Justice Project a different story. “I chased him for half an hour; we were jumping over fences and walls, running through a field, I briefly lost sight of him. I was catching my breath when I saw him again. He was calmly walking down the street, towards me.” Cowey said he put a hand on Sithole’s heart to check his heart rate. Because Sithole was sweating, Cowey concluded he must have been the guy who had been running away from him.
Sithole, however, doesn’t remember being arrested by Cowey at all. He testified he was indeed walking down the road calmly, but reiterated what he told the court, that he was “arrested by a female and male officer. The man pointed a gun at me. They handcuffed me and brought me to a police van and that was where I saw Cowey, who started asking me questions.” Almond and Kennedy also remember a woman police officer being present at the scene of the arrest.
The statements of the three young women are riddled with inconsistencies. One of them claimed in her police statement that Sithole was wearing a red shirt, but after she had seen him in court in 2007, she changed it to a Pick ‘n Pay T-shirt. When asked why she thought it was him, one of the women answered: “Because the arresting officer as well as Simone and Lisa (the other complainants) are sure it is him.” One of the women said he had short hair, while the other said he was bald. One said he was wearing tracksuit bottoms, the other was convinced he wore jeans.
But these inconsistencies are not as alarming as their lack of certainty that Sithole was actually involved in the robbery and was not just a random guy walking down the street. Sutton, the first witness, said in court, “I cannot say beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is him.” Now, five years after the court case took place, Kennedy has admitted that she was uncomfortable with her statement. “I’ve always wondered if he had really done it. I wasn’t 100% sure it was him, but it was a traumatic experience. I was very young and I was afraid.” All three girls were matriculating at the time of the robbery.
Sithole’s lawyer, Kahn, failed to bring up the most glaring discrepancy in the case: Sithole could never have covered the distance from his work to the scene of the crime in a mere 15 minutes. The crime took place at approximately 7.15pm in the evening and Sithole left his place of employment, the Pick ‘n Pay at Brightwater Commons, at 7.06pm, which was confirmed by his employer. It takes 45 to 60 minutes to walk from Pick ‘n Pay to the scene of the crime in Gemsbok Road. The 30-minute chase officer Cowey had conveniently left out of his testimony before the court coincides with Sithole turning the corner into Elise road around 7.45pm.
There was no effort made to ascertain Sithole actually was employed by Pick ‘n Pay, despite his repeated requests to the police to take him to Pick ‘n Pay.
His manager, Dean Dekanah, wrote a letter stating that Sithole left the store at 7.06pm, but the magistrate dismissed this evidence because while the letter did have a Pick ‘n Pay stamp on it, it was not printed on an official letterhead.
Mudau was unperturbed by, and Kahn did not protest the fact that no stolen goods were found on Sithole, nor were there any of his fingerprints on Sutton’s car. If the crime occurred as described, Sithole’s fingerprints would have been all over Sutton’s car and her car keys – as Sithole allegedly opened the door, got into the car and in vain tried to start it and release the gear lock. Sutton and Almond told the Wits Justice Project that they distinctly remembered a police officer dusting the car for fingerprints on the night of the crime but no record is reflected anywhere in the police docket nor was fingerprint evidence – or rather the lack thereof – brought up by the magistrate or defence attorney during the 2009 court case.
In accordance with South African case law, if a trial hinges on a single eyewitness testimony – and not on forensic evidence such as DNA or fingerprints or CCTV camera footage of the accused – the evidence of the eyewitness should be treated with “extreme caution”. Though it is possible to convict an accused on single witness testimony the testimony must be “satisfactory” in every material respect and every effort should be made to test the witness testimony for any holes or weak spots.
Outside the witness testimony of two impressionable girls, one of whom has admitted she was never certain it was him, there is no concrete hard evidence that irrefutably links Sithole to having committed the attempted robbery. His defence attorney, Kahn, did not attempt to secure this evidence.
With legal representation this weak, magistrate Mudau could gloss over the glaring discrepancies in the evidence. “I am satisfied under the circumstances that the state has managed to prove its case against the accused beyond a reasonable doubt. On the other hand I do not find that the accused’s version is reasonably possibly true.” Mudau found Sithole guilty of committing robbery with aggravating circumstances and sentenced him to 15 years behind bars.
Sithole’s guilt was self-evident in Mudau’s view because: “I find it more than a coincidence that accused would have in his cell phone the name of Ayanda. Ayanda was the man (…) who was arrested at the same time that he was.” It didn’t bother the magistrate that no effort was made to phone this Ayanda or to submit phone records as evidence. The mother of Sithole’s child is called Ayanda. “Thuba is a good man. When he visited he always brought food and clothing for our child. And every month he sent us R500,” she said.
Mudau did not grant Sithole a leave to appeal, but his Legal Aid lawyer, Constance Xamsama, petitioned the South Gauteng High Court. Leave to appeal was granted “on the grounds of possibility of error of identity”. Judge Neels Claassen, however, dismissed the appeal on 31 May 2011, stating: “The accused placed himself on the scene where the arrest took place (…) the state has proven overwhelmingly the guilt of the accused.” Claassen found no problem with the magistrate’s comment on Sithole’s phone contacts, the glaring inconsistencies in the witnesses’ statements or the fact that Sithole never could have reached the crime scene in time to commit the crime.
Lumkani, Sithole’s half-brother, lived with him at his father’s house in Joubert Park, when he was not working at Pick ‘n Pay. “Thuba is a simple man. He was always trying to fend for himself. Everyone in my family works; my father was a security guard, my mother works in a factory in Kempton Park. Thuba worked since he was 17, in a bakery, at a barber, various jobs. Whenever he was out of a job, he would be working to find a new one.”
Sithole has wasted five years in prison for a crime he did not commit. DM
Ruth Hopkins is a journalist for the Wits Justice Project.
At the time of writing Kyla Herrmannsen was a Wits Justice Project intern. She is now a television producer for Health-e News Service
Megan Geldenhuys of the Center for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) assisted the Wits Justice Project in accessing relevant court documents in this case
Main photo: Lewkop prison (Kyla Herrmannsen)
Are You A South AfriCAN or a South AfriCAN'T?
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Please or create an account to view the comments. To join the conversation, sign up as a Maverick Insider.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Last week, the City Council in Washington, D.C. voted to raise the District’s minimum wage by 30 percent to $15. Unions and their activist allies were quick to celebrate the decision.
But a recent survey of 100 affected District businesses conducted by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) suggests wage hike proponents shouldn’t pop the champagne just yet. EPI’s survey finds that one in three respondents are “very likely” to cut staffing levels in response to a $15 minimum wage. When you consider that most small businesses have profit margins in the low single-digits, it’s easy to understand why such a dramatic increase in labor costs would force them to cut back.
The survey also finds that the wage hike will cause one in five businesses in the city to strongly consider relocating across state lines. Given that the minimum wage across the river in Virginia is less than half that forthcoming wage in D.C., this is also not a surprise.
The associated reduced job opportunities will only exacerbate Washington’s 45 percent unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds without a high school diploma. (In some neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, the most recently available data shows overall unemployment for 16- to 24-year-olds approaching 60 percent.)
The societal implications of so many young men out of work are broader than those associated with just losing out on a paycheck. As Voltaire explained, “Work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” And vice is a pressing concern at the moment for policymakers and residents contending with a dramatic spike in violent crime.
After a decades-long drop, violent crime, which is overwhelmingly committed by young men, is rising again in cities like Washington D.C. The murder rate in the District was up more than 50 percent last year. Homicides are up again this year in more than two-dozen major U.S. cities.
Decades of academic literature finds that unemployment is correlated with crime. A 2003 study in Criminology finds that employment in early adulthood significantly reduces crime even among those who have already engaged in criminal activity. And a recent University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania study published in Science found that teens with summer jobs committed violent crimes at about half the rate of the control group.
“If something doesn’t change, if we don’t get jobs for these kids, if we don’t change the economic situation, I’m worried that we could be looking at a bloodbath,” said the Rev. Corey Brooks, a pastor in Chicago, which has an even worse youth employment and crime crisis than D.C. “If something doesn’t happen, I fear that we’re potentially looking at one of the worst summers we’ve ever had.”
On July 1, Chicago’s minimum wage rises to $10.50 on its way to $13. Instead of finding more jobs for the city’s kids, it will put them further out of reach. Similar scenes are playing out in cities like Baltimore and Los Angeles, which have thousands of youth not working while city politicians are pursuing or have just passed dramatic minimum wage increases to make it even harder for the least skilled to get a job.
Recognizing how job opportunities reduce violence, many big cities have publicly funded summer jobs programs. Washington’s Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program provides subsidized jobs for 12,000 District youth aged 14 to 24. Yet many of the same policymakers championing these summer jobs programs are exhibiting cognitive dissonance by also supporting dramatic minimum wage increases that put nonsubsidized jobs further out of reach.
More crime, not just lost jobs, may be the real legacy of the Fight for $15.
• Richard Berman is the president of Berman and Company, a public affairs firm in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Some of the biggest breakthroughs in the plant-based world this year have been achieved through the magic of film.
Look at the success of documentary What the Health, which has inspired many people to go plant-based - or Netflix hit Okja, which reportedly had a direct impact on the number of Google searches for'vegan' after its release.
Anticipated
An upcoming film which many are hoping will have the same impact is Eating Our Way to Extinction.
The film, which is slated for release next year, has been in development over the last 12 months since the filmmakers launched a crowdfunding campaign.
The crowdfunder reached its target of around £140,000 in January of this year, and according to producers Otto and Ludo Brockway, they have been working hard since.
Principal photography started in August, with some exciting interviews (including Virgin boss Richard Branson) being filmed.
The film looks at animal agriculture (Photo: Eating Our Way to Extinction)
Exposing the cost
According to the filmmakers, they want to 'expose the true cost of eating animals'.
They say: "The film looks at the latest science of what is happening to the ecology and climate of the planet and shows the conclusive evidence that the main cause is animal agriculture.
"The film will feature the latest research from some of the world’s largest studies on human health and nutrition, that show beyond any doubt that a plant-based diet, free from animal products, is far healthier for humans in the long term.
"We will be showing the explosive and damning evidence that exposes the twisted economics in the foundations of an industry that is one of the most corrupt in the world.
"We also look at some ground breaking new research from animal-behaviourists that shows us how farm animals and fish are not only far more intelligent than most people give them credit for, but also share many of the same emotional needs and wants as humans."
Phenomenon
The pair describe the shift towards a plant-based diet as 'a global phenomenon'.
Part of the film will look at the 'explosive' growth of the plant-based food industry, and the relative 'collapse' of traditional animal ag.
Otto and Ludo say: "Celebrities, leaders and famous athletes all over the world are making the switch, and the growing interest in a plant based lifestyle is hitting the mainstream media almost every day.
"The film will aim to leave audiences feeling moved and inspired; that by making the shift to a plant based diet, they are joining millions of people all over the planet in a global movement that is beginning to change the world."
READ MORE:
The British Dietetic Association Lists 'Raw Veganism' As Celebrity Diet To Avoid
Vegan Stars Miley Cyrus And Moby Ask Fans To Help 'Scared' Animals As Wildfires Blaze
Major UK Supermarkets Ramp Up Vegan Offerings To Meet Growing DemandThe pop-rock band also premieres an exclusive preview of its latest music video.
If there’s a term 21st century pop-punk fans grown to hate, it’s “hiatus,” or more specifically, “indefinite hiatus.” Scene giants like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Blink-182 have all taken well-publicized vacations from the spotlight with no defined return date, some reuniting, some not.
The All-American Rejects took a different approach. The hitmakers behind “Move Along” and “Gives You Hell” went away largely anonymously, allowing their members to take a well-earned break and to fall back in love with the music that made them in the first place. Since the release of 2012’s Kids in the Street, the quartet -- frontman Tyson Ritter, guitarists Nick Wheeler and Mike Kennerty and drummer Chris Gaylor -- have been taking on their own musical endeavors and enjoying separate private lives in cities across the country.
That’s all about to change. A pair of new songs -- "Sweat" and "Close Your Eyes" -- are due July 7, with their fifth full-length looming in the fall. We hopped on the phone with Ritter to get all the details: the benefits of pressing pause and ignoring outside pressures on your art, learning to love writing again, and returning to the project you’ve been wielding since adolescence.
Check out the music video trailer for the upcoming single, “Sweat,” below, and read on for our conversation with Ritter.
Kids in the Street was the last record, in 2012. A year later you released “Air,” a track under your own name to, in your words, “tide fans over until the next Rejects record.” Were you flirting with the idea of releasing a solo record?
I was just playing around. I had fallen back in L.A. We were a band who lived on the road. There’s an interesting thing when you live on that above-ground submarine for so long. Once you get back to your life you [ask], “What am I doing? What is this? I’ve got a house and I’m supposed to wake up in this everyday now.” Getting back into music, I was touching some water, putting my toe in it, seeing what it felt like to be in the studio by myself. I did [“Air”] with [producer] Greg Wells who we did Kids in the Street with. It felt really safe.
I don’t know what I was doing. I think I wanted to create and do something with the song that came to me while I was on this European run for 12 weeks with Blink-182 in 2013. I was [acting] on Parenthood at the time and they ended up using it. Looking back, I’m not even sure I understood the experience, like, “Wow, this is my studio, this is my time. This is my little playground.” To tide the fans over, I’m not sure it did any of that, but it was an offering.
What have you been up to for the last five years?
It’s been forever! Most people say they haven’t heard from us since 2009 or 2010, so to them it’s been seven years. It’s funny, I got in front of this microphone when I was 17, sent out to fly around the world, get courted by labels and we’ve gone on the road for 24 months for every record. We beat The Roots in 2010 for the most shows played; I think we did over 270. I got a doctorate in asphalt and rock and roll. The last five years, if you’re a fan -- or seven, if you’re a fickle fan -- has been us finally putting our feet into our own earth and going, “Oh, what’s life like without this thing we think is defining us?”
I’ve gotten married, which is a really beautiful, private experience for me. I’ve been exploring acting in the last few years, that’s been such a free form of art to take the pressure off writing music. I booked this HBO thing, and we were up in Calgary in the woods and I had this acoustic guitar staring at me every day, but it wasn’t asking me to step up to it. It wasn’t telling me that I have to do this and music came to me. It was this beautiful, natural thing and I remember when I was 15 and 16 writing that first record, I did it on those sad Sundays, by myself, not thinking, “Oh, this is what the label wants.” I think a lot bands get caught up in the chatter and the big wheel that they get turning from themselves and they can lose that sense of purity. That’s the one thing I knew that I didn’t want to do. For those who think of us as just a pop rock band, that’s fine, we’re just a pop rock band that is doing what we do as purely as we do it. To find this new offering, it took walking away from it and experiencing a bit more life.
Was there ever a moment where it looked like your Kids |
man in Tennessee opened fire Thursday, killing a woman and grazing a police officer. Police said the man may have been angry about recent officer-related killings involving African-Americans.
Officers were wounded by gunfire Friday in ambushes in Missouri and Georgia, although as of Sunday, police had not determined the motives behind the shootings.
Craig said it should be a crime to make threats to kill police officers. “Especially now, in this current climate,” he said. “I don’t think that’s protected speech.
“In California, if you threaten to kill someone, the state statute says that’s a terrorist threat,” Craig said. “When I was in L.A., I personally arrested people for that. But with social media threats, it’s a new issue that needs to be clarified. So let’s clarify it now.”
Subjective or objective threats?
Dan Korobkin, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, declined to comment without seeing the alleged threats.
Courts have ruled that “true threats” are not protected under the First Amendment. But determining when lawful speech crosses the line and becomes unlawful is difficult, and the definition of a “true threat” is open to interpretation.
Craig said in the current environment, anyone who says they want to kill police officers is making a threat.
“When we arrested these guys, each one of them said, ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.’ One of the threats was more vague, along the lines of ‘I wish more cops would be killed.’ Maybe you could argue that isn’t far enough.
“But the others were specific: ‘Kill police officers.’ If that’s not a threat, what is?”
ghunter@detroitnews.com
The Associated Press and Breana Noble fo The Detroit News contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/29H4b2aThe dust-up on social media over Rebecca Tuvel’s article, “In Defense of Transracialism” published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, has given a new meaning to the public/private split central to the history of feminism. For decades, feminists have argued the personal is political, and explored the politics of our private lives. The split between what people wrote to both Rebecca Tuvel and to me in private, and what they felt compelled to say in public is one indication that the explosion of personal insults and vicious attacks on social media is symptomatic of something much bigger than the actual issues discussed in Tuvel’s article. In private messages, some people commiserated, expressed support, and apologized for what was happening and for not going public with their support. As one academic wrote to me in a private message, “sorry I’m not saying this publicly (I have no interest in battling the mean girls on Facebook) but fwiw it’s totally obvious to me that you haven’t been committing acts of violence against marginalized scholars.” Later, this same scholar wrote, again in private, saying Tuvel’s article is “a tight piece of philosophy” that makes clear that the position that “transgender is totally legit, [and] transracial is not—can only be justified using convoluted essentialist metaphysics. I will write to her privately and tell her so.” Others went further and supported Tuvel in private while actually attacking her in public. In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?
For those lucky readers who didn’t follow the nasty attacks on social media, a bit of background is in order. To put it all too simply, in her Hypatia article, Tuvel claimed that the very public cases of Rachel Dolezal’s transracial transition and Caitlyn Jenner’s transgender transition operate according to a similar logic when it comes to thinking about identity and identity politics. Tuvel argued in favor of both transgender and transracial identities, as well as for a more fluid conception of identity more generally. In subsequent responses to her critics, Tuvel has said her article was a response to the media sentiment that transgender identity is socially acceptable (Jenner was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, was a runner-up for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year”, and was named woman of the year by Glamour magazine), while transracial identity is taboo (Dolezal was fired from her job at the NAACP and scorned in the media).
Last week, a flurry of outrage stormed through social media calling the article “wack shit,” “crap,” “offensive,” “violent,” and more. And its author was called “transphobic,” “racist,” “crazy,” “stupid,” and worse. Many were (and still are) calling for a retraction of the article and an apology from Tuvel. Some scholars associated with the journal posted condemnations of the article and issued apologies for it. Eventually, a group of associate editors, spearheaded by Cressida Heyes, whose work is criticized in the article, published an official condemnation of the piece indicating that the journal had made a mistake in publishing it, which of course, just makes the journal look bad. The article was vetted by reviewers and editors, and published, after all.
The feeding frenzy in response to Tuvel’s article couldn’t have happened without social media. The viciousness of the attacks was fueled by the mob mentality of Facebook. Dissenters, even those who just wanted a civil discussion of the issue, were shut down immediately or afraid to voice their opinions in public. Some who in private were sympathetic to Tuvel, felt compelled to join in the attacking mob. The thought police were in full force. Both Tuvel and the journal were under pressure to retract the article and apologize. In a private message to me, one of my academic friends said one editor’s Facebook apology for publishing such an “offensive” article, “sounded like something ISIS makes its captors read in a hostage video before beheading them.” Joking aside, there was (and still is) tremendous pressure to condemn Tuvel and her article. Some who joined in the protests later admitted in private that they hadn’t even read the article. And at least one person who signed a petition demanding that Hypatia retract the text in question, later, when the media tides were turning, wanted to remove her signature from the damning letter. I wonder how many of those who signed that letter had actually read the article. Just this morning, I received a text from someone I respect, lamenting the cruelty on social media, but telling me she was sure she would disagree with the article and find it offensive, even though she hadn’t yet read it.
I have to admit, I didn’t want to enter the Facebook shit-storm and face the wrath of the “mean girls” either. I felt the need to defend Rebecca Tuvel not only because she is a friend and former Ph.D. student of mine, but also because I respect her work, which is always well argued—whether or not you agree with it—and I found her arguments compelling. I summoned up the courage and entered the fray suggesting only that Hypatia invite critical responses to the article. This suggestion was met with ridicule and derision. I then asked critics to respond with philosophical arguments rather than lobbing insults, which was met with claims that I was doing “violence” to marginalized scholars.
The most vocal figures on social media claimed they were harmed, even traumatized, by Tuvel’s article, and by my defense of its right to exist. Some said that Tuvel’s article harmed them, and I was doing violence to them, even triggering PTSD, just by calling for an open discussion of, and debate over, the arguments in the article. While I readily agree that words can do harm and that hate speech exists, my call for philosophical engagement with Tuvel’s article does not constitute harmful speech. In fact, if an essay that openly supports trans identity does violence, and defense of open debate causes PTSD, then by which name should we call the physical violence inflicted on trans people and others daily? What of the PTSD caused by domestic violence, rape, and hate crimes? If an essay written by a young feminist scholar in support of trans rights is violent and harmful, then haven’t we leveled all violence such that everything has become swept up by it, and the very notion of violence has lost its meaning? Certainly, at the very least, we need to distinguish between levels of violence. One Facebook critic called my remarks “unforgivable,” seemingly putting them on par with crimes against humanity. At this point in the social media blowout, (until the Daily Nous published a defense of the article, which elicited support from all sides) I seemed to be the only one publicly defending Tuvel, in spite of the private support she received from folks too afraid to go public.
Through every medium imaginable, senior feminist scholars were pressuring, even threatening, Tuvel that she wouldn’t get tenure and her career would be ruined if she didn’t retract her article. When I called out the worst insulters for threatening an untenured junior feminist, they claimed they were the victims here not her. I wonder. Tuvel’s article in support of transgender and transracial identities didn’t threaten anyone, and didn’t jeopardize anyone’s career. Whereas those calling for a retraction were doing just that to a junior woman in a field, philosophy, nearly 80% of which is still populated by men and which is still resistant to feminism. A senior feminist philosopher called to warn Tuvel that she should be appealing to the “right people” if she wanted to get tenure and warned her not to publish her book on this topic or it would ruin her career and mark her as “all that is wrong with white feminism.”
Part of the problem with the response to Tuvel’s article is that some seem to feel that they are the only ones who have the legitimate right to talk about certain topics. At best, this is identity politics run amok; at worst it is a turf war. Indeed, it leads to a kind of academic Selfie culture where all we can do is take pictures of ourselves and never consider the lives of others. Another criticism of Tuvel’s article is that it didn’t cite enough trans scholarship or philosophy of race. While this may be true, it doesn’t defeat her argument. Apparently, Tuvel’s worst offense was the “deadnaming” of Caitlyn Jenner. Deadnaming is using a trans person’s birth name instead of their chosen name, which can do harm when outing a person as trans, or when that person considers their old self or old name “dead.” I was fiercely attacked on Facebook for pointing out that Jenner is a public figure, a Reality TV star, who doesn’t reject deadnaming herself in her book: “Transgender guidelines suggest that I no longer be referred to as Bruce in any circumstance. Here are my guidelines: I will refer to the name Bruce when I think it appropriate. Bruce existed for sixty-five years, and Caitlyn is just going on her second birthday. That’s the reality.” The irony is that some of the same people publicly disparaging Tuvel for deadnaming Jenner, privately admitted that they’d never heard the word “deadnaming” before the Facebook frenzy. Call it a teachable moment.
In response to my comments on social media about philosophical engagement, some argued it was unnecessary because the issues raised in Tuvel’s article were discussed “decades ago.” That seems unlikely given that the main theme in Tuvel’s article was the 2015 media response to Jenner and Dolezal. Even so, it’s not harmful to ask to see those arguments applied specifically to Tuvel’s article. To the contrary, it should give scholars an opportunity to renew their positions with more vigor, especially given the current spotlight on Tuvel’s essay. Some suggest they don’t want to “dignify” the article with a response. They’d rather just express their outrage at its very existence. My point here isn’t to defend the arguments in Tuvel’s article, but rather to defend the possibility of an open dialogue and debate, and to try to diagnose the outraged response to that idea—the idea upon which the discipline of philosophy, and the academy more generally, if not also democracy itself, are based.
We live in an era of outrage—let’s call it the Trump era. That’s how Trump got elected, by voicing outrage. His most ardent disciples uncritically and unthinkingly believe everything he says because it is expressed with anger and zest. Civility is suspected of being “political,” which has become a dirty word. It’s hard to argue with outrage, and that’s precisely the problem. Outrage has become the new truth. At one extreme, we have Trump and his supporters proudly embracing political incorrectness, and at the other, we have the political correctness police calling for censorship of a scholarly article written by someone working for social justice. On both sides, we have virulent intolerance fueled by hatred. The feminist thought police are the flip side of the alternative facts machine. And both are threats to the open dialogue that is so vital for critical thought inside and outside the academy.
What I find most distressing about the hostile attacks against Tuvel, the article, and my defense of an open dialogue about it, is that there are people and institutions out there that are trying to deny rights to women, especially trans women and women of color. Dissent and debate allow feminism—and scholarship more generally—to flourish and advance, while insults and censorship are the tools of those who would shut us down. In this battle, feminists embracing inclusivity are not the enemy. Far from it. The real enemy is our culture of displaced outrage and its symptoms, namely the thought police and the alternative facts machine. Let’s have critical debate and philosophical arguments instead of cyber-shaming and personal insults.Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
Enlarge Image Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Donald Trump's priorities are clear.
Tech industry leaders are to attend a conversation with the president-elect at Trump Tower on Wednesday.
But Kanye West got a personal meeting on Tuesday.
Just days ago, West was released from hospital, having suffered an unknown trauma. Now here he was, dressed in black with a fetching gold chain, posing with Donald Trump.
Naturally, Twitter endured conniptions. West began to trend, as other events receded in Twitter's gaze.
As a Twitter user by the name of James Melville tweeted: "Kanye West arriving at Trump Tower is trending above the atrocities at #Aleppo. Social media priorities have turned the lights off."
You think this event wasn't serious? Please consider that C-SPAN (tagline: "Where history unfolds daily") tweeted about it.
Some will wonder what West and Trump have in common. Well, during a recent concert West insisted that he would have voted for Trump. Had he voted at all, that is.
Might Trump consider West as his secretary of state for culture? All Trump would divulge to CNN is that they'd been friends for a long time and had discussed "life."
I feel sure that he at least asked West to help him prepare for the boring tech leaders. One surefire question: "What's it like being the next Steve Jobs, Kanye?"
West was reluctant to answer questions. "I just want to take a picture right now," was all he said.
That's what this was about: image. And, Trump's detractors would say, distraction from the awkwardness around suggestions that hackers backed by Russia were intent on getting Trump elected.
Some Twitterers didn't delve so deeply. They were more moved by the sheer spectacle.
A user named Ron Asher, for example, offered: "To give you an idea of the massive scale of Trump Tower -- The atrium was big enough to hold the egos of both Trump & Kanye West."
Where egos dare to tread, mere mortals gasp in wonder.When Hisham Salama grabbed an Uber to visit a friend at Toronto’s St. Joseph’s hospital Friday night, he was expecting to pay around $20.
Instead, the app informed him that his bill for a 20-minute ride was $18,518.
“My first reaction was to just laugh, because I thought it was probably just an error but then about 20 minutes (later), when I was with my friend, I thought I should probably check my credit card to make sure everything was OK," Salama, who had opted for the metered Taxi fare rather than the standard Uber X ride, told VICE. That’s when he noticed there was a significant amount pending on his credit card.
Salama, whose ride lasted from 5:14 PM to 5:35 PM on Dec. 8, contacted Uber for help. He said he was unable to get through to anyone from customer service, but received a phone call from the ride sharing service the next morning.
At that point, according to Salama, an Uber support representative told him: "I can confirm that based on the pickup and drop-off locations of the trip you took, this fare is correct."
Salama said he was told he could get back in touch with Uber if he had any other issues.
"I don’t know on what planet a 20-minute cab ride equals to $18,518.50," he said.
After Salama and his friends posted about the incident on social media, he ended up getting a refund and a $150 credit to his Uber account.
He told VICE the manager he spoke to said the support representative “was confused with the trip and issue.”
"She was very nice but again I told her that this isn't the resolution to the issue and I requested to have a fact-based conversation with the leadership,” Salama said, noting he’s frustrated at the amount of effort it took to get a refund. He was refunded by Saturday for the Thursday ride.
"If it takes an army of people to tweet and post online to interest you and for you to respond, that is a serious issue."
Uber has not yet responded to VICE’s request for comment but apologized in a statement to Slate.
"We have provided a full refund to this rider and apologized to him for this experience," Uber told Slate. "We have safeguards in place to help prevent something like this from happening, and we are working to understand how this occurred."
Uber later told The Canadian Press the over-charge was caused by human error, in that the taxi driver entered the fee wrong.Often times, today’s parents are faced with the following situation: Is it best to have one parent stay at home or should both parent’s return to work. Sometimes the answer may be obvious. Sometimes it may require some analysis.
When parents are faced with finding an answer that is not obvious, the following are some items that should be included when arriving at a decision.
Should one or both parents work?
– Is it possible financially? Might as well talk about the elephant in the room first. This is the driving force behind many of the answers. If both parents are already working, how practical is it to give up a salary? The economy makes the prospect of finding a job less than desirable right now. The salary alone can’t be what’s considered though. You have to look at the added costs of daycare, wardrobe, taxes, travel, lunch, etc. All of these combined will take a hefty portion of your check. Once you calculate what your *true* pay would be, you can decide if it is possible to give up that much from the household income.
The only caveat here, beyond the obvious, is that you also need to factor in the fringe benefits you receive. Does the company contribute to a retirement plan for you? Are you vested? Is the insurance provided really too good to lose? These variables should play a small role in your overall decision.
– Are you in love with your job and career? Does the thought of staying at home for a few years make you feel disappointed? Or are you excited at the prospect of being a full-time parent? If both parents love what they do, then it may be best for both to return to work. Whichever chose to stay home, could end up feeling resentment towards the other if they feel they left their “dream job”. However, if one does choose to be a full-time parent, it does not mean they are sabotaging their chances of returning to the workforce. Once things settle down after the baby comes home, the parent can remain active within organizations they belonged. They can work on certifications. They can learn new skills. There are numerous possibilities that this person can do that will enhance their future prospects.
– Do you personally want to raise your children? Outside the pure financial feasibility of it, this is probably the biggest question you need to ask yourself. Do you want the day-to-day responsibility of raising and caring for your child? Now, without sounding callous, are you comfortable with having someone else be responsible for the day-to-day activities? Within reason of course!
One possibility, instead of having an either/or scenario, would be if there was a family member that was close enough and willing that could watch the child some during the day. This would allow the stay-at-home parent some flexibility to work part-time, volunteer, etc.
There is no right answer!
The question presented is a highly personal one and can only be answered by the parents. My purpose has been to try to present some issues that need to be considered during your discussions and not sway you in one direction or the other.
I do have one other purpose behind this post too. And that is there should be discussions had and planning done well in advance of having children. Too often, I see parents that don’t have any real options around this issue. Having had the discussions and plan in place may have been able to help in that situation.
Please post your thoughts and comments around this issue. I love to hear how others have handled this situation.
AdvertisementsUnder insistent questioning from Democrats, deputy attorney general nominee Rod J. Rosenstein refused to commit Tuesday to appoint a special counsel to oversee investigations of Russian meddling in the presidential election — though he stressed that he did not yet know the facts of the matter.
At a tense Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing that lasted more than 3 1/2 hours, Rosenstein said that he was “not aware” of any reason he would not be able to supervise such probes.
“You view it as an issue of principle, that I need to commit to appoint a special counsel in a matter that I don’t even know if it’s being investigated,” he told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who had vowed to try to block his nomination should he not make such a commitment. “And I view it as an issue of principle that as a nominee for deputy attorney general, I should not be promising to take action on a particular case.”
[Justice Department nominee at center of partisan battle of Russia allegations]
Rosenstein is a respected prosecutor who has served in both Democratic and Republican administrations. But on Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans essentially turned him into a lightning rod, pressing him for answers on how he would handle any probes of Russian meddling in the U.S. election or Trump associates.
Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he was recusing himself from any campaign-related investigations after The Washington Post reported that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during that campaign and had not disclosed that fact at his own confirmation hearing. That would mean supervision would fall to Rosenstein if he is confirmed.
Rosenstein said he would handle it “the way I would handle any investigation.”
Asked whether he had any contact with Russian officials, he said that throughout his career, he has spoken to lawyers and judges visiting from foreign countries at events, and that “it’s certainly possible there may have been Russian officials there.” But he said he did not “recall any such meetings” with Russian officials. He also said he has not talked with Sessions about Russian contacts, and he sought to assure legislators that he would act in the best interests of the United States.
“I don’t know the details of what, if any, investigation is ongoing, but I can certainly assure you if it’s America against Russia, or America against any other country, I think everyone in this room knows which side I’m on,” he said.
Perhaps the most heated exchange came after Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) lambasted Sessions for not disclosing his meetings with the Russian ambassador. It was Franken who asked Sessions at his own confirmation hearing in January what he would do if it was found that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russian government.
Sessions responded, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.”
Franken posed the same question to Rosenstein, who responded, “If there is predication to believe that such communication was in violation of federal law, Senator, I would ensure an appropriate investigation.” The Minnesota Democrat then criticized Sessions for his response and suggested that his letter to the committee Monday insisting it “was correct” was inadequate.
“He answered a question I didn’t ask, and for him to put this in his letter as a response is insulting, and he should come back and explain himself,” Franken said.
[In update to Congress, Sessions insists he was ‘correct’ to say he had no communication with Russians in campaign]
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) fired back that Franken had asked a “gotcha question,” eventually pounding his gavel to cut Franken off.
“It was not a gotcha question, sir,” Franken exclaimed.
“It was, from the standpoint that he didn’t know what you were asking about,” Grassley said.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) grilled Rosenstein about Trump’s weekend tweet accusing then-President Barack Obama of wiretapping him before the election. Rosenstein responded: “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to share my reaction, Senator. It has no bearing on my work.”
He later added, “If the president is exercising his First Amendment rights, that’s not my issue.”
[Meet Rod Rosenstein, the official poised to oversee probe into Russian interference in 2016 race]
Grassley opened the hearing by declaring that any talk of a special counsel was “premature” and that Rosenstein was well equipped to handle sensitive investigations.
“There are times when special counsels are appropriate,” Grassley said. “But it’s far too soon to tell at this time. And even if there were evidence of a crime related to any of these matters, once confirmed, Mr. Rosenstein can decide how to handle that matter. I know of no reason to question his judgment, his integrity or his impartiality.”
Grassley and others, including Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), repeatedly brought up Loretta E. Lynch, the attorney general during the Obama administration, noting that she did not recuse herself from an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email practices, even after reports about a tarmac meeting she held with Bill Clinton.
“My Democratic friends have nothing to say about that,” Hatch said. He added: “This kind of double standard makes it look like partisan politics.”
Although Lynch stopped short of recusing herself, she did agree to accept recommendations in the Clinton probe from the career prosecutors and FBI agents leading that investigation.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, said that a fully independent investigation on Russia was needed to avoid “even the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
“To be clear, I do not say this because I question the integrity or the ability of Mr. Rosenstein,” Feinstein said. “I do not.”
She later warned, “There is a real danger, I believe, that the Justice Department could become politicized.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who introduced Rosenstein, said that he had conveyed to Rosenstein that if FBI Director James B. Comey had asked the Justice Department to issue a statement rebutting Trump’s claim that Obama had ordered a wiretap of him before the election, “then the Justice Department has a duty to let the public know the truth.”
Under later questioning from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Rosenstein declined to address those particular events, though he said he would “certainly consider” the FBI director’s views in whether to issue a public statement.
Thelongest-serving U.S. attorney, Rosenstein, 52, has worked on sensitive cases in the face of political pressure, according to attorneys he has worked with during his nearly three decades in the department.
A bipartisan group of 127 former U.S. attorneys, who were appointed by and served under various presidential administrations, sent a letter Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting Rosenstein’s confirmation.
He began working as a trial attorney in the public integrity section of President George H.W. Bush’s Justice Department in 1990 after graduating from Harvard Law School and clerking for Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Soon afterward, President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general hired Rosenstein to be his counsel.
During the Clinton administration, Kenneth W. Starr tapped Rosenstein to be his associate independent counsel on the investigation into the business dealings of the Clintons and their associates in the Whitewater Development Corp. Rosenstein stayed on into the George W. Bush administration, and in 2005, Bush appointed him U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, where he remained through the Obama administration.
Senators also considered the nomination of Rachel Brand on Tuesday to serve as associate attorney general, the third-highest position in the Justice Department.? A proposal has been introduced in the Kansas Senate to spell out grounds for impeaching state Supreme Court justices, and the list includes attempting to usurp the Legislature’s authority.
The bill was introduced Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republican Sen. Mitch Holmes of St. John said he sought the measure.
The state constitution says justices can be impeached by the House, tried by the Senate and removed if convicted of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
Holmes said the constitutional language offers no guidelines to lawmakers, and without guidelines, they’re not ever likely to exercise their power to impeach and try justices.
Other impeachment grounds listed in the bill include attempting to usurp the executive branch’s power, judicial ethics breaches and failing to adequately supervise subordinates.President Barack Obama departing Sunday evening on an European trip that will take him to Ireland, England, France, and Poland.
CBS News correspondent Bill Plante reports that the people of Ireland are particularly excited to have him, because, well, he's Irish.
While the president is obviously not a full-blooded Irishman, he is, like four other American presidents, Irish enough to make a stop in the ancestral homeland of tens of millions of Irish-American voters.
The official White House guidance says the trip is to "celebrate the relationship between our two countries and the contributions Irish-Americans make to our deep and broad ties."
Nowhere will they be celebrating more than in Moneygall - a tiny village in the central part of the country which discovered to its great good fortune that it's source of Barack Obama's Irish roots. His great-great-great grandfather, Falmouth Kearney left that part of Ireland for America in 1850, and Moneygall - freshly painted, prettied up and stocked with souvenirs - waits to greet the president tomorrow. He'll meet some distant relatives and drop by the local tavern.
Never mind the carnival atmosphere, this is no joke for Ireland, which is looking for a boost to its lagging economy.
This is the start of a six-day trip on which the president goes on to England, France and Poland to talk about issues like Libya, the Middle East and Afghanistan, and to attend an economic summit.
Obama's eighth trip to Europe as president, with a quick-moving itinerary that dips into four countries in six days, unfolds against the backdrop of the NATO-led bombing campaign in Libya and stubborn economic weakness on both sides of the Atlantic.
A priority for the president and his allies will be to more clearly define the West's role in promoting stability and democracy in the Arab world without being overly meddlesome and within tight financial limitations.
Obama, who departs late Sunday, will visit Ireland, England, France and Poland. Each is weathering an economic downturn that has forced European nations to adopt strict austerity measures. The U.S. has pushed its national debt to the limit, and Obama and congressional Republicans are in contentious talks about how steeply to cut spending.Home repossessions 'are set to soar again': Thousands could lose properties when period of rock-bottom interest rates ends
Over last five years, number of home repossessions has dropped every year
However, this 'benign period' may soon 'be coming to an end', warn experts
House prices are also predicted to rise by 44 per cent over next seven years
T he ‘benign period’ during which the number of families being repossessed or falling behind with their mortgage has remained exceptionally low ‘may be coming to an end’, the Council of Mortgage Lenders said yesterday.
Over the last five years, these numbers have dropped every year as rock-bottom interest rates have helped people to stay in their homes and banks have shown extreme patience towards them.
But the CML said the number of families who lose their homes will pick up when the Bank of England raises the base rate, which has been frozen at 0.5 per cent since March 2009.
Warning: Home repossessions could be set to soar again, the Council of Mortgage Lenders warned yesterday
Bob Pannell, chief economist at the CML, said: ‘The benign period of falling arrears and possessions may be coming to an end.’
He added: ‘We remain aware that a sizeable minority of households continue to be subject to financial pressures.’
Mr Pannell said the ‘vast majority’ of families will cope with ‘a slow but certain transition to more normal interest rates’, but the most vulnerable be crippled by a rise.
Just 30,000 families will lose their home this year, compared to 75,500 at its peak during the last recession in 1991.
Concern: Bob Pannell, chief economist at the CML, said most families will witness 'a slow but certain transition to more normal interest rates'
It comes as a report today predicts prices will rise by up to 44 per cent over the next seven years in a move which will lock out future generations ‘forever’.
The research predicts the average cost of a home in England will rise by £85,500 by 2020 to a record average price of £331,387.
In London, the jump will be even more extreme with prices rising by nearly £200,000 over the next seven years to reach an all-time high of nearly £650,000.
The report, from the National Housing Federation, said the situation is ‘dysfunctional’, adding: ‘England’s housing market is broken.’
David Orr, the federation’s chief executive, said: ‘With house prices set to rocket by 2020, an entire generation will be locked out of home ownership forever and be forced to rent for life.’
It comes as a separate report, from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, said the country’s housing crisis will get worse unless more new homes are built.
Simon Rubinsohn, chief economist at RICS, said: ‘If there is not a meaningful increase in new homes, the likelihood is that prices, and for that matter rents, will continue to push upwards.
‘It will make the cost of shelter ever more unaffordable.’ The number of news homes being built remains dangerously far below the amount that need to be built to keep up with demand.
Latest figures show 106,500 new homes were built in England last year, but the ‘required’ number is 240,000, according to the National Housing Federation.
By 2020, its analysis predicts the average price of a home will be below £200,000 only in the North West and the North East.
While house prices soar, rents will also rocket, it predicts, as landlords make a killing from young people who have no choice but to rent, even though they would prefer to buy.
Bad news: It comes as a report today predicts prices could rise by up to 44 per cent over the next seven years
In England, the average private rent will jump by nearly 40 per cent from £8,691 a year to just over £12,000.
In September, RICS called for a radical new rule which would prevent house prices from rising by more than five per cent a year.
If action is not taken, it warned at the time ‘another housing bubble, reckless bank lending and a dangerous build up in household debt’ could cripple Britain again.
Its latest report, published today, said the number of estate agents predicting house prices will go up over the next three months has reached its highest level since 1999.
It said 59 per cent more agents predict prices ‘to continue their upward trend rather than fall back’.After a social media post about a chemistry teaching assistant’s history of anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric circulated around the University of Wisconsin campus Monday, university officials announced he would be removed from overseeing sections for that class.
A Ph.D. student in the chemistry department, Dylan Bleier had been acting as a teaching assistant for various Chemistry 109 courses. After a Facebook post and Medium post circulated about his history of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic behavior at Oberlin College in 2013, UW students called on the chemistry department to remove him from his teaching position.
Bleier became recognized for his racially charged statements while he was an upperclassmen at Oberlin College. Starting from 2013, Bleier has been active on social media about his controversial ideas regarding Muslims, Jews, black people and what he called “racists.”
From February to March 2013, he had been involved in the spreading of posters on Oberlin’s campus to professors and students with statements expressing opposition toward LGBTQ+ and marginalized communities, and encouraging people to join the KKK.
Bleier’s reasoning for this, according to a police report, was to see the campus’s overreaction to his racial postings.
According to a statement released by university officials, the university became aware of the past statements the teaching assistant said and wrote “they run counter to our university values of inclusivity, respect and non-violence.”
“Based on a mutual desire to avoid disruption of these course sections, the sections will be handled by other instructors, effective immediately,” the statement said. “Students who have any concerns about the class may reach out to the course instructor.”
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Correction: A previous version of this article suggested Dylan Bleier had been expelled from Oberlin College. This article has been updated to accurately reflect the fact that he actually been suspended. The Badger Herald regrets this error.A bistro or bistrot, is, in its original Parisian incarnation, a small restaurant, serving moderately priced simple meals in a modest setting with alcohol. Bistros are defined mostly by the foods they serve. French home-style cooking, and slow-cooked foods like cassoulet, a bean stew, are typical. [1]
This article is about the type of restaurant. For other uses, see Bistro (disambiguation)
Bistros likely developed out of the basement kitchens of Parisian apartments where tenants paid for both room and board. Landlords could supplement their income by opening their kitchen to the paying public. Menus were built around foods that were simple, could be prepared in |
and his mostly inept grandson, mixing absurd catchphrases, fantastic alien worlds, and extremely sharp storytelling into a cocktail that’s ripe for the internet age. One of the show’s gags had Rick obsessively questing for McDonald’s Szechuan nugget sauce, a promotional flavor briefly offered in conjunction with the Disney film Mulan 20 years ago.
The show’s cultish fanbase responded en masse, starting a petition to bring back the sauce and talking it up endlessly online. McDonald’s execs hinted they might do just that, and made it official this week, saying the sauce would be available for just one day – today, October 7th – as part of a promotion for the chain’s new Buttermilk Crispy Tenders.
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But there are signs that the promotion is going south, with fans and news outlets reporting that supplies of the ironically prized sauce are running out almost instantly at the select locations where it was supposed to be available. On Twitter, some customers are claiming stores reported receiving only 20 cups of the prized sauce. Other customers are claiming stores haven’t received promised supplies at all.
Though the fast-food chain was clear that supplies would be limited, fans on social media are nonetheless extremely frustrated with the situation.
. @McDonalds I’m at the Merrimack,NH location for the Szechuan Sauce! I was told they didn’t get them! WTF!! pic.twitter.com/DKkRwAqV0l — chris macdonald (@cmacdonald) October 7, 2017
Really cool of @McDonalds to have a website telling people where they are giving out Szechuan sauce, only to find out some actually aren't — Spoopy Cripp💀🎃👻♿ (@YungCripp) October 7, 2017
The bigger problem is you lied about locations getting it, people went where you said to go, and employees had no clue. — Kyle Grantham (@kylegrantham) October 7, 2017
hey @McDonalds, when y'all said you would have limited supplies of szechuan sauce today, you weren't kidding. 20 cups per store? smh, c'mon. — Ryan Mathews (@Ryan_POD) October 7, 2017
mcdonalds really ruined the szechuan sauce promotion — ego (@EvgeniMaIkinEgo) October 7, 2017
One reason for the problems can be deduced from a quick search of eBay, where cups of the sauce are already being offered for hundreds of dollars each.
McDonald’s has acknowledged customers’ frustration, but without offering any real remedy. Fortune has reached out for further comment.
The best fans in the multiverse showed us what they got today. We hear you & we're sorry not everyone could get some super-limited Szechuan. — McDonald's (@McDonalds) October 7, 2017
A relaunch of an old McDonald’s nugget sauce might not seem like a big deal to most people, but this could turn into something serious for McDonald’s. Fans of Rick and Morty are passionate, and some mimic the show’s more acerbic elements by displaying a mean streak so broad it has included harassing the show’s own female writers. Mix that with internet savvy and a target as big as the Golden Arches, and you’ve got a recipe for spicy disaster.One of the announcements at VMworld this week is the upcoming release of vSphere 6.0 Update 1 (GA sometime in Q3 2015) and in addition to bug fixes there are also several new enhancements that have been added. Here are some of the new capabilities specifically for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).
New Deployment Targets - The VCSA now supports both vCenter Server (brownfield) as well as ESXi (greenfield) as a deployment targets.When using either the Guided UI or Scripted UI, you can now deploy to an existing vCenter Server which might serve as a management cluster for example. Previously, ESXi was the only supported deployment target.
- The VCSA now supports vCenter Server (brownfield) as well as ESXi (greenfield) as a deployment targets.When using either the Guided UI or Scripted UI, you can now deploy to an existing vCenter Server which might serve as a management cluster for example. Previously, ESXi was the only supported deployment target. Convert Embedded VCSA to External PSC - An Embedded VCSA deployment can now be re-configured or re-pointed to an External PSC using the new "reconfigure" and "repoint" option found in the /bin/cmsso-util utility. This allows customers to quickly get started using the simple Embedded VCSA deployment and as they get more comfortable and want to scale out to an External PSC for features like Enhanced Linked Mode, you can easily do so.
Two of the most frequently asked questions that I have seen from customers since the release of the VCSA 6.0 is where did the VMware Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) and URL-based patching go? These were definitely two missed features that did not make it into VCSA 6.0 release and today I am pleased to announce that they have returned with some nice enhancements!
VAMI UI - The VAMI UI can be accessed in the familiar 5480 port by visiting the following URL of the VCSA: https://[VCSA]:5480 and requires a local OS account to login like the root user account. The VAMI itself has been completely re-written both on the backend as well as the frontend which is now an HTML5 interface. All VAMI functionality can be accessed both from the UI as well as using the appliancesh command-line interface.
URL-based patching - URL-based patching is also included in the new VAMI UI interface. By default it is configured to point back to VMware's online repository but you can also configure it to use an ISO or a custom repository as previous versions supported. All patching capabilities are also available using the appliancesh command-line interface.
PSC UI - In addition to new VAMI UI, there also now a new Platform Services Controller (PSC) UI which is also written in HTML5. The new UI is located at the following URL: https://[VCSA]/psc and requires an SSO Administrator account to login. This new UI actually uses the same backend as the PSC configurations found within the vSphere Web Client. The idea behind this UI is to provide customers with a way to configure SSO and other related configurations within the PSC for either a greenfield setup or when the vSphere Web Client is unavailable. This can come in handy for troubleshooting purposes. Lastly, with the new PSC UI, you will now be able to replace certificates from a UI standpoint where as previously this was only available in the CLI.
Build-2-Build upgrade support - In prior releases, both a "Major" and "U" (Update) release of the VCSA meant that you had to deploy the new VCSA to perform a migration based upgrade. In vSphere 6.0 Update 1, "U" releases (U1, U2, etc) can now be accomplished by an in-place upgrade or sometimes refer to as a build-2-build. There will be a VCSA 6.0 Update 1 ISO which can be mounted within your existing VCSA 6.0 appliance to perform the upgrade as seen in the screenshot below.
appliancesh automation - The appliancesh interface in the VCSA 6.0 was primarily targeted for interactive usage and did not support any type of Automation. The feedback from customers was to provide a way to be able to call into the various appliancesh commands and in VCSA 6.0 Update 1, you can now execute a series of appliancesh commands within a file and re-directing that into an SSH session. VMware is also looking into providing a proper API for the appliancesh commands, if you have any feedback on this please leave a comment or reach out to Alan Renouf, who is the PM.
Below is the contents of the vcsa-commands.txt file which contains the following appliancesh commands to configure and enable NTP for the VCSA:
ntp.test --servers 0.pool.ntp.org,1.pool.ntp.org ntp.server.add --server 0.pool.ntp.org,1.pool.ntp.org timesync.set --mode NTP ntp.get 1 2 3 4 ntp. test -- servers 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org ntp. server. add -- server 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org timesync. set -- mode NTP ntp. get
Lastly, though this is not specific to the VCSA, I thought it was also worth mentioning that you can now access ALL capabilities of vSphere Update Manager (VUM) within the vSphere Web Client. VUM will still require a separate Windows system, but will fully inter-operate with both the Windows VC as well as the VCSA and you no longer need to rely on the vSphere C# Client to perform remediation or base-line creation and assignments.
As you can see, there are a ton of enhancements in the latest vSphere 6.0 Update 1 release and if you have not taken vSphere 6.0 for a spin yet, I definitely recommend starting with this release.Iraqi government forced killed a senior Islamic State leader near Mosul Monday amid operations aimed at taking back the war-torn nation's second largest city from the militant group. The local "emir" of the Dawasah district in central Mosul was killed during a gunfire attack with security forces.
The fighting broke out as government troops sought to win back the district Sunday while also killing dozens of other ISIS fighters and retaking bridges leading into Mosul over the Tigris River, according to official reports. “The Federal Police’s Rapid Response forces have liberated the Josaq district, and have also taken control over the fourth bridge from the western side,” head of the Joint Operations Command’s operations in Nineveh, Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Yarallah, said in a statement.
There are about 100,000 ISIS fighters guarding Mosul, the militant's largest city of the so-called "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria. Iraqi forces seized the eastern part of Mosul from ISIS a month ago and have since set their sights on reclaiming the western part of the city. Roughly 750,000 people live in Mosul.
"We have encountered heavy resistance from the enemy," Sabah al-Numani, spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Service, told Reuters in November. "We are facing the most difficult form of urban warfare, fighting with the presence of civilians, but our forces are trained for this sort of combat."
More recently, ISIS fighters have begun to flee western Mosul as the fighting has increasingly cut off fractions of the militant group from communicating with each other.
"The terrorist organization Daesh (is) living in a state of shock, confusion and defeat, and its fighters are fighting in isolated groups," Lt. Gen. Raid Shakir Jaudat said this week, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS. "Our field intelligence units indicate that the terrorist organization is falling apart, and its leadership (is) running away from Mosul."I think we’ve covered the bases for general preparations, so now it’s time to start making that print! This is really the first step in producing a fine art print, but it’s not any more or less important than the other steps. If I could give just one piece of advice in this article, it would be to make the final print at the highest quality humanly possible.
Before we jump in, I should make my own printing situation very clear so there are no misconceptions. I use a local professional printer to produce my digital prints: Oscar Medina of San Diego Pictures. He’s the real brains behind the whole printing thing, and he provides me with a top notch service. I don’t handle any of the technical aspects of printing — I just bring him the files and give him the thumbs-up to press the go-button. So any technical information I provide here may be somewhat or completely wrong. As for darkroom prints… I do those myself, so I can speak to it with more confidence.
And again, we’re just skimming the surface of this topic in this article — please ask specific questions and discuss technical stuff in the comments below.
The following tips mostly apply to digital printing rather than traditional darkroom printing.
PREPPING YOUR DIGITAL PHOTOS
Fine art photos are all about “high quality” — and that starts before you even see the image. Make sure that you’re shooting at the highest quality available with your equipment. Shoot RAW, AdobeRGB, no downsizing, no compression, etc. Use high quality glass if you can, and avoid camera shake by shooting at a fast enough shutter speed, etc, etc.
When you process the image, workflow is important. Use 16-bit color depth and a high quality color space (I use AdobeRGB for color and Gray Gamma 2.2 for b/w). Watch your histograms while processing, and don’t let your colors, blacks, or whites jump off the scale — you’ll be throwing away good information. Obviously, make the photo look how you want, but don’t go crazy on the adjustments if you’re trying for a “natural” photo.
Calibrate your monitor so that you see a true representation of your image as you process it. Whether you print yourself or if you have somebody else do it for you, the printer will assume that your photo was processed with a properly calibrated monitor. When I take my digital files to Oscar, they look perfect on his monitor and they look perfect when they come out of the printer. We both use a color managed workflow [pdf 4.5MB].
My typical image prep involves processing RAW files via Adobe Camera Raw (same thing as Lightroom), and occasionally some Photoshop work if needed. I’ll work with the colors, highlights, shadows, and midtone contrasts to get the image looking the way I want. I also put on a very small amount of sharpening and noise correction — just enough to make any artifacts go away.
In the last article, Andrew Ferguson asked “I don’t know what needs to be done to prepare them for print, workflow wise. I’m reasonably sure I need to convert to CMYK, but I don’t know how else to optimize my files (both b&w and colour) to ensure that what I see on the monitor is what I see on the final print.”
Maybe we can touch on this more in the comments, but I always shoot, process, and print using AdobeRGB for color images (I process and print black and white images with gray gamma 2.2). From what I understand, printers will do their own conversion from RGB to CMYK or grayscale. The important thing is to have a calibrated monitor and a calibrated printer — I know Oscar spends a good deal of time keeping up with this stuff to ensure that what we see on his screen is what we see coming out of the printer.
I could probably go on and on about this stuff in more detail, but we need to talk about other things! Chat-it-up in the comments.
PRINTER, PAPER, AND INK
After your digital file is prepped, you’ll need to decide on a printer. There are so many different types of printers and inks out there, I’m not even going to try speaking to the technical side of this. Just do your homework and find a system or method that suits your artistic needs. Chances are, you’ll either have your own printer or you’ll need to find a printing service (including PODs) or a local professional with the right equipment. With the current technology, any professional printer should be using top-notch equipment capable of producing archival prints ready for any gallery wall.
Paper, on the other hand, is more of the artist’s decision than the printer or the ink. There are a lot of different papers out there, and each of them has a unique visual quality suited for different applications. You’ll need to decide between gloss, semi-gloss, matte, metallic, canvas, watercolor, and other fine art papers with varying textures and colors. Even with all the choices available, keep the quality and archival life in mind — fine art prints are supposed to last a long time. Oscar actually has a book of the same image printed on various papers so you can see the different effects and outcomes. This is super-handy when deciding on papers!
I usually go for the glossy paper because I like my prints shiny, but it’s an easy paper to damage and scratch. I’m considering trying out a few canvas prints at the suggestion of Oscar… I just need to find the right photos for it.
SIZING, SHARPENING, AND NOISE REDUCTION
Print size is a big decision — don’t underestimate it! If you want to go really big, you’ll need the pixels to back it up. As a rule of thumb, I try to keep my stuff above 100 pixels per inch. So a 12MP digital photo can be printed up to about 20″ x 30″ without a huge loss of quality.
Once you get at or below 150 pixels per inch, you’ll want to consider upsizing the image on the computer so you can get a better quality on the printer. So for that same 12MP photo, once I go above 20″ wide on the long dimension I’ll probably resize the image to larger dimensions to avoid printing artifacts. This can be done with Photoshop (or other post processing software), but something like Genuine Fractals will do a better job for you.
If you need to up-res your photo in order to print at the size you require, it’s best to do your sharpening and noise reduction at the very end. If you’re printing from the original (not resized) photo, just make sure to apply these things at the very end of your processing. And don’t go overboard… make sure you view your digital file at 100% before finalizing the sharpening settings. Over-sharpening will definitely show up on the print.
[UPDATE] Gary Crabbe left a good comment below: it might be a bit clearer if it read, “You should *Always* do your output sharpening *After* the image has been (re-)sized to the final output measurements.” I think it might also be good to squeeze in a comment warning of over sharpening, and checking for sharpening artifacts at both “Print Size” and at “Actual Pixels”. Agreed! Thanks Gary!
One last thing on print size — know what size you want to print and WHY you want to print at that size. Take into account things like viewing distance, intended border, where you’ll be signing the print (if at all), how it will be matted and framed, and how you’re planning on transporting the print to the final owner. Most of these things will make more sense to some of you as we proceed through this series — so stay tuned for the next couple of articles.
PRINTING, HANDLING, AND SHIPPING
When you finally get to the point of printing, most of your prep-work should be done. If you’ve done you job right, you shouldn’t have any problems. But no matter how much preparation you’ve done, it’s always a good idea to print a test strip in order to evaluate the quality. Choose a section of your photo that contains critical information such as deep shadows, bright highlights, important colors, or people’s faces. Print that section and make sure everything looks right. If it does, go for it. If it doesn’t, go fix stuff. You’ll save a lot of time and material cost if you work with test strips before making the final print.
After the final print comes rolling off the printer, make sure you handle it like a newborn baby. There’s nothing worse than putting all that effort into a print only to bend it, crease it, or put a fingerprint on an otherwise perfect print. Use lint-free gloves to handle the print. Lay it out on acid-free paper. And don’t force it into any position that it won’t go naturally.
Larger prints can be rolled without damaging them — they can be flattened later. For anything larger than 11×14, I lay them face-down on acid-free paper and roll them into a 2″-3″ tube. Before rolling these prints, be sure that they’ve had time to properly dry so the ink doesn’t smudge. Other than that, use common sense!
When it comes to shipping, be careful how you package things. If the print is fairly small, you can use photo mailers available for 8×10 or 11×14 prints. Anything larger and you’ll probably want to send it in a tube. Even with tubes, some extra precaution should be taken. I actually had a print damaged recently because the Post Office just doesn’t care that you’re sending sensitive material. After talking with Oscar, he mentioned that he likes to roll his prints about 1″ smaller than the diameter of the shipping tube and float it in the center by placing extra packing paper at the ends. So even if the tube gets crushed or bent (which mine did just recently — sorry Mom), the print will likely survive due to that extra buffer of airspace.
FOR THE ANALOG FREAKS
Probably not the most popular topic, but I know at least one or two of you are interested in my darkroom workflow. First of all, I use high quality enlarger lenses and easels. Enlargers are no different than cameras, only opposite — so use good stuff. Also, for signed prints, I use fiber base paper and I tone with selenium for archival longevity. Proper fix and wash are also key in the quality of the print. I don’t have actual data points to back up my suspicions, but I’d expect my darkroom prints to last at least 100 years, probably more.
At any rate: print on fiber, don’t skimp on the fix and wash, and tone your prints. These things take FOREVER to print and finish, but it’s totally worth it. If you analog printers have any specific questions, hit me up in the comments — I could talk for days on this stuff.
SO WHAT DID I MISS?
The topic of printing requires a huge series of article on it’s own, so I’m sure we didn’t cover everything here. If you have specific questions about printing methods, techniques, and theories — do ask!!! I spoke with Oscar (my professional printer and fellow artist) about this article and asked him to chime in on the technical stuff. He’s more than willing to answer our questions and take part in the discussion. This guy is a fountain of knowledge on the topic, so don’t pass up the opportunity to tap into him!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia on Wednesday proposed a series of bilateral trade negotiations with the United States under the umbrella of a hoped-for new trade agenda between the two countries, a senior Russian official said.
Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov takes part in the Reuters Investment Summit in Moscow September 23, 2013. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
He said Russia, in a meeting with top U.S. trade officials on Wednesday, had floated the idea of establishing a framework for talks that could lead to up to five separate deals, beginning with a pact on investment.
“Maybe we won’t call it free trade agreement negotiations, but maybe comprehensive approach and comprehensive trade agenda, which would mean that we could divide the whole agenda into different agreements,” the official told a group of reporters.
The proposal was made in a meeting between Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, according to the official.
A spokeswoman for Froman said the United States looked forward to working with Russia to address outstanding issues, including those related to Russia’s implementation of its World Trade Organization commitments, and “to further realize the significant potential of the U.S.-Russia economic relationship.”
“Both sides agreed to work together to address barriers to trade and investment and continue discussions on the possibility of a Bilateral Investment Treaty,” the spokeswoman said.
The Russian official said it could take up to 15 years if the two nations wanted to secure a free-trade deal, although that would be the eventual aim under the proposal.
“Ultimately it would mean a comprehensive free-trade zone agreement, but to negotiate that between America and Russia, it would take 10 or 15 years,” he said. “We need something which is practical.”
In addition to an agreement on investment, the official said pacts on regulations and standards could be completed within five years. The comprehensive framework Russia proposed would also seek to cover trade and tariffs, and perhaps an agreement that provides benefits for certain regions, he said.
He said Russia did not have trouble attracting investment from big U.S. firms, but wanted to see more investment from smaller companies. “Medium-sized companies don’t come over and investment, but that’s more important than giants,” he said.
The official said the Obama administration was not expecting the proposal, but agreed to further discussions in January aimed at achieving a draft road map.
The United States is engaged in two sets of free-trade talks: one with the European Union and another with 11 other Pacific Rim nations. Russia is party to neither.
The official said Russia would proceed cautiously in considering joining any Pacific Rim deal, partly because it has been a member of the World Trade Organization for only a year.Washington Nationals shortstop Ian Desmond, who hasn't performed to expectations this season, said a chance meeting with former Baltimore Orioles star and Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. might have provided him a boost.
"The other day, I was walking to the park, and Cal Ripken was out there signing autographs in the parking lot," Desmond said Monday. "He kind of grabbed me, and he said, 'Hey, back in '93, through the first 80 games, I was hitting.199.' He said, 'I finished with a pretty good year. You're going to be all right.' And that kind of gave me a little bit of hope. If he did it and grinded through it, I can too."
Ian Desmond's stats this season fall short of his.263 career average and his highs of 25 home runs in 2012 and 91 RBIs in 2014. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
Desmond hit a two-run homer off New York Mets reliever Alex Torres in the eighth inning of Monday night's 7-2 win. He went 2-for-4 at the plate to boost his batting average to.208, and he now has eight home runs and 26 RBIs this season. However, those numbers fall short of his.263 career average and his highs of 25 home runs in 2012 and 91 RBIs in 2014.
A prolonged slump led manager Matt Williams to give Desmond a couple days off the past month. The shortstop made six errors in eight games early in the season.
Williams said last month that he believed Desmond would turn things around.
"I don't think it's a problem," Williams said. "He works and works and works. He's told you guys, and he's told everybody that he will be OK, and he's going to work out of it."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Walker would sign 20-week abortion ban
Shifting his tone to reassure social conservatives, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker declared Tuesday that he intends to sign a state law in the coming months that bans abortion after 20 weeks.
In an open letter to the Susan B. Anthony List, the likely Republican presidential candidate also said that he supports “similar legislation” now stalled in Congress.
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“My policies throughout my career have earned a 100 percent rating with pro-life groups in Wisconsin,” Walker writes. “As the Wisconsin legislature moves forward in the coming session, further protections for mother and child are likely to come to my desk in the form of a bill to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks. I will sign that bill when it gets to my desk and support similar legislation on the federal level.”
Though he supported a 20-week ban as a state legislator in 1998, the governor declined to take a position on the ban last year as he campaigned for a second term. Polls showed the race tied at that point, and his female challenger was heavily emphasizing abortion rights.
“Those are things that we’ll have to talk about in the next legislative session if it comes up,” he said in October when asked about the 20-week ban.
When he ran in 2010, Walker, the son of a Baptist preacher, said he opposed abortion in all cases, including rape and incest. He signed bills during his first term designed to crack down on abortion clinics by requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and forcing women to undergo ultrasounds before the procedure.
Nonetheless, anti-abortion activists have been frustrated by what they see as Walker’s evasiveness on the issue during his 2014 reelection campaign and, most recently, earlier this week on “Fox News Sunday.”
Responding to a seven-figure television buy from the pro-abortion-right women’s group EMILY’s List last October, Walker ran a commercial calling abortion an “agonizing decision” and said his bills leave “the final decision to a woman and her doctor.” At the time, people in the pro-life world grumbled that he was using the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement. Then, during a January appearance in Iowa, he bragged about defunding Planned Parenthood.
“Conservatives, long weary of being romanced on the way to the dance only to be jilted after the ball, are wary,” a post on the American Principles Project web site last week. “If he’ll pivot once, will he pivot back?”
On Fox News Sunday, Walker declared himself pro-life but noted that he could not “change the law” to ban abortion. “The Supreme Court ultimately made that” decision with Roe vs. Wade, he told Fox host Chris Wallace.
“This gaffe is making me wonder whether Walker is ready for prime-time,” Frank Cannon, president of American Principles in Action, said in a Monday press release.
This has led to negatives stories on right-wing sites like Breitbart, and the New York Times recently ran a Sunday front-page story that accused Walker of hardening his position on social issues to woo base voters.
Radio host Laura Ingraham also highlighted a POLITICO story from last week’s Club for Growth donor conference in Florida, where Walker said he is primarily focused on economic issues.
“In the case of social issues, there are beliefs that I have, and I’m not going to hide them,” Walker said. “But I was elected as the governor to focus on the economic and fiscal crisis my state faced. … I believe this country needs someone focused on economic and fiscal issues and, increasingly, safety.”
Walker’s path to the nomination depends on emerging as the leading conservative alternative to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Evangelicals are crucial to his coalition in the Iowa caucuses.
Most of the GOP field has previously pledged to the SBA List that they would try to ban abortion after 20 weeks if elected, according to the group, including Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and former Hewlett-Packard CEO and 2010 California Senate candidate Carly Fiorina.
Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser used Walker’s announcement to pressure New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who supported abortion rights early in his political career, to follow suit.
“Governor Walker is making his pro-life convictions concrete in his presidential platform,” she said in a release. “The only likely candidate who has not yet endorsed the measure is Governor Chris Christie.”
In the open letter, Walker declares his anti-abortion bona fides.
“Life is a value I learned from my parents, and it’s a value I have cherished every day, predating my time in politics,” he wrote. “… I will continue working for every life.”
This article tagged under: Abortion
Wisconsin
Scott WalkerThe Iowa caucuses are just a few days away, and it looks like the Democratic race will truly come down to the wire. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been polling within several percentage points of each other for weeks, and while the statisticians over at FiveThirtyEight peg Clinton as the heavy favorite to win, those who #FeelTheBern are still holding out hope for a Bernie upset. But even if Sanders wins in Iowa, he'll still have quite a bit of work cut out for him.
Historically, winning in Iowa hasn't meant all that much. In the last nine Democratic primaries, the victor in Iowa caucuses has gone on to win the party's nomination six times. That's two out of three — not a bad success rate, but not an amazing one, either. Furthermore, only twice has a Democrat who won Iowa actually gone on to win the presidency. (That would be Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008.)
Nevertheless, winning the Iowa caucuses does have other advantages, including the loads of free media that's bestowed upon the winner. With it, victory in Iowa can help create a perception early on that a candidate is actually the real deal — that they deserve to be taken seriously. That might not matter much to a Washington, D.C. fixture like Hillary Clinton, but it matters a whole lot to Sanders, who up until very recently was an obscure socialist from one of the smallest states in the country.
Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images News/Getty Images
For that reason, Iowa would be an important early win for Sanders, and the same logic also applies to New Hampshire, which he's even more likely to emerge from as the victor. At the same time, a Sanders win in Iowa would say very little about his chances in the rest of the primary states, because Iowa is uniquely and unusually tailored to Sanders' strengths as a candidate.
In short, Sanders strongest level of support comes from white liberals, and white liberals make up a huge chunk of the Democratic voting electorate in Iowa. In fact, Democrats are more white and liberal in Iowa than they are in all but two other states: Vermont and New Hampshire. That's a big reason why Sanders' support is so high in the first two voting states.
The problem is that most of the Democratic Party is not white and liberal. That second part may sound a bit counterintuitive, but in fact, only 41 percent of Democrats describe themselves as "liberal." As a consequence, self-identified moderates and conservatives actually make up the majority of the Democratic Party in the United States, and those subgroups support Clinton over Sanders by a 30 point margin.
Darren McCollester/Getty Images News/Getty Images
Sanders' support among non-whites is also lacking. A Fox News poll from June, for example, had only 5 percent of black Democratic primary voters supporting Sanders' presidential bid. A CNN poll from around the same time had similar results, with Sanders pulling the support of just 9 percent of non-white Democrats. His standing among minority voters has improved slightly since then, but he's still far, far outpaced by Clinton. In December, Clinton led Sanders by 43 (!) points among non-white voters nationally; by January, that lead had actually grown to 50 points.
One side note: Bernie Sanders' supporters have frequently clashed with the Black Lives Matter movement, and it's tempting to blame this tension for Bernie's deficit with non-white voters. Without wading into that (much larger) debate, I'll point out that there are confounding demographic factors that make it very hard to draw any firm conclusions about exactly why Sanders is having a hard time attracting non-white support. For example, he also does poorly among lesser educated voters, and those voters tend to be both less liberal and disproportionately non-white. It is, as in so many cases, a situation where it's difficult to separate causation from correlation.
Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images
The point, though, is that Sanders is struggling with both minority voters and more moderate Democrats. That won't be much of a problem in Iowa, New Hampshire, or Vermont, but it'll be a huge problem in states like Texas and California, where whites don't make up 90 percent of the Democratic Party. If Sanders wins Iowa, his battle will only be beginning, and it'll be quite the battle indeed.President Barack Obama ordered a comprehensive review of US hostage policy as Islamic State militants stepped up threats to behead American hostages the terrorist group kidnapped in Syria, The Daily Beast reports.
A letter from US Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Christine Wormuth says the review will look for “innovative and non-traditional solutions” to improve how the government handles hostage cases.
The letter is full of vague bureaucratic wording, but The Daily Beast notes that the review will seek to “[put] a stop to turf wars and [get] the various corners of the government on the same page.”
Obama ordered the review over the summer, according to the White House.
The US is known for refusing to pay ransoms for hostages — doing so could make Americans more attractive targets for kidnappings because terrorist organisations know that certain countries are willing to pay large sums of money to free their citizens.
But the issue of whether or not the US government is doing enough to recover Americans taken hostage overseas has resurfaced in light of highly publicized videos from ISIS showing terrorists beheading hostages.
Most recently, American aid worker Peter Kassig was beheaded by the terror group. ISIS released video of the killing. ISIS has also released videos of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff being beheaded.
Foley’s family publicly criticised the government’s handling of his case. His mother said it seemed that their efforts to free Foley were an annoyance to the US government.
Wormuth’s letter mentions “family engagement” as a point of focus for the review of hostage policy.
While this focus on improving hostage policy might result in a more coordinated response from the government in the future, a drastic change in government policy toward paying hostage ransoms isn’t likely.
Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said in August that the government is right to refuse to pay hostage ransoms.
“We feel very strongly that it is not the right policy for governments to support the payment of ransom to terrorist organisations,” Rhodes said. “In the long run, what that does is it provides additional funding to these terrorist organisations, which allows them to expand their operations. It incentivizes the kidnapping of foreigners in ways that we’ve seen, frankly, with organisations like ISIL and some al-Qaeda affiliates.”
But Rhodes did say that the US might step up its efforts to recover these hostages.
“What we will do is use all the resources of the U.S. government to try to find and, if possible, bring home those Americans who are missing,” he said.
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agh, a GP in Liverpool, said his surgery had “severed links” to the wider NHS network as a precaution. He said: “Unable to access our clinical system – as a precaution our area has severed links to the wider NHS, which means no access to our national systems, no computers means no records, no prescriptions, no results. We are dealing with urgent problems only. Our patients are being very understanding so far.”
Lorina Nash, 46, from Hertfordshire, was bringing her mother for an appointment at Lister hospital in Stevenage when systems went down. “We have been here since 12.30pm and the computers were affected at about 12pm – patients are still waiting around but most of the A&E patients have been sent to other hospitals. I have never seen accident and emergency so empty.
Have you been affected by the cyberattack on the NHS? Read more
“They gave my mum a blood test but have had to send her blood to Cambridge by courier for testing. They said it could take two or three hours before it comes back with a result.”
Dr Asif Munaf, a gastroenterologist at Chesterfield hospital, said there was a backlog of patients in its A&E, which he said had been badly affected because it was unable to book new patients on the system.
“From my ward’s point of view, we’re not able to make referrals to, for example, psychiatry because they use a different system to us,” he said. “Everything’s getting delayed. Patients who were supposed to go home this afternoon won’t go home until Monday because they now won’t be seen and get a follow-up plan. It’s quite unfortunate for the patients.”
Dr Christopher Richardson, the head of the cybersecurity unit at Bournemouth University, said the process of recovering the NHS’s IT systems would involve a painful and longwinded “deep strip” of affected computers.
“You go down to the basic machine, you take everything off it, you reconfigure it and then you build it back up again,” he said. “If you’re talking national health, you’re talking a lot of machines on a single site and you’ve got to get them all because these nasty pieces of malware, they float around, so they only have to remain on one machine and when you reboot it will deliver the same thing again.”
Additional reporting by Sam Jones in MadridThe trio live together in Oakland, California, and are all sharing the
On September 6, 2014 Melinda Phoenix was overjoyed to welcome her first son Oliver into the world.
But it wasn't just her husband Jonathan Stein, 32, from Oakland, California, who shared her joy in the delivery room. Incredibly his second wife Dani, who was also pregnant, was beside them to witness it too.
And just 35 days later on October 11, it was Melinda's turn to offer her support to 30-year-old Dani in the delivery room, when she gave birth to Jonathan's second baby, a beautiful baby girl named Ella Lynn.
Scroll down for video
Three is the magic number: Jonathan Stein (L) and his two wives Melinda (C) and Dani (R) Phoenix welcomed two newborns within 35 days
Happy ever after: The trio, pictured at their wedding in 2014, are a polyamorous family, which means that they all believe in having more than one partner
Jonathan, Dani, and Melinda are a polyamorous family, which means that they all believe in having more than one partner.
The trio and their two children all live under the same roof, with all three parents sharing every aspect of parenthood, from nighttime feeds to diaper changes.
'It might seem strange to a lot of people, but to us it makes perfect sense,' Melinda, 28, who runs her own healing company, East-West Collaborative Health, told Daily Mail Online. 'We all love each other and it was our dream to fall pregnant at the same time.
We need a bigger bed as we are all co-sleeping with the babies Dani Phoenix
'Unlike conventional couples who are sleep deprived when a newborn comes along, there are three of us to take it in turns on the night shift. We breastfeed each others babies, split the finances three ways and the housework too.
'Even sex is great as if one person is not feeling up for it, then there are two other people to choose from.'
Dani added: 'We compliment each other perfectly as our parenting styles are so different.
'Whereas I'm a bit paranoid and constantly worrying about germs and if the babies are breathing, Melinda is the opposite.
'We just need a bigger bed, as we are all co-sleeping with the babies as well and at the moment the only way Jonathan fits is if he lays horizontally at the bottom of the bed.'
Until Dani met Melinda in 2008, Melinda had only been in monogamous relationships with men, while Dani had enjoyed relationships with both men and women.
But after meeting at a music festival, the pair knew they were destined to spend the rest of their lives together.
Parenthood: Melinda (pictured) welcomed her son Oliver on September 6, 2014. Both Jonathan and Dani were in the delivery room
Baby number two: Dani (pictured) gave birth to her daughter Ella Lynn on October 11
Despite gay marriages back then not being legal in California, the pair exchanged vows on the beach in a commitment ceremony on June 26, 2010, in front of friends and family.
But one year later despite being desperately in love, Melinda confided to Dani that she didn't just want a wife - she wanted a husband too.
'When Melinda first told me she was missing a man in her life I thought "Why aren't I enough?"' Dani confessed. 'But the more we spoke about it, the more I realized there could be huge advantages to having three of us in our marriage.
'The hard part was finding a man we could both fall in love with.'
Miraculously the girls didn't have to wait too long for their dream husband to come along.
Just a few months after their initial discussion, Dani and Melinda met Jonathan, after all three enrolled on the same building class.
But the two admit that the were hesitant about approaching Jonathan initially, over fears that he might not feel the same way about one, or either of them.
Thankfully, their fears were unfounded.
'When I met the girls I was just coming out of a long term relationship with my childhood sweetheart,' Jonathan, who run his own construction company, recalled.
'I knew they were married and I didn't know they were interested in me. But one day they wrote me a letter and revealed what they wanted and I'll be honest I didn't know what to do.
The perfect couple? Dani (L) and Melinda (R) wed in 2010, but after a year of marriage, Melinda confessed that she wanted the pair to try and find a husband to join their family
'I thought they were amazing and fancied them both, but I had to think long and hard whether I was capable of loving them both. While men might fantasize about such a situation, in reality it is double the responsibility.'
To explore their feelings for each other the threesome went on a road trip for a week.
And it was then that Jonathan began to realize he was more than capable of loving both women equally.
Some of Jonathan's friends just thought this was all about kinky sex Melinda Phoenix
'We just all clicked so well,' he added.
'Polyamory is an unusual concept for sure, and one I had never heard of, but the more I spent time with them, the more I fell in love with them both.
'We all just complimented each other so well.'
Sadly, while Jonathan's mom Sandy was open to their unusual relationship, other friends and family had a harder time accepting it.
'My mom thought it was a joke when Dani and I got married, so when we told her about Jonathan she just thought we were crazy,' Melinda explained. 'Some of Jonathan's friends just thought it was all about kinky sex and thought it was just plain weird. So much so he doesn't talk to some of them anymore.
'Dani's family had a hard time accepting it too.
'But luckily there were others, like Jonathan's mom Sandy, who thought what we had was amazing and gave us their full blessing.'
One, two, three: The women met Jonathan (C) at a building class, and soon confessed to him that they had both developed feelings for him
The perfect set-up: While Dani (R) was initially hesitant about welcoming another person into her relationship, she has begun to feel almost as strongly about Jonathan (L) as she does about her wife Melinda (C)
The threesome also had to learn to overcome their own feelings of jealousy too.
'At times it has been hard to adapt to, as for me just being with Melinda was enough,' Dani explained. 'So to see her fall in love with Jonathan was at times tough.
'But I began to realize that I could love him too, in my own way. And the more we talked to each other, the easier over time it has got. There are moments when I just want Melinda to myself, but now there are also moments when I feel just as strongly about Jonathan too. We have just learnt to cope better as time goes on.
'Now we all make sure we give each of us time together and separately. If Melinda wants a night out just with Jonathan, I am fine with that and likewise with her.
'Sexually it works perfectly as while we do make love together and me just with Melinda or Jonathan, I don't have as high a sex drive as Melinda, so she gets to satisfy that part of her personality with Jonathan too.'
By the end of 2013 Melinda, Dani and Jonathan were living together and began making plans to start a family.
'We all have a fabulous sex life, share the same bed, so we just made sure we timed things correctly and prayed our wishes would come true,' Melinda said. 'I found out I was pregnant on January 14th this year and two weeks later we all let out a scream of pure delight when we found out Dani was expecting too.'
On July 1st 2014 they got married in front of friends and some family in a park near their home.
And, while their marriage contract is not yet official or legal, the family pray that one day their unique family set up will be recognized in the eyes of the law.
'My mom didn't come to the wedding as she doesn't approve of our life,'tells Melinda. 'But Jonathan's mom Sandy gave us away and as we both stood with our blossoming bellies, it was the perfect day, full of love and laughter.'
Hardship: The trio have faced a great deal of criticism from some members of their family, as well as their friends
Mothers-to-be: Melinda (R) and Dani (L), pictured during the initial stages of their pregnancies, were over the moon about experiencing motherhood together
And while the two women went through every aspect of their pregnancies together, they admit that their experiences were incredibly different; Dani suffered from no morning sickness, while Melinda did. Meanwhile, Melinda only put on 25lbs during her nine months, while Dani, who has always been the skinnier one, found her body became much more curvy.
'It was just so special experiencing pregnancy with the woman I love going through it at the same time,' Melinda said.
'The birthing center we chose was incredibly liberal and thought our family was wonderful. I would have my check up and then Dani would have hers straight after.
'Sharing a bed while pregnant was a little tricky though as the bigger our bellies got, the more squashed we all were.'
While men might fantasize about such a situation, in reality it is double the responsibility Jonathan Stein
Both Melinda and Dani had natural water births and Jonathan was there for them both, along with a camera, which captured the entire experience for the trio's upcoming web series Looks Like Love To Me, which documents every aspect of the trio's unique lifestyle.
Jonathan's mom Sandy was also in the room and it was incredible as our labors lasted pretty much the same time. Melinda's was 13 hours and 12 minutes and mine was 13 hours,' Dani, who is currently studying sign language explained.
'Melinda and I really wanted to share breastfeeding each others babies and this week I breastfed [Melinda's son] Oliver for the first time. It gave Melinda a break and time alone with Jonathan and me an invaluable chance to bond with a boy I consider to be my son.'
As for raising their children within an unconventional family unit, they are not concerned about what anyone else thinks.
'People sometimes ask us: "Are you not worried about the kids getting bullied at school?"' Melinda admitted. 'But in all honesty it is not something that concerns us.
'We had agreed that when thy become old enough we will explain our situation and are committed to instill them with tools to face any hurdle they may encounter.
'Thankfully we live in community that is pretty liberal and over time we hope families like ours will not be in a minority. Because in all honesty we think having two moms and one dad is the perfect way to raise a child, in a home full of love.
'We are even open to taking in even more lovers if it feels right in the future, as more hands make for an easier life.'China's Gong Naiying competes during women's giant slalom of snowboard at the 2017 Sapporo Asian Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, Feb. 19, 2017. (Xinhua/He Changshan)
By Sportswriter Cao Jianjie
SAPPORO, Japan, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) -- With the Asian Winter Games winding down without a glitch in Sapporo, it is time for the three-time host of the continental event to seriously consider a bid for the Winter Olympics.
Sapporo was the first Asian city to host the Winter Games and its 1972 Olympic legacy still lasts to this day.
Most of the Asian Games competitions, including Alpine skiing, snowboarding, ski jumping, biathlon and ice hockey, were held on renovated 1972 venues, winning a nod from Olympic Council of Asian President Sheikh Ahmad Al Fahad Al Sabah, who said Sapporo has all the facilities needed to bring the Winter Olympics back.
Sapporo officials said they are mulling over a bid for 2026, but nothing official has been decided.
"Our citizens' interest in bidding for the Winter Olympics is rising," said Sapporo mayor Katsuhiro Akimoto, also the chief organizer of the Winter Asiad.
The OCA president suggests Sapporo bid for the 2026 Games, saying "Sapporo is capable and ready."
It would mean the IOC would return to a city in Asia for a third straight time following PyeongChang in 2018 and Beijing in 2022.
The Japanese Olympic Committee has yet openly voiced their support for a 2026 bid, considering Tokyo is hosting the Summer Olympics in 2020.
Sapporo's abilities in organizing big games have been recognized by the 2022 host.
"I am impressed with their savvy, diligence and efficiency," said Wang Yanxiao, head of a six-member "learning team" sent by the Beijing 2022 organizing committee.
"We come to learn," added Wang, "especially in the areas of personnel management, tech support, venue design and construction, post-games use of facilities and venues, as well as media service."
Wang noted a deeply-rooted winter sports tradition in Sapporo.
"In addition to natural resources, Sapporo has a great winter sports tradition and a perfect atmosphere, as well as a deep pool of winter sports personnel," Wang said.
Wei Jizhong, an OCA honorary life vice president, gave glowing marks to Sapporo.
"People here are enthusiastic about winter sports, and they are very nice," said Wei.
"They are cheering for figure skaters from south Asia even though they tumbled on the ice. Volunteers are very helpful, and 79 percent of tickets were sold out," he added.
Bidding applications for 2026 are expected to be due early in 2018 and the International Olympic Committee will decide a winner in 2019.Prime minister Manuel Valls tells BBC the measure brought in after Paris attacks must remain for ‘necessary’ amount of time
France is considering extending the state of emergency that has been in place since the Paris attacks in November despite criticism from human rights groups and United Nations experts.
The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, told the BBC that the state of emergency must remain in place for the “necessary” period of time and “until we can get rid of” Islamic State. “As long as the threat is there, we must use all the means,” he said.
Valls’s comments sparked debate in Paris about how long the extra emergency police powers could be allowed. A final decision is expected next week, but the French president, François Hollande, has told senior figures that an extension of the measures is probable.
The government declared a state of emergency within hours of the first shots by gunmen on 13 November, when a series of attacks across Paris left 130 people dead. But the powers – which hark back to the Algerian war in the 1950s – were later redefined and extended for three months until 26 February.
The state of emergency allows police to conduct house raids and searches without a warrant or judicial oversight, including at night, and gives extra powers to officials to place people under house arrest outside the normal judicial process. It also allows for restrictions on large gatherings.
One year after Charlie Hebdo, my friend tells me: ‘This just isn’t the same Paris’ Read more
This week, a group of four UN human rights specialists called on France not to extend the state of emergency, warning of “the lack of clarity and precision of several provisions of the state of emergency and surveillance laws”. Their main concerns centred on the restrictions to freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and the right to privacy.
The Human Rights League of France has taken a case to the country’s highest court to end the state of emergency, which it said was no longer justified and “seriously impacts public freedoms”. The case will be heard next week.
Since it was declared, there have been 3,099 house raids and searches. More than 380 people have been placed under house arrest. Most of the raids and house arrests took place in the weeks after the Paris attacks and the rate has since since slowed down. In total, at least 500 weapons have been seized. But 200 of those weapons were seized from one person, BFMTV reported.
Of the thousands of raids carried out, four judicial proceedings linked to terrorism have been opened, and Le Monde reported that one person had been charged in connection to terrorism.
Several house arrests have been legally contested, including a row over environmental activists put under house arrest during the Paris climate talks using the emergency measures.
Hollande intends to enshrine the new adapted special emergency measures into the French constitution in a high-stakes vote of both houses of parliament next month.
Opinion polls show public opinion is largely in favour of the state of emergency.
Privately, members of the ruling Socialist party have said that ending the special measures would be a very delicate issue. There is a sense among the French public that another attack could take place at any moment and the government does not want to be seen to have lifted measures should an attack occur.
This week, French state TV obtained a military intelligence document listing seven sites that could be the target of “coordinated, simultaneous” attacks, spread over several parts of France. These included Toulouse airport, the La Défense business district in Paris, the port of Marseille and the European parliament in Strasbourg.It’s a car that someone should make a movie so it can star in it, rather like the Aston Martin DB5 starred in the James Bond movie Goldfinger and the DeLorean starred in Back to the Future. It would need to be a movie that somehow combines the best of a Sherlock Holmes type of story with some James Bond Cold War intrigue laced with a bit of the grittiness of the British TV counter spy drama Callan; and with some carefully selected guns for the characters to add some interest; a Webley Fosbery, a Polish Radom Vis WZ 35 and a few more interesting guns of that sort.
The creation of the Tatra rear engined V8’s is itself a story laced with pre-war intrigue. It is a story of a car designed by Austrian engineer Hans Ledwinka, an associate of Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, and it was a car jointly designed by Hans Ledwinka, Zepplin designer Paul Jaray and engineer Erich Übelacker. The big rear engined V8 Tatras were built as models T77 between 1934-1935, T77a between 1935-1938, and the Tatra T87 between 1936-1950, so our feature car was made during the final year of production. The successors to the T77 and T87 were the similar Tatra 600 Tatraplan and the Tatra 603.
This was a car birthed in the era of the creation of the autobahn when designers were thinking of aerodynamic cars with straight line speed, like Zepplins of the road. The idea that these autobahn cruisers would need to go around corners was not as high on the agenda as it should have been. The big Tatras were and are impressive motorway cars, highly capable, quiet and comfortable. But hang even a magnesium alloy three liter V8 out behind the rear axle line and bolt it to a set of swing axles running on skinny wheels and cross-ply tires and be ready for some over-steer excitement.
Appearing in the thirties the T77 and T77a became a popular choice amongst high ranking Nazi German military officers such as Erwin Rommel the famous general of the Afrika Korps. However the T77’s propensity for getting into an over-steer condition when driven hard on winding roads soon led it to be christened “The Czech secret weapon” as quite a number of those senior Nazi military officers finished up dead or badly injured when their big Tatra rolled over. Drivers of the thirties were not used to the handling characteristics of these rear engine cars and so the difference in the handling came as a sudden surprise often in the worst possible circumstances. Drivers of the Auto Union mid-engined Grand Prix cars of the thirties faced similar difficulties. In any event Hitler banned his senior officers from owning the big Tatras and made them go back to boringly predictable Mercedes instead. He also banned Tatra from making any more of these gorgeous but temperamental cars until the end of the war saw his influence brought to an end.
The Tatra T87’s 2,970cc Single Overhead Camshaft air-cooled magnesium alloy V8 engine breaths through a single downdraft carburetor and produces 75bhp at 3,500rpm. The engine drives the car through a four speed manual transmission located in the same configuration as the Volkswagen and rear engined Mercedes of the thirties. Rear suspension is swing axles and the front suspension independent. Brakes on all four wheels are hydraulically actuated drums. Driven by someone who knows how to get the best out of the car these are a wonderful driver’s car and the V8 in the rear adds that V8 music we all love.
The interior of the T87 is aimed at comfort and the whole car is quite “Art Deco” in its style. It was created as a new style of car for a new era. In Czechoslovakia’s case that new era involved being invaded by Nazi Germany, and then when the Nazis were defeated being made a satellite state of the USSR. So the Tatra 87 went from being a car of choice for Nazi military officers to being a car of choice of Communist Party officials, whilst the “proletariat” caught the bus – if there was one.
Our feature Tatra 87 is coming up for sale by Bonhams at their Greenwich Concours d’Elegance Auction on 5th June 2016.
You will find the sale page for this car if you click here.
The sale car was purchased in the year 2000 and shipped to the United States where it joins an inventory of about ten such Tatra T87’s that call America home. One lives in Jay Leno’s garage, one other takes pride of place in the foyer of Peter Mullin’s museum. So this T87 represents a rare opportunity to acquire one of these cars in the United States.
The sale car has been restored in Czechoslovakia in the nineties and has recently been for pre-sale mechanical work with a Massachusetts-based T87 specialist which included refurbishment of the gas tank and gauge. So the car is in very nice condition and has seen little use in its decades of life this side of the Iron Curtain.
This is a car that appeals to people of imagination. It comes as no surprise that John Steinbeck owned a Tatra T87, they are a car that put together a quirky look with some quirky handling and yet make the whole into one of the most desirable motor cars of the thirties and forties, arguably one of the most interesting motor cars ever made. If you have the desire to own a rolling piece of Art Deco automotive art this is almost certainly the car for you.
(All pictures courtesy Bonhams).
Jon Branch is the founder and senior editor of Revivaler and has written a significant number of articles for various publications including official Buying Guides for eBay, classic car articles for Hagerty, magazine articles for both the Australian Shooters Journal and the Australian Shooter, and he’s a long time contributor to Silodrome. Jon has done radio, television, magazine and newspaper interviews on various issues, and has traveled extensively, having lived in Britain, Australia, China and Hong Kong. His travels have taken him to Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan and a number of other countries. He has studied the Japanese sword arts and has a long history of involvement in the shooting sports, which has included authoring submissions to government on various firearms related issues and assisting in the design and establishment of shooting ranges.Internet Teachings
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SaveExcerpt: "It is unconscionable that extremist groups circulate letters which accuse me of horrific things, saying that I am a traitor. These lies have circulated for almost 40 years, continually reopening the wound of the Vietnam War."
Jane Fonda talks with Vietnamese people during a trip to Hanoi in 1972. (photo: Joseph Kraft/L'Express)
The Truth About My Trip to Hanoi
By Jane Fonda, Reader Supported News
grew up during World War II. My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the Grapes of Wrath, his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day. I remember saying goodbye to my father the night he left to join the Navy. He didn't have to. He was older than other servicemen and had a family to support but he wanted to be a part of the fight against fascism, not just make movies about it. I admired this about him. I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.
For the first eight years of the Vietnam War I lived in France. I was married to the French film director, Roger Vadim and had my first child. The French had been defeated in their own war against Vietnam a decade before our country went to war there, so when I heard, over and over, French people criticizing our country for our Vietnam War I hated it. I viewed it as sour grapes. I refused to believe we could be doing anything wrong there.
It wasn't until I began to meet American servicemen who had been in Vietnam and had come to Paris as resisters that I realized I needed to learn more. I took every chance I could to meet with US soldiers. I talked with them and read the books they gave me about the war. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them - active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular - to try and end the war. I drove around the country visiting military bases, spending time in the G.I. coffee houses that had sprung up outside many bases - places where G.I.s could gather. I met with Army psychiatrists who were concerned about the type of training our men were receiving... quite different, they said, from the trainings during WWII and Korea. The doctors felt this training was having a damaging effect on the psyches of the young men, effects they might not recover from. I raised money and hired a former Green Beret, Donald Duncan, to open and run the G.I. Office in Washington D.C. to try and get legal and congressional help for soldiers who were being denied their rights under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I talked for hours with US pilots about their training, and what they were told about Vietnam. I met with the wives of servicemen. I visited V.A. hospitals. Later in 1978, wanting to share with other Americans some of what I had learned about the experiences of returning soldiers and their families, I made the movie Coming Home. I was the one who would be asked to speak at large anti-war rallies to tell people that the men in uniform were not the enemy, that they did not start the war, that they were, in growing numbers our allies. I knew as much about military law as any layperson. I knew more than most civilians about the realities on the ground for men in combat. I lived and breathed this stuff for two years before I went to North Vietnam. I cared deeply for the men and boys who had been put in harm's way. I wanted to stop the killing and bring our servicemen home. I was infuriated as I learned just how much our soldiers were being lied to about why we were fighting in Vietnam and I was anguished each time I would be with a young man who was traumatized by his experiences. Some boys shook constantly and were unable to speak above a whisper.
It is unconscionable that extremist groups circulate letters which accuse me of horrific things, saying that I am a traitor, that POWs in Hanoi were tied up and in chains and marched past me while I spat at them and called them 'baby killers.' These letters also say that when the POWs were brought into the room for a meeting I had with them, we shook hands and they passed me tiny slips of paper on which they had written their social security numbers. Supposedly, this was so that I could bring back proof to the US military that they were alive. The story goes on to say that I handed these slips of paper over to the North Vietnamese guards and, as a result, at least one of the men was tortured to death. That these stories could be given credence shows how little people know of the realities in North Vietnam prisons at the time. The US government and the POW families didn't need me to tell them who the prisoners were. They had all their names. Moreover, according to even the most hardcore senior officers, torture stopped late in 1969, two and a half years before I got there. And, most importantly, I would never say such things to our servicemen, whom I respect, whether or not I agree with the mission they have been sent to perform, which is not of their choosing.
But these lies have circulated for almost 40 years, continually reopening the wound of the Vietnam War and causing pain to families of American servicemen. The lies distort the truth of why I went to North Vietnam and they perpetuate the myth that being anti-war means being anti-soldier.
Little known is the fact that almost 300 Americans - journalists, diplomats, peace activists, professors, religious leaders and Vietnam Veterans themselves - had been traveling to North Vietnam over a number of years in an effort to try and find ways to end the war. (By the way, those trips generated little if any media attention.) I brought with me to Hanoi a thick package of letters from families of POWs. Since 1969, mail for the POWs had been brought in and out of North Vietnam every month by American visitors. The Committee of Liaison With Families coordinated this effort. I took the letters to the POWs and brought a packet of letters from them back to their families.
Here is the link to the petition to stand with Jane.
To read the full post, please go to janefonda.com.Buy Photo KIPP Nashville's Randy Dowell. (Photo: George Walker IV / File / The Tennessean)Buy Photo
KIPP Nashville won its appeal Friday against Metro Nashville Public Schools and will be allowed to open two new schools in Nashville.
Following its staff's recommendation, the Tennessee State Board of Education voted unanimously to approve both charter school appeals. KIPP was the only decision that was recommended to be overturned by the state board's staff, and the schools are the first to be approved by the state board since a 2014 law allowing the appeal process came into effect.
Both the International Academy of Excellence and Rocketship Education appeals were recommended to be denied.
International Academy of Excellence saw its appeal unanimously denied, while Rocketship Education's appeal to open a new school was also denied, but with an 8-1 vote. State board member Wendy Tucker was the dissenter.
By overturning Metro Schools' decision, the state board followed the recommendation from its staff that the Metro board made a decision that was "contrary to the best interests of the students, the school district, or the community."
The district will now have to figure out if it will charter the school or if the state board will become the authorizer. Either way, KIPP will be able to operate two new Nashville schools.
"There will be a reconciliation period with a 30-day window," said Sara Heyburn, state board executive director. "Our legal team will work with the district and school."
The law, however, could be challenged, if not by the school board, by parents and community groups, said board member Will Pinkston. Lawyers have offered varied opinions on whether the law can withstand a legal challenge.
"Regardless of how this settles, I believe there will be litigation," he said. "If the board is not willing, I know a group of parents and educators interested in a lawsuit."
The law allows the state board to authorize the creation of a school if a charter application is denied by a district. The law applies only to districts with priority schools and is tied to Metro's decision to reject the Great Hearts Academies application in 2012.
KIPP was recommended to be approved by the state board after a review of its application and public hearing.
Heyburn said in her recommendation the charter operator provided compelling arguments for opening two schools in South Nashville, including showing strong academic achievement, and that there is a demand for the school.
The recommendation also said the review didn't find that opening two KIPP schools would create a "substantial negative fiscal impact" on the Metro Schools budget, a major argument by Metro Schools officials during the public hearings.
Tucker, who came under scrutiny earlier this week due to her involvement with Project Renaissance by Pinkston, said during the meeting she checked with the state board's attorney and was cleared to vote.
Project Renaissance officials describe the nonprofit as an entity committed to getting more children into better Nashville public schools. The goal is to use a variety of initiatives to accomplish that goal, but opponents, and Pinkston, have noted they are interested in increasing the number of charters in Nashville.
"I'd like to put on the record (Project Renaissance) is focused on increasing quality schools for kids in Nashville, no matter the operational structure," Tucker said. "We support high-performing charters and district schools."
She also apologized to families of KIPP Nashville for the "vitriol" displayed by the Nashville board before her KIPP vote.
"There are plenty in Middle Tennessee that support your decisions and support the choices you have made for your children," she said.
Multiple groups have weighed in on the process, with Tennesseans Reclaiming Educational Excellence asking the state board to leave the determination of approving or denying charter schools in the hands of local districts. StudentsFirst Tennessee, however, called the vote historic in expanding quality schools in Nashville.
After the meeting, Rocketship Education Regional Director Shaka Mitchell said the charter operator will build on the successes it saw in its school last year and again ask to expand next year.
"Our kids are on a great trajectory," he said.
Reach Jason Gonzales at 615-259-8047 and on Twitter @ByJasonGonzales.
Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/1LRKG1fIn the latest sign of its resurgence, Forest Hills‘ Cinemart Cinemas will be screening next month the live-action remake of “Beauty and the Beast,” the first Disney film to be shown there in a decade.
The “tale as old as time,” which stars Emma Watson, Ewan McGregor, Kevin Kline and Luke Evans, will be shown in standard definition and in 3D starts on Friday, March 17, at the five-screen Cinemart located at 106-03 Metropolitan Ave.
Just two years ago, it looked as if |
kitsunetsuki. Their fur turns a deep black and they lash out against all around them. A nogitsune will often procure power, wealth, or material pleasures in order to fill the void left by their lost potential.
Kitsune Names
Kitsune often have a true name as well as a chosen name. Their chosen name may change over time or just on a whim but their true name never changes and knowing a kitsune's true name gives you power over it.
True Male Names Hibiki, Jun'ichi, Kaito, Michi, Itazura, Ryuu, Shinobu, Takahiro, Yuuta
True Female Names Aiko, Chika, Hanako, Izumi, Kazue, Miyako, Rei, Sayaka, Tomiko, Ume, Yuzuki
Chosen Names Kantai, Chamu, Torikku, Higi, Dorobo, Kokatsu, Sagi, Sakkaku, Itazura, Ato, Kireina
Kitsune Traits
Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity and Intelligence scores increase by 1.
Age. Kitsune reach adulthood around the age of 50 and can live to be 1000 years old.
Alignment. Most Kitsune are chaotic good aligned although it is not unheard of that those among the Yako clan to be chaotic neutral or even evil if scorned.
Size. In their human and hybrid forms Kitsune are built proportionally to humans, your size is Medium. In their fox form they are barely 2 feet tall and their size is small.
Speed. Your base walking speed is 30ft.
Shape-Shifting. When not shape-shifting you take the form of a fox-humanoid hybrid. As a bonus action you can assume the form of either a human or fox. You can enter a specific human form of the same sex. When in this form you are indistinguishable from a human. The fox form has the statistics of a cat (MM pg. 320). The Following rules apply:
Your game statistics are replaced by the statistics of a fox, but you retain your alignment, personality, hit points, and ability scores. You also retain all of your skill and saving throw proficiencies, in addition to gaining those of a fox.
You can’t cast spells, and your ability to speak or take any action that requires hands is limited to the capabilities of your fox form. Transforming doesn’t break your concentration on a spell you’ve already cast, however, or prevent you from taking actions that are part of a spell, such as minor illusion, that you’ve already cast.
You retain the benefit of any features from your class or other source and can use them if your fox form is physically capable of doing so.
You choose whether your equipment falls to the ground in your space, merges into your fox form, or is worn by it. Worn equipment functions as normal, but the DM decides whether it is practical for the fox form to wear a piece of equipment, based on the fox’s shape and Small size. Your equipment doesn’t change size or shape to match the new form, and any equipment that the fox form can’t wear must either fall to the ground or merge with it. Equipment that merges with the form has no effect until you leave the form.
Fey-Ancestry. You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep.Screenshot of Spec Ops: The Line courtesy of 2K
Walt Williams, a writer who has worked on titles like Mafia II, Star Wars Battlefront II, and most famously, Spec Ops: The Line, has published an excerpt of his book about working in the games industry over on Polygon. It's titled "Why I Worship Crunch," and perhaps unsurprisingly, that's what it's about.
If you're not familiar, crunch is the practice of doing intensive, long hours of game development on a tight schedule. It is brutal on the mind and the body, and it is taken as the norm in many studio situations worldwide. Kotaku's Jason Schreier wrote an excellent (and horrifying) piece about crunch practices back in 2015 if you're interested in more details.
Williams's piece is a very personal essay about the two sides of the coin of crunch. As Williams told me in a Twitter exchange, at its core, it's about how crunch itself is both seductive and destructive. It is clear that, for Williams, crunch is a way of dealing with the world. Like any kind of intensive activity, it is a way of dissolving the myriad problems of daily life and focusing in on one thing to an extreme. In that way, Williams seems to find crunch therapeutic, despite the fact that it seems to have had a severely negative effect on his life. In some follow-up tweets about the essay, that was the way of reading the essay that he clearly prefers.
At the end of the day, no matter how much an individual loves it, crunch is not about individuals themselves. Crunch is a systemic, top-down solution to the problem of extracting the most labor from game developers; it is a strategy that is implemented on workers, and it is performed widely in most sectors of the industry. One developer's complicated relationship with crunch is a blip on the constantly-screaming radar of worker exploitation that the practice enables as part of the normal operation of the game industry. It is not an exception in one person's life, it is the norm.
On one hand, it's hard to damn Williams for wanting to write artfully and in a complicated way about something that he has a complicated relationship with. On the other hand, Williams literally says that "crunch is a natural occurrence brought on by the creative process." He also tells us that "it's natural to wish things weren't this way, but it won't change anything."
The essay functions as a romantic, florid apologia.
The conditions of work, the organization of humans in relationship to the things they build, and the corporations that manage that building process are all left out of this "natural process." The implication here is that, whether you have Williams's addictive relationship to crunch or not, you might as well just shut the hell up and get on with crunching, because that's what it's going to take.
Williams might not be celebrating crunch, but he is legitimating it, and even if he doesn't feel that way, that's what the essay (even with the context of his Twitter follow up) does. The final paragraphs are meant to function as stark honesty in relation to the manic illustrations of the middle of the essay. Williams tells us that "we can accomplish almost anything, but only if we're willing to pay the price" before patiently explaining that "it may not be fair, and it definitely won't be the same price quoted to someone else, but it will still need to be paid."
Then, to end, despite all the protests about how crunch is bad, how his relationship to it is poison, and about how we're all chumps for accepting this industry practice, he delivers this:
I've paid the price more than once. In return, I more or less got exactly what I wanted — I shouted into the void and the void shouted back, "We hear you." That puts me in a unique position to look back on the past ten years and ask, "Was it honestly worth it?"
I don't know. But I know the price was fair.
He says he doesn't know, but the very structure of the essay screams "Yes!" This final paragraph is an endorsement. If crunch is "natural," as he claims, and the reward has been recognition for the work you have put in, then it seems impossible for me to see that recognition as anything other than an unalloyed good. It's easy to summarize these final paragraphs, after all, as "I put in the time, and then I got mine!"
I am of the opinion that we need these kinds of discussions about crunch, and I'm glad that Williams is being open about his own. This essay, though, gives so much ground to a practice that Williams claims not to support, and radically individualizes a systemic issue to the detriment of those who crunch and who do not have a complicated relationship with it. The essay functions as a romantic, florid apologia.
When this story first hit, it was tweeted out as "a brutally honest look" at the practice—but in so far as that's true, it's true only in the most individualistic way. Individual stories are useful: It is important to highlight how people feel about the structures they live within. After all, that's how we learn about those structures, and that learning is the only way to change them for the better. But Reducing a systemic issue into an individual one masks the exploitation at work, though, in the same way that talking about local weather doesn't give you a diagnosis of global warming.
And if we want to change crunch, to de-naturalize it and make it a practice of the past, then a collective perspective needs to be the approach.
Have thoughts? Swing by the Waypoint forums to share them!The Detroit Connector, a University of Michigan bus service connecting the Ann Arbor campus to Detroit, will provide service seven days a week, starting Oct. 30, to U-M faculty, staff, students and, for the first time, the general public.
Bus stops will include the Central Campus Transit Center in Ann Arbor, UM-Dearborn, and the U-M Detroit Center.
The Detroit Connector will also include expanded service hours, including Fridays and Saturdays beginning as early as 7 a.m. and concluding at 1 a.m.
"The University of Michigan is deeply committed to creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive campus environment," says Robert Sellers, vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer.
"The Detroit Connector helps us break down existing barriers and better connect the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Detroit communities. By expanding service and opening it to the public, the Detroit Connector can improve access to the region's numerous research, academic and cultural opportunities."
In support of the expanded service, riders will now be able to make reservations online, with one-way trips ranging from $6 to $10. U-M students receiving Pell Grants will be able to ride the Connector for free, with reduced fares available to students and faculty who engage in community service or class activities in Detroit.
Indian Trails, the Detroit Connector's bus provider since 2014, will shift daily operations to its Michigan Flyer division, which currently supports a similar service, called AirRide, between Ann Arbor and Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
"Our experience in developing the Michigan Flyer airport shuttle service should prove valuable for the Detroit Connector," says Chad Cushman, president of Indian Trails.
"One key to building ridership is frequency of service. Though not otherwise publicly funded, Michigan Flyer used a one-year, one-time federal grant to help increase its round trips between East Lansing, Ann Arbor, and Detroit Metro Airport from eight to 12 daily. As a result, passenger volume grew to more than 200,000 per year, ensuring the service was self-supporting."
Detroit Connector buses are wheelchair accessible and include amenities such as coach seating, individual climate controls, in-seat AC outlets, WiFi, restrooms and bike storage.
Founded in 2013, the Detroit Connector has operated over the past four years through grants, donations, and funding by the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion and the Detroit Center.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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The Senate voted Thursday to massively increase income inequality in the United States by using the power of the federal government to redistribute wealth upward. By a narrow 51-49 vote, the chamber backed a budget measure that clears the way for Republicans to enact epic tax cuts for corporate elites, mega-millionaires and billionaires. Ad Policy
How epic? “At a time of massive income inequality, this budget provides $1.9 trillion in tax breaks for the top 1 percent,” argued Senator Bernie Sanders. “This is not a bad budget bill, it is a horrific budget bill.”
Sanders was not alone in his assessment. As the Los Angeles Times noted, Senate Republicans approved massive deficits in order “to pay for Trump’s tax cuts.”
The horrible budget bill—which allows for the implementation of sweeping tax cuts for the rich without bipartisan support and without controls on the use of deficits to fund those tax cuts—won only the votes of Republicans.
Forty-six Democrats, two independents who caucus with the Democrats (Sanders and Maine Senator Angus King), and one Republican (Kentucky’s Rand Paul, who has objected to Pentagon-spending hikes) voted no.
One of the budget’s most ardent foes, Wisconsin Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin, argues that
This budget resolution paves the way for a partisan tax proposal that favors big corporations and gives a majority of the tax breaks to the wealthiest 1 percent. I just don’t think it’s right to make Wisconsin’s hardworking middle class families pay for it by blowing a hole in the deficit and cutting Medicare and Medicaid. Current Issue View our current issue
Sanders and Baldwin exposed the true agenda of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans with a pair of amendments that clarified the tax and deficit issues.
The Sanders amendment sought to prevent tax cuts for the top 1 percent of Americans, including billionaire campaign donors such as David and Charles Koch, whose enthusiasm for the Trump administration’s “tax reform” schemes was summed up by a Boston Globe headline that read: “The Koch brothers (and their friends) want President Trump’s tax cut. Very badly.” Tim Phillips, the president of the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity cabal, announced that the push for the tax cut is “the most significant federal effort we’ve ever taken on.”
That significance is measured not just in benefits to the Koch brothers and their billionaire friends but also in cuts to programs that serve the great mass of Americans. To avert the shift of money to the Kochs, Sanders proposed a simple standard that would have directed tax cuts that are outlined in any reform package to the 99 percent of Americans who are neither mega-millionaires nor billionaires.
Sanders, the ranking Democratic Caucus member on the Senate Budget Committee, explained that
It’s not a radical idea to suggest that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the people on top are doing unbelievably well, at a time when the middle class is shrinking, now is not the time to provide hundreds of billion of dollars of tax breaks to the very wealthiest families in this country.
Forty-four Democrats, Maine independent Angus King, and Sanders backed the amendment. But it was blocked by 51 Republicans and one Democrat: North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp. (Though Heitkamp opposed the overall budget measure, her vote on the amendment broke faith not merely with her fellow Senate Democrats but also with the historic populist tradition of the Nonpartisan League that gave its name to her home state’s Democratic-Nonpartisan League Party.)
Baldwin, a Wisconsinite who traces her politics to another populist movement of the upper Midwest (that of the Wisconsin progressives who supported Senator Robert M. La Follette’s battles against wealth and privilege), proposed an amendment that focused on the fiscal irresponsibility of the GOP scheme. She sought to reinstate a Senate rule that would effectively prevent Republicans from increasing the deficit in order to fund tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Proponents of sound budgeting hailed the Wisconsinite’s proposal, with Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, declaring that
The amendment offered by Senator Baldwin would restore a shield to prevent reconciliation from being used to add to the debt. It is fiscal common sense and important especially now as lawmakers confront growing debt.
Fiscal common sense won the votes of 47 Democrats and independents who caucus with the Democrats. But 51 Republican votes blocked the Baldwin amendment.
So it was that the Senate voted to advance a Trump-backed, Koch-promoted “tax reform” agenda that is is intended not only to make the rich richer but also to pay for this transfer of wealth by robbing from the rest of us and by creating deficits that will weaken the ability of the federal government to function and that will burden working-class taxpayers for decades to come.
This is, as Sanders says “Robin Hood in reverse” budgeting. But it does not stop there. If the Trump-GOP plan is enacted, generations of working families will continue to be robbed, year and year, in order to keep taxes low for the Koch brothers and the billionaire class.Arsène Wenger has admitted the loss of Santi Cazorla to injury for at least three months is “very bad news”, with the Arsenal manager unsure when the Spain midfielder will play again.
Cazorla will travel to Sweden next week for surgery on a plantaris tendon after sustaining the injury in his right ankle in the 6-0 Champions League victory against Ludogorets in October.
Alan Pardew admits Crystal Palace are in crisis ahead of Southampton match Read more
“For me it’s very bad news,” said Wenger. “You always know the date of the surgery but never the date where the player will play again. I always try to put absolutely everything in place to avoid surgery because it creates anxiety and rehab. When you can avoid it, you have to avoid it. Now they tell me that he will be out for two months at least, but two months can sometimes be three as well.
“He has an inflammation at the back of his foot. Nobody really knows where it comes from. The anti-inflammatory injections have not got rid of it. The surgeon decided to have an exploratory surgery, that means open and see what’s going on in there. He’s desperate to play football. He’s only happy on the football pitch. I’ve spoken to him, of course. He himself wants to get out of that vicious circle of going out and coming in again. He just wants to cure it.”
Arsenal travel to West Ham on Saturday with doubts over Olivier Giroud and Mohamed Elneny. It is the first time they have visited the London Stadium and Wenger has warned West Ham that it takes years to feel at home after a big move.
“It’s a bit like when we moved to the Emirates,” he said. “You feel a bit like you’re playing on neutral ground for a while. It takes a few years, because you have to make memories and build a little history. You move from somewhere full of history, and suddenly you move to a stadium where nothing happened before you came in. You feel a bit lonely there.
“You have to rebuild the environment. You can try, but you cannot create something artificially that doesn’t exist.”
Wenger recalled how his players even missed the orientation that they had become used to at Highbury. “When they played at Highbury, they kind of had a picture. When you play up front you know where the goal is, because of the signals coming from the crowd, you know where the adverts are and sometimes you have no time to make your decision, but you have a geographical reference when you stand on the pitch that is linked to the stadium. You have to recreate that.”
Wenger admits that Upton Park was a favourite place to visit, particularly when he first arrived in England 20 years ago. “I preferred the first version of the West Ham stadium, when he was very tight, one the most intimidating stadiums I knew.”
West Ham have just two Premier League wins in their first four months at the converted Olympic Stadium, but Wenger is still expecting a challenging evening. “They had a difficult start to the season but recently they’ve picked up with their quality and they played well against Tottenham and Manchester United,” Wenger noted. “They are difficult fixtures so overall it will be a very tight and intense game.”By Captain Pyke | July 29, 2010 - 9:27 pm
The well versed actor, singer, and producer Chase Masterson, is joining the likes of Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto in Star Trek Online. Two Spocks and a Dabo girl, hey, I see a series in that! Anyway, Chase is lending her voice to STO Season Two aboard Deep Space Nine in her familiar role as a Dabo girl. Well, A holographic Dabo girl, which is the property of Quark Enterprises. Let's hear what Chase had to say about joining STO.
"Fans have always asked when there was going to be a game of Dabo. Cryptic's version is everything I had hoped it would be – fun, strategically challenging, and rewarding on many levels," says Masterson. "We've recorded some fun little extras, as well. I'm looking forward to hearing the fans' response."
Season Two, available now, launched a new series of improvements to Cryptic's Star Trek Online including mini games like Dabo, plus others. To see the full list of new additions to the game click here.
Watch Tips & Tricks - Dabo here.The mighty Tyrannosaurus rex was no quick, agile killing machine—the "tyrant king" dinosaur just didn't have the nerves.
Instead, most times T. rex probably plodded along like an elephant, according to a new study that estimated the "speed limit" of nerve signals running through the dinosaur's body.
When a vertebrate—an animal with a backbone—stubs its toe, electrical signals get carried from the toe to the spinal cord by a nerve, which is made up of bundles of long, fiberlike cells.
Since the researchers couldn't study a T. rex's nerves directly, the team looked at how nerves work in a range of modern animals, from the tiny shrew to midsize dogs and pigs to massive Asian elephants.
The scientists found that, for all body sizes, nerves have a basic speed limit of about 180 feet (55 meters) a second. That's the fastest a signal can travel from an animal's feet to its spinal cord—the kind of signal that's essential for walking and running.
At that speed limit, big animals such as elephants can't run too fast or they're effectively running blind.
Suppose an elephant steps on a pebble, said study leader Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. If the pachyderm was running fast, "its foot would be nearly off the ground before it could do something in response to that troublesome pebble."
The same goes for T. rex, said study co-author John Hutchinson, an expert on dinosaur movement at the Royal Veterinary College in London.
"Nerves are nerves—in vertebrates anyway," Hutchinson said. "So the principles will apply generally to dinosaurs, too."
T. rex Would Still Have Been Impressive, Exciting
According to the study, there's a trade-off between the number of nerve cells in a bundle and how fast the nerve can transmit a signal.
For a big animal such as an elephant to be as fast as a shrew and still feel every step, the elephant's nerves would have to be 100 feet (30 meters) thick—clearly impossible.
Instead, elephant nerves can either be relatively slow and sensitive or fast and dulled.
As long as a bus and weighing around 6.5 tons, the average T. rex would also have needed to move slowly to feel with its feet, according to the study, which appears Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The idea that T. rex lumbered like an elephant fits with other studies of the dinosaur's body, including one paper that found that T. rex's leg muscles would have to have been heftier than its whole body weight for the dinosaur to have been a speed demon.
"To be agile, Tyrannosaurus would need to be both all muscle and all nerve," Simon Fraser's Donelan said.
Nonetheless, elephants can occasionally get up to a fast clip, sometimes charging fast enough to catch people. Ditto for big dinosaurs, the Royal Veterinary College's Hutchinson said.Atherton Racing and GT Bicycles are officially no more.
The Atherton setup has been racing on GT bikes since 2012 but for 2016 we will see a different manufacturer step up as title sponsor. Who will it be? More news on that soon…
This also begs the question, where will GT go from here? After such a big commitment to the British family, this could leave quite the hole in the American brand’s marketing. What direction will they take things?
In 2012, GT Bicycles Factory Racing partnered with Atherton Racing. It’s been an incredible four years with the whole team. Together with the GT Product Team, GT Factory Racing developed world class products that have been proven on the world stage. The results speak for themselves. With over 50 World Cup podiums, 3 World Championships, and 3 World Cup overall titles, the team proved that the partnership between GT Bicycles and Atherton Racing was unstoppable.
– GT BicyclesJunior dos Santos had not even gotten back to his locker room by the time fans and media everywhere were deep in thought about his future UFC heavyweight championship bout with Cain Velasquez Another party quite interested: gamblers.According to noted MMA linesmaker Nick Kalikas, dos Santos is a slight edge in the possible fall matchup.Just moments after UFC 131 ended, Kalikas installed dos Santos as a -125 favorite, giving him a very slight edge over the champion, who was listed at -105.On Saturday night, dos Santos won a convincing unanimous decision over Shane Carwin, lumping him up over the course of the three-round fight after nearly finishing him in the first.Dos Santos (13-1) has yet to lose in the UFC, winning seven straight bouts. He's only failed to finish two of those, but even in those, he's been dominant. Against Carwin, he out-landed him 104-22 according to FightMetric.com.Also according to the site, the two are No. 1 and No. 2 in UFC history in strikes landed per minute, with Velasquez landing the way at 7.46 per minute and JDS just behind at 6.79.The unbeaten Velasquez (9-0) is still recovering from shoulder surgery stemming from an injury suffered in his title win against Brock Lesnar last October. The UFC is hoping that he will be ready to return for an October event in Houston, though that fight is not yet official.A decision by the EU court earlier this year to scrap a controversial data retention directive may have implications for existing international data agreements and EU proposals under review.
“We will have a debate on the question of the compatibility of these international agreements with EU law here in the parliament,” German Green Jan Phillip Albrecht said Wednesday (23 July).
At stake are a number of data-sharing agreements with the Americans such as the one requiring airlines to share air passengers' personal details (PNR) with US authorities, and the EU-US terrorist financial tracking programme (TFTP).
The European Court of Justice in April ruled that the EU retention directive had violated the rights to privacy and data protection, in part, because no link was made between the data retained and the threat to public security.
The court rejected the bulk collection of data of people not suspected of any crime and the amount of time it was stored.
But the now-defunct retention directive is not the only EU policy or law that involves the mass collection of data of people not suspected of any crime.
A study, commissioned by the European Greens and presented by Albrecht, says the court’s judgement means the European Commission will have to review or renegotiate a number of agreements.
It finds that the transfer of undifferentiated bulk data collection and transfer of flight passenger and bank data to the US are not compatible with court’s judgement.
“It doesn’t happen very often that a directive is declared void in its entirety and this shows the importance of the case and maybe the initial misjudgement of the EU legislator, in particular the commission, which defended the directive in recent years,” said Franziska Boehm, an assistant professor at the University of Munster, and co-author of the study.
One legal argument used by the study is an article in the 2002 e-privacy directive.
It states blanket data retention is not possible in the field of communications “except under certain circumstances” and only if compatible with fundamental rights.
“We think a review of these agreements and possibly even a renegotiation of these agreements even if it is painful needs to be carried out,” she said.
The commission disagrees.
A “preliminary assessment” by the Brussels executive suggests other EU-level justice and home affairs laws cannot be compared with the scrapped directive.
EU spokesperson Michele Cercone said in an email the air passenger data and financial tracking agreements “provide for effective data protection safeguards”.
He said the existing instruments are also “more limited in purpose and scope” and “set out clear rules for the access and use of data.”
Some concessions to the ruling could be made when it comes to on-going discussions, he said.
He pointed to discussions on the EU’s own air passenger data collection system and the so-called Entry/Exit system where the fingerprints of all visiting non-EU nationals are collected and stored in a database.
Albrecht received a similar written reply from EU home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom in June.
Malmstrom said the commission has no intention of terminating the PNR agreements with the US, Canada or Australia regardless of the court’s judgement.
“The personal data involved in the processing of PNR (passenger name record) data is less revealing than the types of telecommunications data formally retained under the data retention directive,” she noted.
Albrecht, for his part, said the debate would continue in the parliament’s civil liberties committee after the summer break.Glyphosate (often known by its original brand name, Roundup) is the most widely used agricultural chemical in the world. What, if anything, is it doing to people?
I bring this up because of some recent (and seemingly contradictory) news items. A group of farmers is suing Monsanto, the compound’s original developers, because they claim that the company knew of (and deliberately minimized) risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from exposure to it. At the same time, two branches of the UN, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization) have come out with a statement that glyphosate is “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk in humans”. And this only a year after another UN agency, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, stated what looks like the exact opposite, that it could “probably” be a cause of cancer in humans. Later on last year, the European Food Safety Authority said that glyphosate is “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic hazard”.
So the situation is confused, and that confusion is compounded by the amazingly low signal/noise on this subject if you start searching for information. The list of web sites that have “glyphosate = death” articles on them is beyond numbering, because a lot of natural food advocates hate the compound and hate Monsanto. What you have to try to do, though, is figure out how good the reasons are for that hate. The problem is, most of these sites seem to be repeating the same allegations, and thus have little to add to the debate. The sources that a lot of them are using for their arguments are not helping much, either, such as the papers of Stephanie Seneff and co-authors.
I went into one of those in detail here, and after looking into the case that it makes, I am willing to dismiss out of hand anything else Seneff has to say on the subject. It’s that bad. You will hear that “MIT researchers” have “proven” that glyphosate does X and Y and Z, and that this work is “published in peer-reviewed journals”, but nothing like that is true. Seneff has done no actual studies on glyphosate; she doesn’t work in a lab. Those papers are rehashes of stuff from the literature, piles of speculation and dot-connecting, and they’re invariably published in low-quality pay-to-play journals that do little or no actual refereeing of their contents. And their content is yet another problem – as shown in that link above, the paper that goes on and on about glyphosate’s effect on gut bacteria does not manage to cite any of the papers that have studied...glyphosate effects on bacteria. It not only doesn’t cite them, it seems to pretend that this research does not even exist, probably because all these papers contradict the fundamental ideas that Seneff’s tower of speculation is built on. She’s going around now saying that half of all children are going to be autistic (because of glyphosate), and that it’s also a root cause of not only cancer, but Alzheimer’s and a whole list of other diseases. If your knowledge of glyphosate’s toxicology comes only from reading the Seneff papers, I feel pity for you, because you have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to actually understand anything about it.
All right, with that out of the way, what are the facts, if any? First off, let’s take a look at those two UN-based statements. This article at Wired does a good job explaining what’s going on: the difference is that the IARC is looking at the question from a “Is there any possible way, under any conditions at all, that glyphosate could be a carcinogen?”, while the FAO and WHO are giving an answer to the questions “Is glyphosate actually causing cancer in people?”. If you’re not used to thinking like a toxicologist, then these two questions might still seem to be pretty similar. In fact, if you went out and took a public opinion poll and asked everyone if we should make sure to ban anything in food that has been linked to causing cancer, you’d get a large majority of vigorous agreement. But the problem is, as long as you’re willing to allow pretty much any conditions, pretty much anything can conceivably cause cancer.
A toxicologist interviewed in the Wired article makes a great analogy to explain hazard versus risk, which is what we’re talking about here. Sharks are a hazard. They are fierce predators with sharp teeth, and they most definitely have attacked humans in the past. But for most people, sharks are not much of a risk. “Risk”, technically speaking, refers to your chances of being harmed under real-world conditions, while “hazard” refers to the potential for harm. A large shark has plenty of potential to do damage to you, but should you be worried about that happening? It depends. If you’re sitting in your car, probably not (you have other, more immediate risks to worry about). If you’re swimming off a tropical beach, though, that may be another matter. And if you’re doing so after cutting your foot and leaving a trail of blood in the water, I would seriously consider the shark possibility and act accordingly: your risk has increased to what most people would find unacceptable levels.
Fine – but what about your risk when, say, you visit an aquarium? Remember, the hazard a shark poses has not changed during all this – he’s still hungry and he still has a mouthful of teeth. The shark is the shark. Your risk of being bitten by him has, in fact, increased a great deal when you visit an aquarium – you’ve gone from a place (your home, your car) where there are (one assumes) no sharks whatsoever, and now you’re in the same room with one. True, you’re separated by a thick pane of glass, and true, it’s hard to come up with a plausible chain of events that would lead to said shark chomping on your leg, but it’s undeniable that this is much more possible than it was in the parking lot outside the aquarium or back in your bed. The odds are still vanishingly low, and not many people worry on their visit the aquarium about the chances of being bitten by a shark (nor should they) – but if you write things up from the right angle, that visit can look wildly dangerous. “RISK OF SHARK ATTACK NOW INCREASED BY FACTOR OF ONE MILLION!”
This may sound like a silly example, but that’s basically what happened recently with the IARC and its announcement on bacon being a cause of cancer. Under real-world conditions, eating a normal amount of bacon raise your risk of colorectal cancer by an amount too small to consider. But it does appear to be raising it by a reproducible, measurable amount, and therefore bacon (and other processed meats) are in the IARC’s category 1. (Here’s an article on those categories). It’s important to note that some hypothetical substance that reproducibly, in human studies, gives anyone cancer every single time they touch it would also be in category 1, the same as a hypothetical substance that reproducibly, in human studies, raises a person’s risk of cancer by one millionth of a per cent. Same category. These categories are not arranged by relative risk – they’re arranged by how good the evidence is. Glyphosate is in category 2A, which means that there is evidence from animal studies, but limited/insufficient evidence from humans as of yet. Here’s the list of everything in category 2A, and you’ll note that it’s a mixed bag, with entries that range from ethylene dibromide to shift work that disrupts circadian rhythms. So yes, by the standards of the available evidence, glyphosate is in the same cancer hazard category as working the night shift, or working as a hairdresser. (Working nights as a hairdresser is presumably worse). You will not see these comparisons made on the web sites that proclaim Roundup as a known human carcinogen, but they’re completely appropriate by IARC standards, and they’re the only agency by whose standards glyphosate is a cancer hazard.
Now to the case of those farmers. They’re suing, as mentioned, because of a putative link between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, NHL. When you look into the medical literature, the best you can say is that no relationship between these forms of cancer and glyphosate exposure can be established, based on the available evidence. Some associations from meta-analysis of the literature barely reach statistical significance, but at a level that could easily be due to bias or confounding variables. If you want everyone to take numbers like this |
return { loading: true }; case userConstants.GETALL_SUCCESS: return { items: action.users }; case userConstants.GETALL_FAILURE: return { error: action.error }; case userConstants.DELETE_REQUEST: // add 'deleting:true' property to user being deleted return {...state, items: state.items.map(user => user.id === action.id? {...user, deleting: true } : user ) }; case userConstants.DELETE_SUCCESS: // remove deleted user from state return { items: state.items.filter(user => user.id!== action.id) }; case userConstants.DELETE_FAILURE: // remove 'deleting:true' property and add 'deleteError:[error]' property to user return {...state, items: state.items.map(user => { if (user.id === action.id) { // make copy of user without 'deleting:true' property const { deleting,...userCopy } = user; // return copy of user with 'deleteError:[error]' property return {...userCopy, deleteError: action.error }; } return user; }) }; default: return state } }
React + Redux Services Folder
Path: /src/_services
The _services layer handles all http communication with backend apis for the application, each service encapsulates the api calls for a content type (e.g. users) and exposes methods for performing various operations (e.g. CRUD operations). Services can also have methods that don't wrap http calls, for example the userService.logout() method just removes an item from local storage.
I like wrapping http calls and implementation details in a services layer, it provides a clean separation of concerns and simplifies the redux actions (and other modules) that use the services.
React + Redux User Service
Path: /src/_services/user.service.js
The user service encapsulates all backend api calls for performing CRUD operations on user data, as well as logging and out of the example application. The service methods are exported via the userService object at the top of the file, and the implementation of each method is located in the function declarations below.
In the handleResponse method the service checks if the http response from the api is 401 Unauthorized and automatically logs the user out. This handles if the JWT token expires or is no longer valid for any reason.
import config from 'config'; import { authHeader } from '../_helpers'; export const userService = { login, logout, register, getAll, getById, update, delete: _delete }; function login(username, password) { const requestOptions = { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' }, body: JSON.stringify({ username, password }) }; return fetch(`${config.apiUrl}/users/authenticate`, requestOptions).then(handleResponse).then(user => { // store user details and jwt token in local storage to keep user logged in between page refreshes localStorage.setItem('user', JSON.stringify(user)); return user; }); } function logout() { // remove user from local storage to log user out localStorage.removeItem('user'); } function getAll() { const requestOptions = { method: 'GET', headers: authHeader() }; return fetch(`${config.apiUrl}/users`, requestOptions).then(handleResponse); } function getById(id) { const requestOptions = { method: 'GET', headers: authHeader() }; return fetch(`${config.apiUrl}/users/${id}`, requestOptions).then(handleResponse); } function register(user) { const requestOptions = { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' }, body: JSON.stringify(user) }; return fetch(`${config.apiUrl}/users/register`, requestOptions).then(handleResponse); } function update(user) { const requestOptions = { method: 'PUT', headers: {...authHeader(), 'Content-Type': 'application/json' }, body: JSON.stringify(user) }; return fetch(`${config.apiUrl}/users/${user.id}`, requestOptions).then(handleResponse);; } // prefixed function name with underscore because delete is a reserved word in javascript function _delete(id) { const requestOptions = { method: 'DELETE', headers: authHeader() }; return fetch(`${config.apiUrl}/users/${id}`, requestOptions).then(handleResponse); } function handleResponse(response) { return response.text().then(text => { const data = text && JSON.parse(text); if (!response.ok) { if (response.status === 401) { // auto logout if 401 response returned from api logout(); location.reload(true); } const error = (data && data.message) || response.statusText; return Promise.reject(error); } return data; }); }
React + Redux App Folder
Path: /src/App
The app folder is for react components and other code that is used only by the app component in the tutorial application.
React + Redux App Component
Path: /src/App/App.jsx
The app component is the root component for the react tutorial application, it contains the outer html, routes and global alert notification for the example app.
import React from'react'; import { Router, Route } from'react-router-dom'; import { connect } from'react-redux'; import { history } from '../_helpers'; import { alertActions } from '../_actions'; import { PrivateRoute } from '../_components'; import { HomePage } from '../HomePage'; import { LoginPage } from '../LoginPage'; import { RegisterPage } from '../RegisterPage'; class App extends React.Component { constructor(props) { super(props); const { dispatch } = this.props; history.listen((location, action) => { // clear alert on location change dispatch(alertActions.clear()); }); } render() { const { alert } = this.props; return ( <div className="jumbotron"> <div className="container"> <div className="col-sm-8 col-sm-offset-2"> {alert.message && <div className={`alert ${alert.type}`}>{alert.message}</div> } <Router history={history}> <div> <PrivateRoute exact path="/" component={HomePage} /> <Route path="/login" component={LoginPage} /> <Route path="/register" component={RegisterPage} /> </div> </Router> </div> </div> </div> ); } } function mapStateToProps(state) { const { alert } = state; return { alert }; } const connectedApp = connect(mapStateToProps)(App); export { connectedApp as App };
React + Redux Home Page Folder
Path: /src/HomePage
The home page folder is for react components and other code that is used only by the home page component in the tutorial application.
React + Redux Home Page Component
Path: /src/HomePage/HomePage.jsx
The home page component is displayed after signing in to the application, it shows the signed in user's name plus a list of all registered users in the tutorial application. The users are loaded into redux state by dispatching the redux action userActions.getAll() from the componentDidMount() react lifecycle hook.
Users can also be deleted from the user list, when the delete link is clicked it triggers the redux action userActions.delete(id) to be dispatched.
import React from'react'; import { Link } from'react-router-dom'; import { connect } from'react-redux'; import { userActions } from '../_actions'; class HomePage extends React.Component { componentDidMount() { this.props.dispatch(userActions.getAll()); } handleDeleteUser(id) { return (e) => this.props.dispatch(userActions.delete(id)); } render() { const { user, users } = this.props; return ( <div className="col-md-6 col-md-offset-3"> <h1>Hi {user.firstName}!</h1> <p>You're logged in with React!!</p> <h3>All registered users:</h3> {users.loading && <em>Loading users...</em>} {users.items && <ul> {users.items.map((user, index) => <li key={user.id}> {user.firstName +'' + user.lastName} { user.deleting? <em> - Deleting...</em> : user.deleteError? <span className="error"> - ERROR: {user.deleteError}</span> : <span> - <a onClick={this.handleDeleteUser(user.id)}>Delete</a></span> } </li> )} </ul> } <p> <Link to="/login">Logout</Link> </p> </div> ); } } function mapStateToProps(state) { const { users, authentication } = state; const { user } = authentication; return { user, users }; } const connectedHomePage = connect(mapStateToProps)(HomePage); export { connectedHomePage as HomePage };
React + Redux Login Page Folder
Path: /src/LoginPage
The login page folder is for react components and other code that is used only by the login page component in the tutorial application.
React + Redux Login Page Component
Path: /src/LoginPage/LoginPage.jsx
The login page component renders a login form with username and password fields. It displays validation messages for invalid fields when the user attempts to submit the form. If the form is valid, submitting it causes the userActions.login(username, password) redux action to be dispatched.
In the constructor() function the userActions.logout() redux action is dispatched which logs the user out if they're logged in, this enables the login page to also be used as the logout page.
import React from'react'; import { Link } from'react-router-dom'; import { connect } from'react-redux'; import { userActions } from '../_actions'; class LoginPage extends React.Component { constructor(props) { super(props); // reset login status this.props.dispatch(userActions.logout()); this.state = { username: '', password: '', submitted: false }; this.handleChange = this.handleChange.bind(this); this.handleSubmit = this.handleSubmit.bind(this); } handleChange(e) { const { name, value } = e.target; this.setState({ [name]: value }); } handleSubmit(e) { e.preventDefault(); this.setState({ submitted: true }); const { username, password } = this.state; const { dispatch } = this.props; if (username && password) { dispatch(userActions.login(username, password)); } } render() { const { loggingIn } = this.props; const { username, password, submitted } = this.state; return ( <div className="col-md-6 col-md-offset-3"> <h2>Login</h2> <form name="form" onSubmit={this.handleSubmit}> <div className={'form-group' + (submitted &&!username?'has-error' : '')}> <label htmlFor="username">Username</label> <input type="text" className="form-control" name="username" value={username} onChange={this.handleChange} /> {submitted &&!username && <div className="help-block">Username is required</div> } </div> <div className={'form-group' + (submitted &&!password?'has-error' : '')}> <label htmlFor="password">Password</label> <input type="password" className="form-control" name="password" value={password} onChange={this.handleChange} /> {submitted &&!password && <div className="help-block">Password is required</div> } </div> <div className="form-group"> <button className="btn btn-primary">Login</button> {loggingIn && <img src="data:image/gif;base64,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" /> } <Link to="/register" className="btn btn-link">Register</Link> </div> </form> </div> ); } } function mapStateToProps(state) { const { loggingIn } = state.authentication; return { loggingIn }; } const connectedLoginPage = connect(mapStateToProps)(LoginPage); export { connectedLoginPage as LoginPage };
React + Redux Register Page Folder
Path: /src/RegisterPage
The register page folder is for react components and other code that is used only by the register page component in the tutorial application.
React + Redux Register Page Component
Path: /src/RegisterPage/RegisterPage.jsx
The register page component renders a simple registration form with fields for first name, last name, username and password. It displays validation messages for invalid fields when the user attempts to submit the form. If the form is valid, submitting it causes the userActions.register(user) redux action to be dispatched.
import React from'react'; import { Link } from'react-router-dom'; import { connect } from'react-redux'; import { userActions } from '../_actions'; class RegisterPage extends React.Component { constructor(props) { super(props); this.state = { user: { firstName: '', lastName: '', username: '', password: '' }, submitted: false }; this.handleChange = this.handleChange.bind(this); this.handleSubmit = this.handleSubmit.bind(this); } handleChange(event) { const { name, value } = event.target; const { user } = this.state; this.setState({ user: {...user, [name]: value } }); } handleSubmit(event) { event.preventDefault(); this.setState({ submitted: true }); const { user } = this.state; const { dispatch } = this.props; if (user.firstName && user.lastName && user.username && user.password) { dispatch(userActions.register(user)); } } render() { const { registering } = this.props; const { user, submitted } = this.state; return ( <div className="col-md-6 col-md-offset-3"> <h2>Register</h2> <form name="form" onSubmit={this.handleSubmit}> <div className={'form-group' + (submitted &&!user.firstName?'has-error' : '')}> <label htmlFor="firstName">First Name</label> <input type="text" className="form-control" name="firstName" value={user.firstName} onChange={this.handleChange} /> {submitted &&!user.firstName && <div className="help-block">First Name is required</div> } </div> <div className={'form-group' + (submitted &&!user.lastName?'has-error' : '')}> <label htmlFor="lastName">Last Name</label> <input type="text" className="form-control" name="lastName" value={user.lastName} onChange={this.handleChange} /> {submitted &&!user.lastName && <div className="help-block">Last Name is required</div> } </div> <div className={'form-group' + (submitted &&!user.username?'has-error' : '')}> <label htmlFor="username">Username</label> <input type="text" className="form-control" name="username" value={user.username} onChange={this.handleChange} /> {submitted &&!user.username && <div className="help-block">Username is required</div> } </div> <div className={'form-group' + (submitted &&!user.password?'has-error' : '')}> <label htmlFor="password">Password</label> <input type="password" className="form-control" name="password" value={user.password} onChange={this.handleChange} /> {submitted &&!user.password && <div className="help-block">Password is required</div> } </div> <div className="form-group"> <button className="btn btn-primary">Register</button> {registering && <img src="data:image/gif;base64,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" /> } <Link to="/login" className="btn btn-link">Cancel</Link> </div> </form> </div> ); } } function mapStateToProps(state) { const { registering } = state.registration; return { registering }; } const connectedRegisterPage = connect(mapStateToProps)(RegisterPage); export { connectedRegisterPage as RegisterPage };
Base Index HTML File
Path: /src/index.html
The base index html file contains the outer html for the whole tutorial application. When the app is started with npm start, Webpack bundles up all of the react + redux code into a single javascript file and injects it into the body of the page.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>React + Redux - User Registration and Login Example & Tutorial</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css" /> <style> a { cursor: pointer; }.help-block { font-size: 12px; } </style> </head> <body> <div id="app"></div> </body> </html>
Main React Entry File
Path: /src/index.jsx
The root index.jsx file bootstraps the react + redux tutorial application by rendering the App component (wrapped in a redux Provider ) into the app div element defined in the base index html file above.
The boilerplate application uses a fake / mock backend that stores data in browser local storage, to switch to a real backend api simply remove the fake backend code below the comment // setup fake backend.
import React from'react'; import { render } from'react-dom'; import { Provider } from'react-redux'; import { store } from './_helpers'; import { App } from './App'; // setup fake backend import { configureFakeBackend } from './_helpers'; configureFakeBackend(); render( <Provider store={store}> <App /> </Provider>, document.getElementById('app') );
React Tutorial Babel RC (Run Commands)
Path: /.babelrc
The babel config file defines the presets used by babel to transpile the React and ES6 code. The babel transpiler is run by webpack via the babel-loader module configured in the webpack.config.js file below.
{ "presets": [ "react", "env", "stage-0" ] }
React Tutorial Package.json
Path: /package.json
The package.json file contains project configuration information including package dependencies which get installed when you run npm install. Full documentation is available on the npm docs website.
{ "name": "react-redux-registration-login-example", "version": "1.0.0", "repository": { "type": "git", "url": "https://github.com/cornflourblue/react-redux-registration-login-example.git" }, "license": "MIT", "scripts": { "start": "webpack-dev-server --open" }, "dependencies": { "history": "^4.6.3", "react": "^16.0.0", "react-dom": "^16.0.0", "react-redux": "^5.0.5", "react-router-dom": "^4.1.2", "redux": "^3.7.2", "redux-logger": "^3.0.6", "redux-thunk": "^2.2.0" }, "devDependencies": { "babel-core": "^6.26.0", "babel-loader": "^7.1.5", "babel-preset-env": "^1.6.1", "babel-preset-react": "^6.16.0", "babel-preset-stage-0": "^6.24.1", "html-webpack-plugin": "^3.2.0", "path": "^0.12.7", "webpack": "^4.15.0", "webpack-cli": "^3.0.8", "webpack-dev-server": "^3.1.3" } }
React Webpack Config
Path: /webpack.config.js
Webpack is used to compile and bundle all the project files so they're ready to be loaded into a browser, it does this with the help of loaders and plugins that are configured in the webpack.config.js file. For more info about webpack check out the webpack docs.
The webpack config file also defines a global config object for the application using the externals property, you can also use this to define different config variables for your development and production environments.
var HtmlWebpackPlugin = require('html-webpack-plugin'); module.exports = { mode: 'development', resolve: { extensions: ['.js', '.jsx'] }, module: { rules: [ { test: /\.jsx?$/, loader: 'babel-loader' } ] }, plugins: [new HtmlWebpackPlugin({ template: './src/index.html' })], devServer: { historyApiFallback: true }, externals: { // global app config object config: JSON.stringify({ apiUrl: 'http://localhost:4000' }) } }
Web Development Sydney
Feel free to contact me if you're looking for a web developer in Sydney, I also provide remote contracting services for clients outside Sydney.In today’s news and notes we have information on CZW joining UWN and what it means for CZW talent coming to SoCal and SoCal talent in CZW, PWG’s Battle of Los Angeles, Flamita making a SoCal appearance, and more.
United Wrestling Network, which is the governing body for Championship Wrestling from Hollywood, designed after the old NWA, has announced that CZW has joined the United Wrestling Network. CZW promoter DJ Hyde has been featured on recent CWFH TV shows.
“CZW has been a dominate wrestling promotion for many years and they’re not new to the television game. I know many may think that CZW and Marquez don’t mix, but I assure you they’d be incorrect. For close to a year I have been meeting with CZW management and we both have the same mission and together I believe we’ll achieve those goals starting with their upcoming TV taping.” said acting United President and Championship Wrestling from Hollywood Owner David Marquez.
When asked if this will lead to an increase in CZW talent appearing in SoCal, Dave Marquez stated “It started with [Drew] Gulak and we’ve added DJ Hyde, so it is safe to say you’ll see more talent from them on CWFH and our other participating partner promotions. You will see CWFH regulars in CZW and in the rest of our system“.
“With the combined efforts of Mr. Marquez’s staff and ours, we look forward to bringing a unique product back to television. My belief is that we can make something great. With our combined efforts, we can bring forth a new age of entertainment.” said Combat Zone Wrestling owner, David John Markland (DJ Hyde).
CWFH can be seen weekly on Saturdays at 4:00 pm on KDOC in Los Angeles and at 9:00 pm PST on Youtoo America. it can also be viewed on the Fite TV app. Their next TV taping is this Sunday.
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As most people are no doubt aware already, PWG has announced Cody Rhodes for Battle of Los Angeles taking place in September. There could be more names announced in the lead up to their July 29th 13th anniversary show.
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Oddity Wrestling Alliance will have Flamita, previously of Dragon Gate and AAA, on their June 25th show in San Diego. He will be facing Aeroboy for the OWA US title. Also announced so far for the show are Donnie Suarez versus Jarek 1:20 and Black Mamba versus Matt Twizted.
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On June 18th there will be a free event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the film Nacho Libre in Los Angeles. This will be a free event that will include a screening of the movie, live lucha libre action from Santino Bros Wrestling Academy, vendors, food, celebrity hosts and more. The film starred Human Tornado as El Snowflake, also I believe Jack Black was in it.
The event will take place at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, which is located at 501 N Main St. in Los Angeles.
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We will have an interview up with EWF, SoCal Pro, and DWE’s Adrian Quest tomorrow at 9:00 am. We have several more interviews scheduled over the next couple of weeks so be on the lookout for them.
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This week’s events:
Pro-Wrestling
6/10:
Millennium Pro Wrestling in Moorpark, CA
6/11:
UIPW 5h Anniversary Event in Montebello, CA
OCCW presents Turf War in Stanton, CAUpdated, 10.38
AN ESB-OWNED ENERGY company has introduced a new billing system which will see some customers have their bills increased – for not using enough electricity.
Electric Ireland, which was formally rebranded from ‘ESB’ shortly before Christmas, introduced a ‘low user standing charge‘ earlier this month – which means users who use only small amounts of electricity will pay for more than they actually use.
The charge applies to households who use an average of two units (kilowatt-hours) per day across the two-month billing period – adding €9.45 to each bill if customers fall below that minimum usage threshold.
Electric Ireland explains that the cost of necessary because the cost of maintaining the electricity network, and running billing and customer services has increased- with the result that low-spending households don’t actually pay enough to cover the costs.
Second or holiday homes which lie vacant for much of the year are most likely to incur the new charge. The average household uses several dozen units a day: for example a 28″ television, left turned on, would use around three units over a 24-hour day.
“This leaves us with no option in these situations but to increase the standing charge on these accounts,” it says, noting that the alternative option would have been to raise the flat ‘standing charge’ for all customers.
Though Airtricity and Bord Gais energy have similar standing charges, they do not apply a minimum floor.
The Irish Times this morning estimates that Electric Ireland’s minimum charge affects around 100,000 customers, with Electric Ireland saying the absence of any minimum charge meant that it was making a loss on ‘about 10 per cent’ of its 1.3 million domestic customers.
Fine Gael senator Catherine Noone said the new charge was a double-whammy for customers who were also not in a position to pay their bills by direct debit or who were in arrears, as customers who pay by direct debit on time are now given a discount on their bill.
“A simple proposal that would save money for both customer and company is, why not have a flexible billing period for low-usage customers and generate a bill when they hit a minimum threshold – perhaps €75,” Noone suggested.
“This saves the company issuing bills every two months, which in turn would detract from the need for this method of charging people for energy they haven’t used.”The Canadian government has already identified about 10,000 possible Syrian refugees, Immigration Minister John McCallum says – which is close to half of the 25,000 the Liberals have promised to resettle here by Jan. 1.
These asylum seekers have applied to come to Canada but have not yet been approved to come here, the minister said.
This "would certainly be a part of the number of refugees that we would like to bring in," Mr. McCallum said.
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"Those people have already identified themselves. It doesn't mean they've gone through the health and security checks yet, but we do have a number of applications in the pipeline."
Health Minister Jane Philpott says prospective refugees will have to be screened for diseases such as tuberculosis.
The deadline for the Liberals to meet their political pledge arrives in about seven weeks.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is expected to unveil the full scale of its plans in the coming days, with an announcement of the refugee intake expected by the end of this week or early next week.
"They will start arriving soon," Mr. McCallum said of the Syrians.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres caused a stir Tuesday when he released a statement saying that Syrian asylum seekers arriving in Canada would not initially be granted permanent-resident status but instead arrive under a temporary sanctuary arrangement. (Mr. McCallum had also told The Globe and Mail earlier this week that some Syrians might be brought to Canada without being first granted permanent-resident status.)
Mr. Guterres said on Tuesday that Syrian refugees "will initially receive a temporary residence permit," and only obtain permanent residency based on the results of further screening in Canada.
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Refugee groups have voiced anxiety about such an arrangement, saying they need to be assured that Syrians brought here will be allowed to remain here and that any children born here are Canadians.
But Mr. McCallum waived off Mr. Guterres's comment, saying "it remains to be seen" whether Syrians would be initially granted just temporary residence here.
One B.C. refugee advocate said he expects about half the 25,000 Syrian refugees to be housed at first by the Canadian Armed Forces on military bases or in armouries. The military would end up feeding, sheltering and tending to the medical needs of asylum seekers housed there.
Chris Friesen, director of settlement services for the Immigrant Services Society of B.C., said he expects the other half will be sent to cities across Canada with temporary accommodation facilities for refugees, including Vancouver.
"What we're hearing constantly is the public would rather see them on cots, on church floors, rather than spend another night in a tent" in a refugee camp, he said.
Mr. Friesen estimated more than 6,875 Syrian refugees would be destined for Ontario, 6,100 for Quebec and more than 2,800 in British Columbia.
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He said the No. 1 challenge will be locating sufficient rental housing to accommodate refugees more permanently; he forecasts that 1,500 units would be needed in Metro Vancouver alone.
The Immigrant Services Society put out a call for volunteers Tuesday to help Syrians settle in Canada, including clinical counsellors to deal with personal trauma suffered by the newcomers. "There will be Syrians who arrive with exceptional skills, education and training and may be ready to enter the labour market once they have located permanent accommodation. As such, we would also welcome employment leads," the organization said in a statement.
Mr. Friesen said it is his understanding that more than 200 offers a week to privately sponsor Syrians are flooding into the Department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
Canada is ultimately on track to bring in more than 35,000 Syrian refugees because the 25,000 pledge by the Liberals is on top of the 10,000 promised by the former Conservative government.
Mr. McCallum pledged to divulge the price tag of the Syrian refugee initiative to Canadians as soon as possible. "What I can guarantee to you absolutely is we will not keep Canadians in the dark on what the costs are … but I cannot say today precisely the moment we will be able to release those costs," he said.Announcing Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 10586.71 By Gabe Aul / Corporate Vice President, Engineering Systems Team Share Share Skype
UPDATE 2/4: Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 10586.71 is now available to Windows Insiders in the Slow ring.
Hi everyone,
We have another Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 10586 which we’re releasing today to Windows Insiders in the Fast ring, Build 10586.71. This Cumulative Update contains additional bug fixes outlined below. Windows Insiders in the Fast ring will also notice an Insider Fast Configuration Update that will update an expiring certificate to ensure your device will continue to receive future flights.
We have been working on addressing Windows Insider feedback of the update experience and today many Insiders will get to try out these fixes. Windows Insiders that downloaded the Configuration Update that was published on Friday, or has a device that was automatically updated over the weekend, will experience improvements in the performance and reliability of receiving this Cumulative Update. But don’t worry if you have not yet downloaded the Configuration Update to your device, it will be included in the download with this update.
We have continued to address feedback we receive on Windows 10 Mobile as well as the upgrade experience from Windows Phone 8.1. In some cases, these improvements will only be seen when upgrading from Windows Phone 8.1 such as improvements in cellular and Wi-Fi data profile migration or the availability of SensorCore API’s.
Give this update a try and as always keep sending your feedback!
Fixes include:
Windows Update performance and reliability improvements
Improvements in migration of data profiles and messaging settings when upgraded from Windows Phone 8.1.
SensorCore API’s are now upgraded correctly from Windows Phone 8.1; allowing applications, including many fitness applications, to correctly access movement data.
SD card detection has been improved on boot and after insertion; File Explorer now handles the removal of an SD card when the default for apps or photos are set to SD.
Improvements in the Edge browser, including PDF rendering.
Bluetooth improvements when re-connecting to already paired devices and cars; turn by turn directions, and when using Cortana with the Microsoft Band.
Improvements in Settings when downloading Maps or changing Quick Settings.
Reinstalling Groove Music from the Windows Store no longer causes DRM music playback issues. Groove Music local song collections are now more quickly imported within the application
Device power improvements after listening to music, after missed phone calls when iris detection is disabled, and when downloading updates.
In app purchases now work correctly when cellular data is disabled.
Improvements to the reliability of Kids Corner.
Thanks,
g
Updated February 4, 2016 2:01 pmDiarmaid MacCulloch charts the destruction of religious art during the English Reformation, from the reign of Henry VIII to the end of the Civil War.
From the Dissolution of the monasteries to the Civil War, Diarmaid MacCulloch tells the dramatic story of iconoclasm and reformation in the English church.
A difficult and gradual process, the English Reformation eventually succeeded in denuding churches up and down the country of all their images - and (during the Civil War) even their organs. Word replaced image as the medium for worship. Looking at the white-washed churches of Wetherden and Bures in Suffolk, Diarmaid assesses the complex set of motivations which drove the iconoclasts to tear down statues, dismantle rood screens and smash stained glass. He examines the journal of William Dowsing, probably the most notorious iconoclast of the Civil War period, and other documents that shine a light on the complex motivations of Reformation iconoclasts.
Diarmaid's journey also takes him to Winchester Cathedral where the great rood screen was attacked (probably under Edward) and the stained glass later smashed by Cromwell's soldiers. Academic Philip Lindley and sculptor Richard Deacon help to explain the power of religious images and the corresponding fear they induced in iconoclasts.
Finally, the Rever |
tossed out the spamming claim because the statute of limitations on those charges had expired.
What’s unusual (and somewhat lame) about this botnet is that — through a variety of botnet reporting panels that are still displaying data — we can get live, real-time updates about the size and status of this crime machine. No authentication or credentials needed. So much for operational security!
The “mind map” pictured below contains enough information for nearly anyone to duplicate this research, and includes the full Web address of the botnet reporting panels that are currently online and responding with live updates. I was unable to load these panels in a Google Chrome browser (perhaps the XML data on the page is missing some key components), but they loaded fine in Mozilla Firefox.
But a note of caution: I’d strongly encourage anyone interested in following my research to take care before visiting these panels, preferably doing so from a disposable “virtual” machine that runs something other than Microsoft Windows.
That’s because spammers are usually involved in the distribution of malicious software, and spammers who maintain vast networks of apparently compromised systems are almost always involved in creating or at least commissioning the creation of said malware. Worse, porn spammers are some of the lowest of the low, so it’s only prudent to behave as if any and all of their online assets are actively hostile or malicious.
FOLLOW THE HONEY
So how did KrebsOnSecurity tie the spam that was sent to promote these two adult dating schemes to the network of spam botnet panels that I mentioned at the outset of this post? I should say it helped immensely that one anti-spam source maintains a comprehensive, historic collection of spam samples, and that this source shared more than a half dozen related spam samples. Here’s one of them.
All of those spams had similar information included in their “headers” — the metadata that accompanies all email messages.
Received: from minitanth.info-88.top (037008194168.suwalki.vectranet.pl [37.8.194.168])
Received: from exundancyc.megabulkmessage225.com (109241011223.slupsk.vectranet.pl [109.241.11.223])
Received: from disfrockinga.message-49.top (unknown [78.88.215.251])
Received: from offenders.megabulkmessage223.com (088156021226.olsztyn.vectranet.pl [88.156.21.226])
Received: from snaileaterl.inboxmsg-228.top (109241018033.lask.vectranet.pl [109.241.18.33])
Received: from soapberryl.inboxmsg-242.top (037008209142.suwalki.vectranet.pl [37.8.209.142])
Received: from dicrostonyxc.inboxmsg-230.top (088156042129.olsztyn.vectranet.pl [88.156.42.129])
To learn more about what information you can glean from email headers, see this post. But for now, here’s a crash course for our purposes. The so-called “fully qualified domain names” or FQDNs in the list above can be found just to the right of the open parentheses in each line.
When this information is present in the headers (and not simply listed as “unknown”) it is the fully-verified, real name of the machine that sent the message (at least as far as the domain name system is concerned). The dotted address to the right in brackets on each line is the numeric Internet address of the actual machine that sent the message.
The information to the left of the open parentheses is called the “HELO/EHLO string,” and an email server administrator can set this information to display whatever he wants: It could be set to bush[dot]whitehouse[dot]gov. Happily, in this case the spammer seems to have been consistent in the naming convention used to identify the sending domains and subdomains.
Back in October 2016 (when these spam messages were sent) the FQDN “minitanth.info-88[dot]top” resolved to a specific IP address: 37.8.194.168. Using passive DNS tools from Farsight Security — which keeps a historic record of which domain names map to which IP addresses — I was able to find that the spammer who set up the domain info-88[dot]top had associated the domain with hundreds of third-level subdomains (e.g. minithanth.info-88[dot]top, achoretsq.info-88[dot]top, etc.).
It was also clear that this spammer controlled a great many top-level domain names, and that he had countless third-level subdomains assigned to every domain name. This type of spamming is known as “snowshoe” spamming.
Like a snowshoe spreads the load of a traveler across a wide area of snow, snowshoe spamming is a technique used by spammers to spread spam output across many IPs and domains, in order to dilute reputation metrics and evade filters,” writes anti-spam group Spamhaus in its useful spam glossary.
WORKING BACKWARDS
So, armed with all of that information, it took just one or two short steps to locate the IP addresses of the corresponding botnet reporting panels. Quite simply, one does DNS lookups to find the names of the name servers that were providing DNS service for each of this spammer’s second-level domains.
Once one has all of the name server names, one simply does yet more DNS lookups — one for each of the name server names — in order to get the corresponding IP address for each one.
With that list of IP addresses in hand, a trusted source volunteered to perform a series of scans on the addresses using “Nmap,” a powerful and free tool that can map out any individual virtual doorways or “ports” that are open on targeted systems. In this case, an Nmap scan against that list of IPs showed they were all listening for incoming connections on Port 10001.
From there, I took the IP address list and plugged each address individually into the URL field of a browser window in Mozilla Firefox, and then added “:10001” to the end of the address. After that, each address happily loaded a Web page displaying the number of bots connecting to each IP address at any given time.
Here’s the output of one controller that’s currently getting pinged by more than 12,000 systems configured to relay porn spam (the relevant part is the first bit on the second line below — “current activebots=”). Currently, the entire botnet (counting the active bots from all working bot panels) seems to hover around 80,000 systems.
At the time, the spam being relayed through these systems was advertising sites that tried to get visitors to sign up for online chat and dating sites apparently affiliated with Deniro Marketing and CyberErotica.
Seeking more information, I began searching the Web for information about CyberErotica’s affiliate offerings and I found that the affiliate program’s marketing division is run by a guy who uses the email address scott@cecash.com.
A Google search quickly reveals that scott@cecash.com also advertises he can be reached using the ICQ instant messenger address of 55687349. I checked icq.com’s member lookup page, and found the name attached to ICQ# 55687349 is “Scott Philips.”
Mr. Philips didn’t return messages seeking comment. But I couldn’t help wonder about the similarity between that name and a convicted Australian porn spammer named Scott Phillips (NB: two “l’s in Phillips).
In 2010, Scott Gregory Phillips was fined AUD $2 million for running a business that employed people to create fake profiles on dating websites in a bid to obtain the mobile phone numbers of dating website users. Phillips’ operation then sent SMS texts such as “get laid, text your number to…”, and then charged $5 on the mobile accounts of people who replied.
Phillips’ Facebook page and Quora profile would have us believe he has turned his life around and is now making a living through day trading. Reached via email, Phillips said he is a loyal reader who long ago quit the spam business.
“I haven’t been in the spam business since 2002 or so,” Phillips said. “I did some SMS spam in 2005, got about 18 million bucks worth of fines for it, and went straight.”
Phillips says he builds “automated commodity trading systems” now, and that virtually all modern spam is botnet-based.
“As far as I know the spam industry is 100% botnet these days, and not a viable proposition for adult sites,” he told KrebsOnSecurity.
Well, it’s certainly a viable proposition for some spammer. The most frustrating aspect of this research is that — in spite of the virtually non-existent operational security employed by whoever built this particular crime machine, I still have no real data on how the botnet is being built, what type of malicious software may be involved, or who’s responsible.
If anyone has additional research or information on this botnet, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below or get in touch with me directly.
Tags: 55687349, AmateurMatch, cecash, CyberErotica, Deniro Marketing, Farsight Security, Nmap, Scott Philips, Scott Phillips, scott@cecash.com, spamhaus, Techcrunch, Voice MediaI have a confession to make. I have never eaten bread pudding before making this one. All of those years of gluten eating, and bread pudding never made it on my radar. It wasn’t until my husband ordered something called ” Chocolate Croissant Bread Pudding” at our local bakery that my ears perked up. It sounded amazing. I watched him eat it with a sense of gluten eaters envy. That doesn’t happen too often anymore, since I am SO used to being gluten-free… but there he was eating this melty pot of flakey chocolate and butter and there I was eating yogurt. It was a moment. I felt an injustice and it had to be righted.
I have no basis for how a bread pudding tastes. I didn’t really know what went in it. I assumed. I didn’t even do a google search. This could have gone poorly. I will admit that I have a tendency to fly by the seat of my pants in the kitchen. A dash of this and a dash of that. I am not great a measuring things. I keep on having to remind myself to write things down now that I am blogging and sharing things with you lovelies! That’s just how I learned to cook. I call it the “Put Some” method. Every time my Grammie or my Mom would give me a recipe and I would ask them “Wait…how much garlic?” or “How much shoyu?” they would always tell me “Oh, you know…just put some!” So there it is. My general philosophy in the kitchen. Just put some. Cooking by feeling it out.
I surveyed my pantry and my fridge. I did not have gluten-free croissants (If you have some of these, please bring them to me immediately. Thank you.) However, I did have a trusted loaf of UDI’s bread. That’ll do. I had chocolate in the form of chocolate chips. I had eggs. I had cinnamon. I had vanilla almond milk. I had vanilla extract. Those things sounded like they would do just fine. I figured since there is only the two of us (plus two very furry children who should definitely not be eating chocolate) that we only needed to make a very small pan of this. If we made a big pan I would probably gorge myself on it. It would lead to a sugar mania followed by the inevitable sugar crash which includes me passed out in a puddle of my own tears. Not an ideal way to spend a Saturday For our wedding we had gotten a set of pretty Emile Henry pans and one of them was a 9 by 5.7 inch baker. Perfect. If you want to make more of this just double, triple, the recipe…or do as I do and just put some. 🙂
Let’s start putting…
Ingredients:
5 slices of UDI’s gluten free bread
2 eggs
1/2 cup vanilla almond milk
1/3 cup chocolate chips
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tbs vanilla extract
Butter (for greasing the pan, plus 1 tbs for on top)
This recipe will make enough for two. Or, maybe four. It depends on how hungry of a hippo you are. I tend to be a hungry hungry hippo in the morning.
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Chop your UDI’s into cubes and lay them out flat on a baking sheet. When your oven had heated up, put your tray of bread cubes in the oven and lightly toast them. It won’t take long. Check on them after two minutes. If they are not toasting evenly give them a stir with a spatula and let them continue toasting a little longer.
Once your bread is toasted, remove it from the oven and set aside.
Crack your eggs in a small mixing bowl and whisk them together well. Add in your almond milk, cinnamon and vanilla extract. Whisk until all ingredients are combined thoroughly.
Grease your 9 by 5.7 inch pan with butter.
Place your toasted bread cubes in your 9 by 5.7 inch pan. Pour your egg and milk mixture over the top. With your clean hands mix the bread and the egg mixture together so that all of the pieces are coated. This is a good time to assess if you have enough liquid. If the mixture looks too dry add a tad bit more almond milk and then mix it again. I would only add almond milk in very small increments. Gluten-free bread isn’t as forgiving as regular bread and does better with a little less liquid.
Add in your chocolate chips and mix it up again.
Just before baking, take a tbs of butter, cut it into a few little cubes and place them evenly on top of your bread and egg mixture.
Pop it in the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. It is done when the egg mixture is no longer runny and it has a beautiful golden brown crust on top.
Congratulations! There is no longer a bread pudding injustice. Take that, yogurt.
Wishing you all a fabulous Friday!As the United States imposes sanctions on Russia and moves to do likewise to Venezuela, it’s essential to keep in mind which country it is that’s the most destructive and dangerous in the world today. When such questions have been posed in international polls in recent decades, the answer overwhelmingly is the United States. Not Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia or any of the many other nations the ruling class and corporate media here regularly demonize, but the United States.
People in the global South know this all too well from the long and brutal history of US foreign policy. Because we live in such a closed society, however, where critical analysis of imperialism is by definition excluded from discussions in Washington and the national media, people here must search long and hard for such information. Should information of this sort seep into the mainstream, ruling elites invariably vilify it and those imparting it just as they vilify international figures they regard as enemies.
According to Washington, sanctions are being considered against Venezuela because of repressive measures and violence that is attributed almost exclusively to the government. In reality, counterrevolutionaries are responsible for the majority of those killed including at least one death of a motorcyclist decapitated by wire strung across a street. This tactic was suggested by retired General Angel Vivas, who has become a hero of the counterrevolution for his armed defiance of the government’s attempt to arrest him for the motorcyclist’s death. Simultaneously, the US has imposed sanctions against Russia and is threatening military escalation in response to the incursion into Crimea. Conveniently left out of the narrative is any connection between Russia’s actions and the coup in the Ukraine led by fanatically anti-Russian neo-fascists, an effort supported by the US to the tune of $5 billion, according to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. Also excluded from discussions are the many military stations the US and its allies have close to Russia, as well as the fact that practically every member of the former Eastern bloc now belongs to NATO.
As always, these events are presented in unambiguous black and white, where we are the unquestioned good guys standing up for freedom, democracy and liberty and the other side is evil incarnate. Hillary Clinton, for example, played the always handy Hitler Card in reference to Vladimir Putin, a card that in recent decades has been applied to Noriega, Milosevic, Qaddaffi, Chavez, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Assad and Ahmadinejad, to name just some. The Hitler Card has never been used against Mass Murder Inc, the US’s longstanding club of dictators that includes the Somozas, Suharto, Diem, Savimbi, the Duvaliers, Mobutu and others too numerous to list, since they were loyal servants of Western business interests. And it goes without saying that the Hitler Card doesn’t apply to us even though in the world today it is US foreign policy that most closely approximates the Third Reich’s.
In fact, the black/white narrative collapses immediately both when today’s situations are probed and when history is reviewed. Since documenting acts of direct US aggression and additional crimes committed via financing, armaments and diplomatic support to client states would require several large libraries, let’s restrict ourselves to just the 14 years of this century. In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly in response to the 9/11 attacks even though none of those involved was Afghan and most were Saudi. Invading Saudi Arabia wouldn’t do, however, since it’s a staunch and very important ally. As Noam Chomsky has documented, the Taliban offered to assist the US in tracking those responsible for 9/11, including bin Laden, on the condition the US present evidence. Because the US was determined to wage war no matter what, the offer was rejected and the invasion of Afghanistan commenced. Thirteen years and trillions of dollars later, the killing goes on, expanded under Obama to include indiscriminate drone strikes, with no end in sight.
In 2002, reactionaries representing Venezuela’s Super Rich put tens of millions of dollars of funding from the CIA, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and undoubtedly other US sources to use by overthrowing the democratically-elected, immensely popular government of the late Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan people immediately rose up and defeated the coup but the funding, sabotage and subversion have continued. Angry and frustrated at continual losses at the polls and in the streets, the old oligarchs fight on absent any international support other than that of the US and neighboring Colombia. The violence that began last month is the most serious moment in Venezuela since the failed 2002 coup, and despite its complete isolation the US has ramped up its 15-year propaganda war against the Bolivarian Revolution.
In 2003, the US illegally overran Iraq, demolishing the country as well as the argument used to justify the invasion that Hussein was a powerful threat because of weapons of mass destruction. The US knew no such weapons existed and the invasion has resulted in what some international reports say is more than one million Iraqi deaths. Coming on the heels of the 1991 US invasion and the ensuing years of Sanctions of Mass Destruction, Iraq has been largely destroyed and is now plagued by bitter internal fighting. Central to that fighting is Al-Qaeda, which had absolutely no presence in Iraq but is now a formidable force thanks to the invasion.
After hammering Muammar Qaddafi for decades to turn over Libya’s weapons, the US illegally invaded that country in 2011 not long after he complied. At least 50,000 people were killed as a result including Qaddafi, and Libya was plunged into chaos that continues to this day. Elsewhere in the Mideast, the US continues to support Israel’s ever-expanding occupation of Palestine and again finds itself on the same side as Al-Qaeda and other terrorists in Syria as it attempts to do there what it did in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.
Since the 1990’s, the US has supported mass killer Paul Kagame in Rwanda while presenting him as a hero. In reality, the war in Rwanda began with the 1990 invasion from Uganda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an army Kagame soon became head of. Four years later, with peace talks underway, the RPF killed Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana by shooting down a plane on which he was returning from a negotiating session. Thus began the most horrific period in the region, with mass killings on all sides and the US undermining peacekeeping efforts and several potential settlements so the RPF could win a complete victory.
Former UN Secretary General for one puts the blame on the US for its support of Kagame and the RPF. As reported recently in Counterpunch by Robin Philpot, Boutros-Gali has said that “the Rwandan genocide was 100% American responsibility.” Reports by a number of international organizations, including several by the UN, concluded that the RPF is responsible for more than one million deaths and possibly several million in Rwanda. In addition, UN and other reports have found the RPF responsible for the most serious atrocities during years of warfare in the neighboring Congo. Edward Herman has called Kagame a “double genocidist” while underscoring that the US made the killing possible and business interests benefited most from it.
In Latin America, in addition to supporting counterrevolution in Venezuela, the US continues to lavish millions on Colombia in a decades-long War on Drugs that is, in fact, a war against the people designed to destroy opposition to domination by global capital. And in 2009, the US was virtually alone in the world in recognizing the coup government that came to power in Honduras in 2009 by overthrowing democratically-elected reformer Manuel Zelaya. The coup and two fraudulent elections have restored the oligarchy’s power while opponents are being killed in alarming numbers by the military, paramilitaries and others suspected of ties to the coup regime. The eradication of opposition is necessary to the smooth operation of mining multinationals in particular, and Western investments have increased dramatically since the coup.
US violence is not restricted to other nations. Domestically, that is best illustrated by the massive imprisonment of African-Americans. With the highest incarceration rate in the world and the vast majority of prisoners black, the US is not so different from apartheid-era South Africa. Perhaps international sanctions are in order to turn the US into a pariah and diplomatic isolation would help the world’s most dangerous state gets a dose of civilization.
The people of the US bear a special responsibility to oppose both its government’s aggression and its funding and arming of subordinates engaged in terror. During the US-financed Central American killing fields of the 1980’s, a campesino at the New York stop of her speaking tour implored people here to “help us by changing your country.” Those words echo louder than ever today and come from every part of the world; it remains to be seen whether our collective reply to those cries is in the affirmative
Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author who has written for Z, The Indypendent, Counterpunch and many other publications. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.Katherine DeClerq, CTVNews.ca
Moviegoers in Hong Kong were shocked when their pre-show activities caused a virtual car accident, courtesy of Volkswagen.
Customers at the MCL Cinema, there to watch a short film, were completely unaware that they were to be part of the PSA. Sitting in the theatre with their popcorn, they watched the screen as a person got in his or her car and started the engine.
The entire advertisement was filmed from the driver’s point of view, allowing people to just see the steering wheel and the road in front of them.
Behind the screen, someone using a location-based broadcaster sent texts to every member of the audience. As they took their phones out of their pockets or bags to check their messages, the car on screen abruptly swerves into a tree.
The horn blares and the windshield is cracked.
The audience gasps and stops what they are doing, staring at the screen in silence.
A message comes up on screen: “Mobile use is now the leading cause of death behind the wheel. A reminder to keep your eyes on the road.”
The car company’s interactive PSA is called “Eyes on the Road,” and is meant to show the dangers of driving and texting. It has already amassed over 11 million views on YouTube.
Distracted driving is one of the leading causes of traffic fatalities in Canada, with 78 deaths in Ontario alone in 2013.Blockchain technology, the tech that powers cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, is all the rage on Wall Street. A recent report from financial technology consultant Aite estimated that banks spent $75 million this year developing the technology. But Silicon Valley venture capitalists appear even more eager to make bets on blockchain.
In a separate report released this month, Aite estimated that angel investors and venture capitalists have poured $180 million into blockchain startups this year.
The report illustrates the growing interest in blockchain—a sort of digitized, public ledger—from both financial firms and Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
Financial firms are trying to develop the technology to use internally, with a particular focus in using it for functions such as settlement. Settlement is the crucial but unglamorous process of exchanging cash and securities between buyers and sellers.
Goldman Sachs filed a patent in October 2014 for SETLCoin, a cryptocurrency built on the blockchain to help Goldman traders execute and clear trades in real time. Elsewhere, JPMorgan, the London Stock Exchange Group, Wells Fargo, and State Street recently announced they joined a consortium with IBM, Intel, and Cisco and blockchain startup Hyperledger (now owned by Digital Assets Holdings) to develop blockchain technology.
Some VCs are also interested in backing finance-centric blockchain companies. Chain, a blockchain company working with NASDAQ on a new trading platform, raised $3o million dollars from both finance giants like Visa and venture capital firms like Khosla Ventures.Watson in the limelight, circa 2011.
Photo by Ben Hider/Getty Images
Just two years removed from the fame and glory of defeating Ken Jennings on “Jeopardy!,” the world’s smartest computer finds itself looking for work as a call-center agent.
IBM announced today that it has trained its Watson artificial-intelligence software to answer customers’ questions and offer advice about a given company’s products and services. In a brochure touting the new Watson Engagement Advisor service, IBM writes:
IBM Watson represents a bold new step into a new era of computing and has the potential to transform the way people and companies interact over the lifetime of their relationships. The unique combination of natural language processing, hypothesis generation & evaluation, and machine learning of IBM Watson is being applied to customer engagement.
For example, IBM added, a bank could use Watson to help customers decide what type of account to open based on their financial situation and needs. Forbes reports that ANZ Bank and Nielsen have already signed on as clients.
For Watson, the move to customer service comes on the heels of a highly publicized stint in the health care industry. The artificial-intelligence engine will continue to work in that field as well, IBM execs told the New York Times, but the customer-service business is more of a “high-volume play.”
Keep your head up, Watson. I myself spent a summer working as a tech-support agent when I was 17, and while I can’t say it was the most fulfilling job, it paid the bills. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll come out of it a much stronger wastepaper-basketball player than you are today.The CoinTelegraph; Blockchain Courses in Universities: A New Supply for a New Demand
Financial Times; Universities add blockchain to course list
The CoinTelegraph; Which Universities Are Offering Blockchain Courses?
The Memo; University of Edinburgh launching Europe’s first blockchain course
Bitcoin Magazine; More Universities Add Blockchain Courses To Meet Market Demand
TrustNodes; The Best Universities To Study Blockchain Technology
As a way of trying to keep up with demand, and to demonstrate just how popular cryptocurrencies are, many university across the globe have started to offer specific blockchain courses to create enough experts to meet the demands of this constantly expanding market.In less than ten years, cryptocurrency has taken the world by complete storm. Regardless of what your takes are on it, there is no denying that there has definitely been a surge in the demand for blockchain professionals. In fact, data from LinkedIn; a professional networking site show that blockchain related job postings have in fact tripled in the last twelve months. Universities have recognised this increase in demand for blockchain specialists and added to their fields of study, tailoring specific courses to this high demand; however, there is still not a large enough supply of workers to meet the increased demand. Many people are simply unaware of the blockchain technology, which is why many universities around the world have been implementing Blockchain and cryptocurrency-related course to adequately prepare students for jobs in this specific industry. Schools, colleges and universities across the whole world are embracing this. In the US, NYU Law, Princeton, Stanford and UC Berkeley are among those who are now offering blockchain courses. In Europe, the University of Cumbria, B9 Lab Academy, IT University of Copenhagen and University of Nicosia are just a handful of the higher-learning institutions that offer courses relating to this field, with Edinburgh University most recently adding a course specialising in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Both students and scholars have taken an interest in the field of blockchains, so it was the natural leap for universities to launch their own courses related to the topic. There are many students who are setting up cryptocurrency clubs at their place of study, and taking the initiative to spread knowledge that will be essential to the future of this technology.The interest is less sudden, and more that the popularity of different cryptocurrencies has increased, and therefore the demand for knowledge has also increased. Traditional monetary transactions are quickly becoming dated, with some countries striving to become completely cashless, so it is only natural that we would be moving on; however, to move on with a sophisticated blockchain technology, it is important that there are people who have been properly educated on this matter.The future looks good for cryptocurrency, with many experts predicting that it will soon be used to purchase goods and services. More companies are already accepting Bitcoin – the oldest of the cryptocurrencies for some time now, so it is only natural that others will follow suit. No institution will want to be left behind, so if major corporations are adding a blockchain technology into their companies, others will likely follow suit. But, in order to keep up with one another many large companies are looking for blockchain experts, which is why these courses are so important to keep up with the demand.As many of you know, I actively participate on Stack Overflow, the leading Q/A website for software developers.
Kind folks on Stack Overflow have made their data open for examination, and anyone can query their database using this web interface at data.stackexchange.com.
Many of the questions and answers there are illustrated with links to XKCD, the web comics created by Randall Munroe.
So I decided to see which of those comics best illustrate quirks and oddities we keyboard warriors have to deal with in our daily routine.
The query itself is quite simple:
SELECT link, cnt, id [Post Link], score FROM ( SELECT link, id, score, COUNT(*) OVER (PARTITION BY link) cnt, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY link ORDER BY score DESC) rn FROM ( SELECT id, score, 'http' + SUBSTRING(start, 1, PATINDEX('%/%', SUBSTRING(start, 13, 30)) + 12) FROM ( SELECT id, score, SUBSTRING(body, PATINDEX('%://xkcd.com/[0-9]%', body), 20) start FROM ( SELECT TOP 400000 id, body, score FROM posts ORDER BY id DESC UNION SELECT TOP 4000000 postId, text, score FROM comments ORDER BY id DESC ) q WHERE body LIKE '%://xkcd.com/[0-9]%' ) q ) q (id, score, link) ) q WHERE rn = 1 ORDER BY cnt DESC
The TOP clauses are there to limit the query size, as their hosting provider does now allow fulltext indexing, and without them the query would just time out. This query only searches recent comments and posts, so some famous and top-voted posts might not be present here. Still, it's a good sample.
You can see all results here, and we'll just discuss the top 5 entries.
#5. Random Number (10 links)
Of course the questions which link to it deal with random number generators of any kind and fallacies in their implementation.
The top voted post:
For some (probably good) reason, the Golden Ratio seems a good choice to seed a random number generator.
It's interesting that one of the referenced papers, Pseudo Random Number Generators in Programming Languages, displays the XKCD comic right on its first page.
#4. goto (10 links)
goto is a construct in some programming languages which allows to make an unconditional jump to an arbitrary point within a program or function, skipping all currently executing loops or statement blocks. Many developers (and apparently velociraptors) consider this bad programming practice.
The top voted comment goes on this post:
, where the author asks not to pick on his gotos, to no avail. The top comment linked to the comic with 5 upvotes.
#3. Password Strength (11 links)
Instead of using random character sequences for passwords (which are hard to remember), Randall suggests using passphrases in natural language, which are both more secure and easier to memorize.
The top voted comment is on a post which asks for a regexp to validate passwords with enough complexity:
This regexp would not allow using such passphrases. The comment author subtly points to this fact with an XKCD link.
#2. Wisdom of the Ancients (16 links)
It's so frustrating when you are searching for a rare and specific problem on the internet, and find a single post which addresses the exactly same problem but does not mention how has it been solved, if at all.
The top voted comment goes on this post:
The guy who had posted it apparently spent much time searching for a solution, and when he had finally solved the problem, he was so kind as to post both the problem and the solution on Stack Overflow.
The comment is just a thank you with a link to the comic. And judging by the comment and the number of upvotes, it helped at least three people.
Good job, seriously! All do as Jarrod Roberson does.
And the winner with astonishing 96 links is, of course
#1. Exploits of a Mom (96 links)
A cunning mom named her son so that entering his name into a database not protected against SQL injection would ruin it.
This is actually not unheard of, and there is a real story you may find fun to read: Searching for a customer whose last name is Null kills the application.
Also, people or Irish descent are apparently pretty much irritated with the wrong SQL injection handling techniques as they try to submit their surnames on websites.
The top voted comment goes on this question:
whose author in fact tries to write code vulnerable to SQL injection on purpose, but fails.About the author
(NewsTarget) How did the powerful gain power over the rest of us? In a time when the power and freedom of the average American is being eroded at terrific speed, many of us wonder how this could be happening. What we may not realize it that the powerful have specific tools or principles to use to con the rest of us into surrendering our power to them. One of the most effective principles used in the last several years with great success is the Hegelian Principle.The principle is simple, consisting of only three steps toward a preconceived goal. Once you are able to see how it works, you may want to analyze many of the events unfolding around you in terms of this principle. As the principle is often used today, it can be explained as:- Perceive a problem that exists and build it up out of proportion to its actual importance, or create a problem or conflict where none existed before.- Relentlessly place stories about this problem in the major media outlets. Report on it daily until it becomes a steady drumbeat and a truism for the public who then begin clamoring for a solution to this problem.- The best solutions are those that appeal to the emotions of the public and make them think something really good is being donethem, when in fact, something really bad is being donethem. This solution is one that the public never knew it needed until the conditioning of Step Two was successfully completed.A simple example of the Hegelian Principle at work was the food industries' conning of the public to throw out their butter and run to buy margarine. It goes like this:Step One: Food industry is geared up to provide food for soldiers during WWII. When war ends, food industry needs to turn its capacity into something it can sell during peace time. It wants to use cheap ingredients to make a high margin product and decides on the manufacture of margarine, but needs to find a way to get the public to buy it. They decide on a scheme to turn the people against butter.Step Two: Food companies spread propaganda convincing the populace that butter is deadly to their health. Appeal to fear. Get doctors and nutritionists to help in the spreading of propaganda. Sponsor medical studies to "prove" that butter is deadly. Convince housewives who had grown up healthy while eating butter that they are placing their families in jeopardy if they serve butter.Step Three: Food companies rush in to save the American public from having to put butter on their tables. They present margarine. Women who want their families to love them stampede to buy margarine. Voila!One of the classic and most sinister examples of the Hegelian Principle involves the Nazi's rise to power that quickly followed the burning of the German Parliament building, the Reichstag, on the night of February 27, 1933.Step One: Adolf Hitler, the new Chancellor of Germany, has no intention of abiding by the rules of democracy that installed him into the Chancellor position. He intends only to use those rules to legally establish himself as dictator as quickly as possible, and begin the Nazi revolution. But opposition lurks in his path.The Nazis, led by Joseph Goebbels, devise a scheme to burn down the Reichstag, the building where the elected officials of the republic meet to conduct the daily business of government, and blame it on the Communist opposition.Step Two: Hitler acts as though he is enraged over the fire and speaks out that the German people have been too soft on the Communists, proclaiming that "every Communist official must be shot. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!" Hitler directs the newspaper's coverage of the fire. He and Goebbels put together papers full of lies about a Communist plot to violently seize power in Berlin. The newspaper proclaimed that only Hitler and the Nazis could prevent a Communist takeover.Step Three |
effect, which is capable of scaling images up by large amounts while preserving details in the image, so that sharp lines and curves stay sharp. Scaling up from SD frame sizes to HD frames sizes or even digital cinema frame sizes is well within the range in which this effect is intended to operate with good results. This is closely related to the Preserve Details option in Photoshop.
Go ahead and try this out now in the current version. If you’re not already a Creative Cloud subscriber, you can try the free 30-day trial. For information about purchasing a Creative Cloud subscription, see this page about plans and this page with current promotional offers.
If you want to let us know what your favorite changes in After Effects have been since After Effects CC (12.0), come and tell us here, whether your favorite change is a new feature, a bug fix, or a little tweak in behavior.Des Moines based garage-rock/post-punk 5-piece Foxholes, are gearing up for the release of their forthcoming self-titled sophomore album. Following the band’s debut full-length ‘Can’t Help Myself,’ their sophomore release delivers more strong hooks and expansive tracks. Featured on the new project and premiering exclusively on GroundSounds is the video for “Sunny,” it’s pure sonic goodness that will take you on one wild ride.
Frontman Trevor Holt had this to say about the music video for “Sunny”:
The concept came from this fear of having a mind debilitating disease in the later phases of life where you can’t readily access memories and can no longer live independently. For the video, I wanted to put a (little) lighter spin on it and do this Thelma & Louise type thing where an old man and his granddaughter go out for an afternoon for some fun but things escalate more and more and they find themselves on the run. The boyfriend character was added to as an audience surrogate in a way. In the video, the girl and her grandfather’s behavior keeps escalating, and I wanted someone there with them who’s along for the ride but at the same time kind of appalled by the situation.
Check out the video for “Sunny” below and grab a copy of Foxhole’s self-titled sophomore album it’s slated to drop on May 26th.
Stay in touch with Foxholes: FACEBOOK | WEBSITE
Comments
commentsOn Friday night, speaking at a rally for Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) in Alabama, President Donald Trump made very strong comments about NFL free agent Colin Kaepernick and other players who have protested the National Anthem, saying that he thought that people who protested the anthem should be fired. Trump said that he wished that NFL owners would tell protestors to "get that son of a b--ch off the field right now" and that he believed that players who protest the anthem and disrespect the flag should be fired.
Trump wishes NFL owners would tell anthem protesters "get that son of a bitch off the field right now" pic.twitter.com/gq4EH3lNoY — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 23, 2017
On Saturday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement saying that comments like the ones Trump made were "divisive" and showed an "unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players." Goodell cited NFL players' recent response to Hurricane Harvey as an example of how the NFL can be an "overwhelming force for good."
NEW: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says President Trump's "divisive comments... demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL" pic.twitter.com/AaVLkxa18r — NBC News (@NBCNews) September 23, 2017
The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture. There is no better example than the amazing response from our clubs and players to the terrible natural disasters we've experienced over the last month. Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities.
While Goodell's statement didn't mention the president by name, it's clear that he is not okay with this sort of rhetoric.
Personally, it seems odd that Trump would chose to discuss anthem protests at a time when there are dozens of far more pressing issues facing the country. There are so many more important things to discuss, yet Trump went for...that? It's just very strange. He's not campaigning for president any longer.
This post has been updated.16 Aug, Beijing– A closed-door blockchain seminar was held in Beijing. Around 20 participants from the industry and local authority agree to tighten regulation on ICO and industrial self-discipline is needed at the moment. The meeting voices concern over the wild ICO market and stress that any illegal conduct will be penalized. Star Xu, CEO of OKCoin, hosts the meeting as the Chairman of China Blockchain Application Research Center.
According to the ICO Report of China released by IFCERT, 65 ICO projects have raised a total of 63,523.64BTC, 852,753.36 ETH, some RMB and other virtual currencies
The sheer amount is big enough to raise authority concern over social order if scams disguised as ICO.
ICO and other forms of internet finance must be compliant with regulation. The meeting also warns:
“Any violation of regulation and abuse will be penalized. “
However, official documents on ICO regulation may take a long time. Currently ICO market is going viral as scammers take the ride of ICO and Blockchain to pull off their scehment. Therefore the “industrial self-discipline” is much needed to fill in the void at the moment.
One may notice that the “Big Three” Bitcoin exchanges in China have changed their standing on “ICO-based coins”. The most aggressive one is BTCC, which lists “ICOCOINS” trading on its platform recently. The ICOCOIN is founded by BTCC’s founder, Linke Yang.
ICO is becoming one of the important financing channels for blockchain startups. This article makes a comprehensive study on the connotation, categories and value assessment of ICO. The paper also compares ICO with IPO, equity crowdfunding and other financing methods and proposes specific framework and suggestions for ICO regulations with considerations upon the legislation practice of securities issuance and the current regulatory design. “Regulatory sandbox” is suggested as the practical patch to regulate ICO projects.
PBOC Official: Research on ICO and Its Regulation(full text translation)
ICO is Risk 3.0
It has been made clear that all financial business must be regulated on the two-day National Financial Work Conference in July 2017. A supreme regulatory authority called the “National Financial Stability Development Committee” will be established to coordinate all financial regulations across the country.
The regulatory environment of cryptocurrency ecosystem is expected to be in line with these latest policy changes.
“If risk is not controlled properly, then all innovations will head to its opposite direction.”
“If traditional financial business is rated as 1.0, internet finance is 2.0 and the risk with Blockchain and ICO is 3.0.”
Such warning is based on one the Chinese authorities governance principle: social order stability.
ICO Principles
The meeting also points out several principles for ICO projects to follow: genuine technological innovation, essential reduction, legal transaction, beneficial to society. In terms ICO supervision to be particularly concerned about the points: product registration, information disclosure, asset custody, genuine project and qualified investor.
Star Xu share a number of articles about ICO on his wechat moment. This is a very strong signal for the upcoming ICO regulatory measures.It's rumored that the announcement for the R&S CCIE v5 update should be coming soon (November timeframe) and the switch over for the lab sometime around March 2014. Cisco Live Europe has a R&S v5 Technical Breakout scheduled for anyone attending. The update to version 5 is rumored to be a 100% virtual lab environment similar to how the troubleshooting section of the lab is done now. The major benefit of the lab going virtual is that the topics covered will be platform independent. You will not need to buy 2911's or 3750x's to prepare and can use any relatively newer router or switch to prepare or use a virtualized environment (IOL/IOU/VIRL, GNS3, CSR). The goal of the v5 appears to be to focus on the technologies themselves and less on the hardware and a specific topology. This is the best move Cisco has made for the R&S CCIE program in years as candidates will need to focus more on the technologies themselves and not worry about IOS versions, hardware platforms, physical topologies, etc.
Allegedly the R&S CCIE v5 blueprint will see legacy topics like Frame-Relay removed. Additionally it's possible some of the more lesser used features of the IOS like Zone-Based Firewall, WCCP, IPv6 multicast, and PfR could be removed from the lab. A few of the topics we could see added are IPSec, DMVPN, and Embedded Packet Capture. We may see ISIS added to the written at least if not the lab. This could be the last version of the R&S lab that isn't IOS XE based so we could see it added to the written.
Currently the lab has a 2 hour troubleshooting section and a 6 hour configuration section. The new lab may contain, in addition to the troubleshooting section, a new diagnostic section. This means the lab could have a troubleshooting, diagnostic and configuration section. I would assume the points for this new section would come from the configuration section and the troubleshooting section would remain the same or possibly even slightly higher in points.
So what does this mean for someone currently preparing for the R&S v4 blueprint? If you feel you are close to taking the lab but do not have to scheduled, you should schedule a date ASAP. Once the official v5 announcement comes out from Cisco, it will be hard to schedule a lab date. If you have a date scheduled before March 2014 then you should be fine. If your date is after February 2014 then I would recommend you move it up ASAP. The longer we go into November the more likely the new blueprint date has been pushed back by Cisco.
Additional v4 bootcamps will be added to the schedule before the March 2014 changeover. We will start transitioning the current bootcamps over to version 5 around the first of the year. For the self-paced products we will start releasing labs and videos covering the new blueprint in November. 90% of the material from the version 4 blueprint will carry over to the version 5 lab blueprint. Topics you can skip for the routers will be Frame-Relay, PfR, WCCP, Zone-Based Firewall along with technologies that are not supported in IOU L2/IOL L2. Here is a list of features we may not see for the layer 2 section since the switches will be virtual.
1) QinQ Tunneling
2) ISL trunks
3) DHCP Snooping
4) Layer 3 Port Channel
5) Private VLANs
6) SPAN/RSPAN/ERSPAN
Post any questions you have about the new blueprint changes and I'll start creating a FAQ below:
Q) I purchased the version 4 self-paced material so will I be covered for the version 5 products?
A) Yes.
Q) Will I have to pay anything for get the new version 5 material?
A) No.
Q) I attended an R&S CCIE v4 bootcamp so can I resit a v5 bootcamp for free?
A) Yes.
Q) Will INE offer racks for the new blueprint?
A) Yes. Although the lab is virtual it is still good to spend part of your preparation using real hardware as that is what you use in your day-to-day job. Towards the end of your preparation you can hone your skills using virtualized environment. We will be using the CSR along with real switches for the virtualized environments.
Q) What about my tokens?
A) Your tokens will carry over.
Q) I'm currently schedule for the lab after the v5 update. Can I still take the v4 lab?
A) No.
Q) Do you feel strongly that the announcement will come out in November?
A) I do feel confident that the announcement will be in November but it could slip since they are trying to align the Cisco 360 update to the lab release.Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I) has pulled into a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE in New Hampshire, according to a new poll.
The WMUR-CNN survey released Thursday finds Clinton takes 43 percent support in the Granite State, compared to 35 percent for Sanders.
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Because the poll has a 5.2-percentage-point margin of error, the results mean Clinton and Sanders are in a statistical tie, according to the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which conducted the poll.
It also noted that Clinton's edge on her closest opponent has narrowed significantly since the same poll was conducted in May, when Clinton held a commanding 31-point lead over Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who insists she’s not running for president.
In that survey, the total support for Warren and Sanders combined still trailed Clinton by 18 percentage points.
The poll's margin of error means Clinton could also hold as much as an 18-point lead over Sanders.
Still, the new survey coupled with other recent polls suggests the Vermont senator is building support in the nation's first primary state.
The WMUR/CNN survey is the third in recent weeks to show Sanders closing the once-huge gap that separated him from Clinton in New Hampshire. A Suffolk University poll released last week showed Clinton with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Sanders, and a Morning Consult poll showed Clinton’s lead at 12 points.
Clinton is boosted in New Hampshire by overwhelming support from women voters, who favor the former secretary of State 51 percent to 30 percent over Sanders. The Vermont senator has a 10-point advantage among men.
Sanders has attracted a great deal of energy on the campaign trail.
He’s pulling the biggest crowds of any candidate and has had to relocate some of his events to larger arenas to accommodate the crowds.
At one campaign stop in Colorado last week, Sanders turned out more than 5,000 supporters.
According to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week, 62 percent of Democrats want Clinton to face a substantial primary challenge, believing it will make her stronger in the general election.
Only 35 percent said they’d like to see Clinton go through an easy primary that unites the party ahead of the general election.
Still, Clinton remains the prohibitive favorite. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she has a 50-percentage-point lead over Sanders nationally.
Both candidates are wildly popular among Democrats in New Hampshire. Seventy-four percent said they have a favorable view of Clinton, compared to 19 percent who view her negatively.
For Sanders, 66 percent said they have a positive view of him, compared to 11 percent negative.
The WMUR/CNN survey of 360 likely Democratic primary voters was conducted between June 18 and June 24.
— This story was updated at 9:39 p.m.Maryland may be the next state to decriminalize marijuana as a bill was just approved by the Senate to lessen the penalty for the possession of the drug. Here’s what you need to know.
1. Maryland Senate Voted 30-16 on a Bill that Would Decriminalize Marijuana
The Maryland Senate approved Senate Bill 297 on Tuesday that would decriminalize marijuana, reports The Daily Chrionic. The bill, which will now be considered by the House of Delegates, was approved 30-16. If passed by the House of Delegates, the bill would decriminalize marijuana, decreasing the penalty for the possession of less than 10 grams to up to a $100 fine with no time in jail.
“We don’t want to wrap people up in the criminal jail system for this,” the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Robert A. Zirkin, said at last week’s hearing.
Current Maryland law punishes the possession of less than 10 grams of pot with up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.
On the same day as the bill’s approval, the House of Delegates heard a testimony on another bill that would legalize the possession of marijuana by adults 21 or older and establish a system that would regulate the drug like alcohol. If passed, the House Bill 1453 would allow possession of up to an ounce and the cultivation of up to three plants. The bill would also allow licensed marijuana retail stores, wholesale facilities and testing facilities.
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4. 18 States Allow Medical Use of Marijuana
18 states already allow medicinal marijuana. Medical marijuana has been proven to ease nausea and stimulate hunger in chemotherapy patients.
“I think it’s really important to people with family members who might have cancer to be able to do this,” State Sen. Nancy Jacobs, who voted for the bill on Tuesday and whose husband has cancer, told the Senate.
Washington and Colorado voted on the 2012 ballot to legalize marijuana and the measure passed in both states. The vote was a landmark in American history. Within state boundaries anyone over the age of 21 can buy and use a full ounce of pot at any time, except behind the wheel, of course. Up to six plants can also be grown for personal use.“Everything you need to know about Hillary Clinton can be understood by this simple phrase: follow the money," Donald Trump said. | AP Photo Trump launches 'follow the money' attack
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa — In an effort to go steady his campaign after this week’s shaky debate, Donald Trump on Wednesday launched a coordinated attack casting Hillary Clinton as a corrupt pawn of major donors and special interests.
The attack — rolled out in a campaign speech here, followed by a barrage of press releases and a video, all of which made heavy use of the catchphrase “follow the money” — foreshadows a “renewed focus on populist themes in battleground states,” said a person close to the campaign.
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It is similar to an argument that Republicans have been pushing him to embrace for months, and echoes perhaps his best exchange at the first debate, when he pressed Clinton on her support of trade deals and their effect on states like Pennsylvania and Ohio.
On Wednesday, Trump picked up the theme again, telling an enthusiastic midday crowd “Everything you need to know about Hillary Clinton can be understood by this simple phrase: follow the money.”
As the speech proceeded, the campaign blasted out five press releases in the span of 25 minutes, with the “follow the money” heading, starting with an overview of “ethical red flags” at the Clinton Foundation.
It was followed by detailed indictments of a uranium deal approved by Clinton’s state department after her foundation received large donations from people with stakes in the deal; Clinton’s relationship with Irish telecom billionaire Denis O’Brien; Clinton’s six-figure speaking engagements; and a 2009 deal over disclosing the identities of American account-holders that the State Department concluded with Swiss bank UBS, a Clinton Foundation donor.
Later Wednesday evening, the campaign posted a video on its Instagram and Facebook accounts highlighting an Associated Press report that half of the private individuals who landed meetings with Clinton during her tenure at State were Clinton Foundation donors.
After eschewing many standard messaging tools for most of its run, the campaign has occasionally coordinated the themes of Trump’s prepared remarks with bursts of press releases during his speeches in recent weeks.
The tactic returned again with Wednesday’s Iowa rally, and campaign spokesman Jason Miller said that the Trump campaign would be following the money right up to Election Day, highlighting new episodes of alleged corruption along the way.
“We’re going to go to anybody who has had financial dealings with the Clinton Foundation. Anybody who’s paid the Clintons who then received favors and official actions in return. Anybody who’s gotten rich by being friends with the Clintons based off of these official actions,” he said.
During the rally, Trump’s account retweeted a message from his “Official Team Trump” that included #FollowTheMoney and later on Wednesday, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway sent POLITICO a screenshot showing use of the hashtag across the United States, remarking, “This one is pretty cool.”
But at least one Republican operative close to the campaign, still fuming over Trump’s debate performance, was unimpressed with the attempt to turn the page.
“I think it’s a complete waste of time,” said the operative. “It’s not something like Benghazi that resonates with voters. I still can’t believe that Trump just completely dropped the ball on that.”Don’t know if Harry Reid, D-Searchlight, has any juice with the Commissioner of Baseball, but the Senate Majority Leader would like to see Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame.
Reid defended "Charlie Hustle" last week while talking baseball before a scheduled political interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.
The Hall of Fame effectively voted to ban Rose in 1991 because of allegations he bet on baseball. Rose will best be remembered for his days playing for and later managing the Cincinnati Reds. He had some great years with the Phillies, too. Rose is baseball's all-time leader in hits, with 4,256.
Reid, enjoying a pleasant conversation before turning to politics, mentioned that the Yankees Ichiro Suzuki is closing in on 3,000 hits in 11 U.S. seasons (13) and but had more than 1,000 in Japan before that. Reid said he will be worthy of the Hall of Fame.
Then Reid stood up for Charlie Hustle.
"And let’s also bring in Pete Rose. He has been punished enough,” Reid said.
"He (Rose) has been (punished) for years,” Reid said. “He bet when he was a manager of a team. Games were lost. All that stuff. But he’s been punished enough. He is one of the great baseball players of all time. He didn’t take drugs (PEDs) so yes; I think he should be in.”He took his headset off to a deafening roar, to a thousand splendid shrieks, to a wave of collective ecstasy that swelled over the booth and made it tremble almost as much as his hands.
Kim "Birdring" Ji-hyuk looked at his monitor, then at the crowd, then back at his monitor. It still read "MATCH COMPLETE." So it was true. They had won. Kongdoo Panthera had made it to the OGN Overwatch APEX Season 3 finals.
Something hot welled up in his eyes. He wiped it away with both hands.
To his right, Baek "Fissure" Chan-hyung lay flat on his chair, backrest slammed back, eyes closed and hands neatly folded, pretending to ignore all the ruckus. He hadn't even bothered to take his headset off.
"Don't talk to me," Fissure said in his usual exquisite deadpan. "I'm tired."
Blinking back tears, Birdring smiled.
Leaving League behind
Before Overwatch, Birdring's life was dedicated to League of Legends. He dreamt of becoming a professional gamer, and like most wannabes, poured all his time and heart into solo queue in the hopes of being noticed. But unlike most, he went a step further and built a reputation on not one but three servers: Korea, Japan, and China.
His two extra miles turned out to be well worth it. After reaching Challenger in Japan and China, offers started rolling in from both countries. But there was a snag: He wasn't 17 yet.
"I felt dejected," he said. "I was all ready to go, but the age limit prevented me from playing in any [LCS-affiliated] matches. And there was really nothing I could do but wait."
Disheartened, Birdring decided to take some time off from League until he could actually join a team. And it happened to be that right when he did, a shiny new AAA title, Overwatch, was taking South Korea by storm. Bored and having little better to do, the still-to-be-17 trainee decided to give the latest craze a spin, and was instantly hooked. He couldn't believe how fun the game was. Within weeks, he was piloting heroes more often than champions.
But while League slowly faded from his mind, his dreams did not, nor did his work ethic. He still wanted to become a professional gamer more than anything. Setting his mind to a new but familiar grind, Birdring rocketed up the Overwatch ranked ladder and made a name for himself at the top level of yet another game. He also joined an amateur team to start playing competitively.
Later that year when Kongdoo Company announced tryouts, a friend urged him to apply. He did. And amongst a group of 40 applicants, he was selected.
It seemed as if he had finally made it. Living in a team house was fun and exciting. Working with 11 other teammates from all walks of life was eye-opening. Most importantly, the organization's steady support was allowing him to solely concentrate on improvement.
Everything about his new life felt great.
Stumbling blocks
In OGN Overwatch APEX's inaugural season, Birdring's team, Kongdoo Uncia, proved itself as one of the best in the world. Despite being humiliated in its first match against BK Stars (an amateur squad cobbled together by a streamer), Uncia promptly bounced back and pumped out a string of sweeps to advance all the way to the semifinals. Although its story ended there at the hands of EnVyUs, who would go on to win the entire tournament, the 3-2 match was extremely close and left no doubts regarding Uncia's strength.
That wasn't enough for Birdring, however. In his words, Season 1 was merely bearable; his team may have made a deep run, but for him it hadn't been deep enough. He wasn't satisfied with his individual performance, either. Fans who recall his standout games on McCree and Roadhog would be confused, but again, for him, it hadn't been good enough.
Still, it was much better than what followed in Season 2.
At the outset, everything looked fine. Kongdoo had tinkered with its two rosters over the offseason, making a few transfers and role swaps, and it seemed to have benefited both. Uncia made a promising start to the season, as did its sister team, Panthera. Hype mounted as they tore through their groups undefeated. Some fans even started arguing that Kongdoo's two squads would soon become nigh unbeatable by organizations without a sister team setup.
But things immediately fell apart once the tournament moved into the knockout stage. Both teams ended up dropping out in their quarterfinal decider matches, old weaknesses exploited and new ones exposed. Between the two, Uncia's defeat was far more devastating.
Uncia's backbone had always been its teamwork; back in its prime, few teams in the world could match Uncia's uncanny ultimate management or undivided targeting in teamfights. But all of that had evaporated. In its 3-0 quarterfinal loss to Lunatic-Hai, Uncia looked not like one team of six, but rather three unassociated groups brought together via in-client matchmaking. Kim "DNCE" Se-yong might as well have been playing solo queue for how disconnected he was from the rest of his team. Birdring and Yoo "Lucid" Jun-seo managed to work in sync, but only with each other. The breakdown was disastrous.
"Season 2 was a really tough time for me," Birdring said. "I was actually supposed to join Panthera right at the beginning of Season 2, but because I had been one of Uncia's pillars, it was decided I stay with them one extra season and give it one last go. It didn't work out very well. I was extremely stressed out, partly at my play, but mostly at our results."
When the next off-season rolled around, Birdring was moved to Panthera.
The move from Kongdoo Uncia to Kongdoo Panthera elevated Kim “Birdring” Ji-hyuk's play to a different level. Nayeong Kim for ESPN
Birdring rises
When his transfer to Panthera was first announced, many expected Birdring and Kim "Rascal" Dong-joon to form one the world's most versatile DPS duos. That turned out to be true. Much less expected, however, was just how dominant of a player the former would become. Soon after the two started playing together, it was clear which would be the team's ace player. Birdring tore enemy teams apart with far greater confidence than he ever displayed on Uncia.
"I felt liberated after the move," Birdring explained. "On Uncia, I always played with a slight burden. As one of the cornerstones of the team, I felt as if I could never [afford to] mess up. It was a weight on my chest. But on Panthera, there's less pressure; I can rely on other great players like Rascal and Fissure to [share] the load."
Birdring has always possessed a fantastic hero pool for a DPS player. He himself calls his unnatural flexibility "a gift from God." But as a tradeoff, his carry ceiling -- how much individual impact he could have on a game -- had always been lower than that of superstar specialists such as Kim "EFFECT" Hyeon (Tracer) or Lee "Whoru" Seung-jun (Genji).
This season, however, even that drawback is fading. In Panthera's semifinals against EnVyUs, Birdring put out one of the best big-match Tracer performances of all time -- against EFFECT, no less -- and led his team to a clean 4-0 sweep. Both the Korean and English OGN commentators had no shortage of praise for his brilliance. After the game, EnVyUs's Timo "Taimou" Kettunen hailed Birdring as the best DPS player in the world.
Still an underdog
So far, Overwatch APEX Season 3 has been Birdring's season. It has been the buildup to the climax of his personal odyssey, an exhilarating takeoff of a magnificent talent unshackled at last. Now only one series lies between him and timeless glory. But it will be his hardest.
Like in most team-based Blizzard titles, competitive gameplay in Overwatch primarily revolves around how tanks and healers set up and respond to situations. In the Korean region, where tactical play and teamwork are given highest priority, this focus is accentuated. And this is why most Korean experts believe Lunatic-Hai to be the favorites in the final.
Kongdoo Panthera might have improved massively over this season, but Lunatic-Hai's tanks and healers are far and away the best in the world, and their current form looks untouchable. And although Panthera will have the advantage in the DPS matchup, Kim "EscA" In-jae's recent world-class Sombra play against Afreeca Freecs Blue suggests that most of his prior failings were due to being forced on Tracer. When all things are considered, Birdring really is the only player on his team that is categorically better than his Lunatic-Hai counterpart.
And so Birdring has again become a cornerstone. He will again have to rise up and fight onward despite having the weight of a team's destiny pressing down on his heart. But this time, he says, he's OK. He's finally ready to deal with it.
"I no longer have any fear. The finals will be tough, but I feel confident."Do you like Facebook games like Farmville? Do you like Game of Thrones? If so, Disruptor Beam hopes to have the game you want to play but without the spiky throne. Whether slaying slavers or training up a lackwit bastard son, Game of Thrones Ascent always something to do. Or build. Or kill. Pity about the Facebook aspect.
In the Facebook Game of Thrones, you can neither win nor die. But you will always, always wait. With multiple time-consuming actions, there’s always something to wait on. Want to build some stone? Twenty minutes. Want to distract a bear by throwing rocks? Twenty-four freakin' hours. Free extras can lop off the waiting time by five minutes—but only the last five minutes. The waiting is as annoying as Sansa’s season 1 crush on Joffrey.
But that comes a distant second in irritation level to spending money on items that will cut the wait time down, or in other words, paying to have the game speed up in order to actually play it. Obviously, this isn't new to Facebook gamers. But damn, it sucks.
It’s a shame, because there’s a really fun game in here, full of delightful references to one of my favorite series (both book and television). I swore allegiance to the Lannisters, and not only because their bonus to trade complements my merchant background. Just as I had hoped: Tyrion comes to call. What we get is dialog that I can picture perfectly coming from the lips of Peter Dinklage. “House Lannister is grateful for your loyalty, my father regrets he couldn't be here, so on and so forth. Is there any more of this wine?”
The creators of this game really do understand how George R.R Martin’s world works. You can choose to follow the Old Ways or the New Ways, loyally serve the crown or decide your family is more important. It even starts with Jon Arryn giving us orders, so when he inevitably dies, we’re placed in very specific time in the series.
As with games such as Mafia Wars, the more our characters level up, the more tasks we have to juggle. Here, you’re rewarded for tasks with silver, as well as items such resources as wood or stone. From there, you can spend your silver on resource-producing buildings, such as a smithy, village center, or godswood, and upgrade them to create new kinds of resources. So adding a tannery to the village center will let you make cloth (very leathery cloth, I suppose). Alternatively, you can spend your coin on making armor and weapons for your sworn swords, or you can hire new ones (which lets you do more quests at once).
There’s a reasonably complex and well-thought-out branching upgrade system for your buildings—as well as your noble self. These upgrades improve your fighting, trading, or intrigue stats and abilities. For my particular character path, that means bribing anyone in my way.
Building an upgrade or creating a resource takes time and (other) resources, and once we commit to that time, we’re stuck. So if I decide to gather some stone, I can’t get a horse until that action is complete. Worse, I can’t queue up different actions to build and gather concurrently. In most games, a build queue is an essential part of taking the busy work out of resource management. But that would also let me walk away from the game…and have less incentive to pay-to-play.
Other than building up your holdings, there are always story-based quests on offer, often involving characters from the books or their representatives (Lord Varys wants to “help” me? How…kind). Alternatively, there are “Adventures,” which give us a conflict but leave out the dialog options. Either way, your chosen sworn sword will carry out the mission.
Missions are number-matching games. Pick one of the three stats you want to fight with (fight, trade, or intrigue), add your sworn sword’s score. There are three strategies for each stat too, giving you as many as nine possible approaches for each mission. Choose the option that gives you the best odds, click the “Go” button, and wait. And wait. And wait.
I wrote the first draft of this review at a moment where I couldn’t actually do anything in the game to otherwise occupy my time. My two sworn swords were both on missions, my smithy was upgrading itself, my village center was making some more stone, and I was too short on silver to buy anything else I need. So, unless I whipped out my credit card, I was literally unable to make a move.
Finally, one of my sworn swords finished. I dispatch her on my next story mission. That’ll be forty-five minutes, says the game. I have lost the will to live.
But what about PvP, you may be asking. This is Game of Thrones, after all. Aren’t we able to form alliances and screw over our nearest and dearest? Yeah, sort of. Only after you get your sworn sword to level 5 can you challenge a friend, and only then can you play against NPC versions of him/her. NPC versions? Really? What is the point?
Despite all of this, the game is well written and has captured much of the flavor that I love about the books/television show. Disruptor Beam, if you turn this into an iPad or PC game and charge $5 up front, I would be as loyal to this game as I am to the George R.R. Martin series.
I’m giving Game of Thrones Ascent 5 out of 10. It’s earned a 5 for the great writing. But I will never play it again. Fans of Facebook grinding games, your mileage will vary.
You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and here at Forbes.
Thanks to Dan Brogowski, Melinda Brusky, Merv Dettra, Louise Howard, and Viki Kelly.Kim Dotcom is a crook and a scammer. I feel this claim is sufficiently backed for me to make such a bold statement in England. The amazing thing was that the Hollywood-industrial complex ever made a colourful racing identity like Dotcom look like the good guy.
(Though there’s at least one folk song about him, and his apparently Robin Hood-like ways. Yeah, me neither.)
I’m actually surprised he never got bigtime into Bitcoin before. Cryptocurrency is a land of fractal scams, where literally everyone still involved in 2016 is either a scammer, an aspiring scammer or a sucker who thinks he’s gonna be the scammer. Dotcom has the sort of experience to do really well in the field.
So this frankly disturbing imagery made my day:
After the big raid on MegaUpload, he started Mega.co.nz (now mega.nz), which is apparently quite the success (though I’ve never used it … trying it now, and uploads are way slow), though Dotcom claimed last year he’d been sidelined by |
and learn how to become better at their job and obtain that promotion, whereas the benefits of complaining about other people mysteriously holding them back only serves to paralyse them from advancement.
In a relationship, a person might be in denial about why they have a bad relationship with someone. They might blame the other person for being too angry, too poor, too lazy, too dishonest, too fat, not affectionate enough, or any number of things. Yet they will not be honest enough with themselves to admit that they chose to be in the relationship with this person and if that person does not suit them then it is not the other person’s responsibility to change themselves, but for them to choose a partner who is appropriate for their emotional needs.
Thanks to facing these unpleasant facts, one can now take positive steps to remove negative influences from one’s life. Smoking is harming my health? I can stop smoking. I don’t love myself? I can get therapy. I don’t have a good relationship with my partner? I can talk to them about it. I don’t like my job? I can work towards a new job. I am worried about my retirement? I can now read books about investing. Honesty turns a person from a victim into a powerful agent of change in their lives. How many people do you know who are not honest to themselves about their drug habit? Their drinking habit? Their communication habits? Their work habits? Their self-talk habits? It certainly would not be comfortable for these people to be honest with themselves, but how much different would their lives be if they were honest with themselves? How much improvement could they make if they were no longer in denial and learned to accept the truth about who they are and where they are at in their lives?
People who construct fanciful ideas about themselves, others, their world, and relationships that they do not like thinking about are the ultimate hermits, living inside their heads disconnected from other people. They are unable to experience true intimacy, which is the capacity to be open and honest to other people about your thoughts and feelings. Because intimacy is nourishment for the human soul, these dishonest people are starved for genuine love and acceptance. The only way to achieve intimacy, which feeds and strengthens the human spirit, is to be honest with yourself and other people. It means having to brave upsetting yourself and upsetting other people. It means bravely feeling pain, fear, despair, anger, and vulnerability on the path to happiness. Most of all, it means being real with yourself.
Further Reading
Here is a book review of I, Robot I wrote for those curious about it.Sorry, have to get this off my chest.
One of the dumbest thing’s I’ve seen this entire summer (no small feat) is this thing where Deutsche Bank says that the combination of stocks, bonds and real estate haven’t been as overvalued as they are now in 200 years.
It’s all here if you need to see it:
DEUTSCHE BANK: We examined 200 years of data and concluded stocks, bonds, and housing are at ‘peak valuation’ (Business Insider)
I’m sure the DB researches are smart guys and that they mean well, but comparing stock and bond and real estate valuations to 200 years ago (or 100 years ago) is as meaningless an endeavor as you can think up. Because a hundred years ago, there were no investors. Just speculators and the company founders who owned the majority of the shares. There was no such thing as retirement, nor were there portfolios or IRAs or 401(k)s. Therefore, of course valuations for these assets had lower baselines in general. There wasn’t a need for hundreds of millions of people to hold onto trillions of dollars’ worth.
You know what your retirement plan was a hundred years ago? You fucking died.
And don’t even get me started on the valuations of two hundred years ago. I know of the guys who originally put this data together. They’re geniuses at the London Business School (Dimson, Staunton and Marsh). Even they would tell you, these historic indices weren’t exactly carved into stone tablets and left in a storage locker somewhere. All of this stuff had to be pieced together and pulled from hugely varying sources with all sorts of restorative methodologies. We have a good approximation of what historical prices were and even some sense of earnings, book value and revenue – but an approximation is not a fact.
Even today we don’t know what real earnings are. 20% of the S&P 500 is made up of tech companies and about half of them play games with GAAP on a regular basis. They pretend that employee and executive comp can be expensed as an item that may or may not appear in future quarters. Cisco does it. Google does it. Anything that might lower reported EPS is treated like a non-recurring freak accident of some sort. And then bathtubs full of stock options are handed out and they do the same thing 90 days later. And then there’s goodwill, and tax-advantaged write-downs and all sorts of other fun stuff that wasn’t going on even a decade ago. And you’re going to tell me you feel good about the PE multiples of railroad monopolies from the fucking Civil War era?
Stop it.
And I won’t even get into the massive differences in profit margins between a company like Facebook, which makes millions of dollars per employee, and the S&P 500 of the 1970’s, which was dominated by steel companies and oil companies and mining companies and other low-margin, capital-intensive “filthy” industries.
200 years ago, there was no indoor plumbing or electricity, kind of like present-day Camden, New Jersey. Married couples had eleven children each with the expectation that only three or four of them would make it to junior high school, after which they’d become chimney-sweeps or horse-dentists or whatever the hell you did in those days.
No planes. No cars. No guac.
No similarities with the modern era.
Historical context is excellent for understanding financial markets. But let’s remember that the numbers on a spreadsheet don’t exist in a vacuum. They are a function of what’s happening in the world, as progress steadily mows down the economic realities of the past.
This post was originally published on September 8th, 2015.Floyd Mayweather and Robert Guerrero will have veteran referee Robert Byrd sharing the ring with them on May 4 in Las Vegas, and the Nevada commission also selected the judges today, naming Jerry Roth, Duane Ford, and Julie Lederman as the official judges for the bout.
Byrd is a fine choice as referee, a quality pro who stands out as one of the more consistent and reliable officials in the sport. He has never refereed a Mayweather fight before. Recent big fights for Byrd have been Pacquiao-Bradley, Vazquez-Gesta, and Huck-Afolabi II in Germany.
Roth and Ford are well-known, and not for great reasons. Lederman is a fine judge and a good choice, but Roth and Ford are a bit worrisome, even though historically, Mayweather fights are pretty easy to score. It's worrisome simply because they aren't particularly good judges anymore. The sport is dying for some turnover at the top levels with officials.
Jay Nady will referee the main undercard bout between Daniel Ponce De Leon and Abner Mares, with Dick Houck, Robert Hoyle, and Michael Pernick assigned as judges.This article was first published on file-sharing news site TorrentFreak and is re-published here with the author’s permission. It was written by Australian journalist Myles Peterson.
analysis A key player in Australia’s negotiations to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) revealed itself last Monday and surprisingly it wasn’t News Ltd, the US Embassy in Canberra or even a reigning political party. The Federal Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade emerged as ACTA’s cheerleader-in-chief in Australia, trumpeting the benefits of the treaty before a rare open federal parliamentary committee.
The proposed treaty has generated heat across the globe, from the streets of Poland to the parliament of Europe and Mexico, to the social media back-channels of ACTA’s primary driver, the United States of America.
ACTA imposes significant requirements on the 30 or so signatories should they ratify it (none are yet to do so), impacting far wider than the commonly discussed aspects of file-sharing and media piracy. ACTA brings generic medicines into play. To some extent it dictates how nations should deal with trademarks and patents. In the words of Australian Law Professor Dr Matthew Rimmer, ACTA “seeks to define and channel how nation-states enforce concepts of intellectual property.”
Australia’s lack of public and political opposition to ACTA stands somewhat alone in the international community, accentuated by limited local media coverage. The rare light shone on Australia’s role in negotiations during last week’s “Justice Standing Committee” hearing only came after the treaty had already been signed in October, 2011 – as was noted more than once by the handful of politicians present.
Senator Scott Ludlam, an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange and his Wikileaks organisation, seized the opportunity to grill the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade and other supporters of ACTA who presented themselves. If body language is anything to go by, the good senator was less than enthusiastic about the answers he received. Later in the week, a very different group of people gave evidence, drawn from the ranks of concerned members of Australia’s academic community. Their testimony was largely negative, attacking ACTA on multiple levels.
Human rights expert Dr Hazel Moir, of the Australian National University, pointed to the role copyright monopolies played in drafting the secretive treaty and questioned their motives. “The music industry has a very rigid business model. They’re only prepared to sell certain things at certain times,” Dr Moir testified.
Some of the harshest language came from Dr Matthew Rimmer, an intellectual property law expert, also from the ANU. Dr Rimmer took aim at the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade’s role in negotiating the treaty. “The Department [of Foreign Affairs & Trade] have been one of the chief advocates,” Dr Rimmer told TorrentFreak after giving evidence. “They’re conducting and running their own line on what should happen. I’m not sure that represents a wider government approach.”
Dr Rimmer questioned why other government departments had not been included in the treaty negotiations. “There was a need for Treasury, Finance and the Productivity Commission to be involved. I also think the Department of Health [& Ageing] have been ignored … their concerns have not been raised.”
Those concerns include the impact ACTA may have on Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme – a government program that provides subsidised drugs and medicines to the entire population. Bans on the use of generic medicines could see massive blow-outs in the cost of the scheme according to Dr Rimmer. “There’s many real problems with the one department having soul carriage [of ACTA] that have simply been ignored,” he said.
The Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade has been led by no less than three ministers since ACTA negotiations began in 2008. None have shown a particular public interest in the treaty, preferring the rough and tumble of internal party politics and visits to Afghanistan and Washington. Australia’s ruling Labor Party and conservative opposition have a long standing history of combining their numbers to pass treaties and agreements driven by the US State Department – as ACTA is.
Australia’s role in negotiating ACTA has been near invisible, both locally and internationally. Transparency in the process has been non-existent. Mainstream media coverage has been negligible. Expert local voices have been ignored. Should Australia ratify ACTA, it will sign up to a treaty negotiated in secret by a single, questionably-lead government department with parliamentary hearings held after the fact and outcomes that could be felt across the legal and policy landscape of the nation.
Such a process runs counter-intuitive to how a modern liberal democracy operates.
Image credit: Lukas P, Creative CommonsThe construction of a bridge across the Kerch Strait to Crimea is seen from the outskirts of the Taman settlement in Krasnodar region, southern Russia, April 4, 2016. Andrew Osborn/Reuters
Shortly after annexing Crimea in March 2015, Russia has taken bold steps in order show the world its commitment to the Black Sea peninsula.
In order to solidify its footing, it has not only staged large war games earlier this month, but Moscow has also deployed its advanced S-400 missile-defense system into the region.
In order to link the peninsula with the Russian mainland, the country has been constructing the Crimea Bridge, an 11.8 mile undertaking that's estimated to cost $3.2 to 4.3 billion. Equipped with 4 traffic lanes and a railway with 2 tracks, the project is scheduled to be completed in December 2018 and is estimated to transport 14 million people a year.
After Russia took control of Crimea, Ukraine had effectively closed access to the isolated region, inhibiting Russia's logistical capabilities. Because supplies had to be airlifted or delivered by sea, the Russians decided to construct the Crimea Bridge, also known as "Putin's Bridge," from Russia's Krasnodar region through the Kerch Strait and to eastern Crimea.
Although Ukraine has condemned Russia's actions, the project was originally supposed to be a joint Russian-Ukrainian venture in April 2010. However, after relations between the two countries faltered, a firm where the majority of its shares belonged to Arkady Rotenberg, Russian President Vladimir Putin's former judo partner, decided to take it upon itself to complete the project.
But even with a large firm's backing, the bridge's construction has seen some setbacks. Inclement weather, including storms in June, have delayed the project by forcing ships to remain in port and keeping workers from their tasks.
In addition to forces beyond their control, engineers also claim that the bridge's design is problematic. Sources from NPR assert that the bridge is being built at the wrong place and the wrong way, leaving itself susceptible to mud volcanoes and earthquakes.
Bridge workers have also complained that after being promised a pay of $80 per day and having housing and meals provided for, the extra housing costs and cost of food were deducted from their pay. Furthermore, NPR reports that workers who took breaks ended up being fired and sent home without pay.
Earlier this month, the US Department of the Treasury added several companies and individuals involved with the bridge's construction into their sanctioned blacklist.
"Treasury stands with our partners in condemning Russia's violation of international law, and we will continue to sanction those who threaten Ukraine's peace, security and sovereignty," said John Smith, the acting director of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, in a Reuters report.
However, regardless of the sanctions, the project looks to be well underway. Shortly after being blacklisted, the Crimea Bridge's communication team showed no intention of slowing down their construction efforts.
"The sanctions will not affect the construction of the bridge," the Crimea Bridge infocenter explained. "The contractor has all the resources necessary for the timely completion of the project."
Watch the entire footage of the latest developments from state-sponsored RT:Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can't Stop Eating It
By Michael Wex, St. Martin's Press, 297 pages, $37.99
Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food
By Roger Horowitz, Columbia University Press, 303 pages, $35
My bubbie was a terrible cook. As she's no longer with us, and we are beyond the reach of her soggy, under-seasoned food, hopefully she won't mind my saying so.
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Her chicken was boiled. Her chocolate cake was dry. The jagged edges of her kugel were so sharp they would be unsafe for a household with small children.
Imagine the shock of tasting Texas brisket for the first time, the smoky flesh quivering from its long bath in the barbecue's woody fumes, if you'd only ever known it as a wet, rubbery brick, so unappetizing it made you ask for the parsley on the Seder plate.
As a consequence, I never thought much of Jewish food.
Two new books – Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food by Roger Horowitz and Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can't Stop Eating It by Michael Wex – ask me to reconsider my people's cuisine, but not for long.
The narrative they tell, the foods they describe, are not flavour combinations born of creativity, or even necessity, but of denial.
Yes, my childhood diet contained warm, salty pastrami sandwiches loaded with mustard and a Sunday-morning assurance of as much bagel, cream cheese and smoked salmon as I could eat. But that was it for Jewish food. Everything in between was defined by what we, even as a barely kosher family, weren't allowed to eat: checking cookie ingredients for lard; spacing two hours between eating meat and dairy; shrimp or bacon as verboten as premarital sex.
"Lifelong engagement with dietary laws, the endless watch for forbidden ingredients or illicit combinations, gives rise to a way of thinking in which looking at food becomes looking for trouble," Wex writes.
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Historically, Jews have been nomadic. So the cuisine borrows from everyone. But always the denial comes first.
I've heard raves about cholent. But none of its proponents, who haven't eaten it since childhood, have ever been able to tell me the recipe for the fabled stew before. And that's because it's not a recipe, but a loophole for cooking on Fridays.
Wex explains cholent as "an attempt to reconcile the prohibition against cooking on the Sabbath." Meat and sundry starches (beans, potatoes, whatever you have) are left in a hot oven before sundown on Friday, left to cook (though not technically "cooking" as a verb, only profiting from residual heat) until dinner on Saturday, thus circumventing the rule against cooking on the Sabbath, when observant Jews are not supposed to work, drive, exchange money, operate machinery or even turn on a light.
We're talking about cuisine by people who devise schemes for getting around these sacred rules – automated elevators that stop on every floor, a piece of tape on the switch for the fridge light, paying a non-Jew to run errands for you – so digressive of the original intention, that Rube Goldberg would decry them as needlessly complicated.
Wex's book frequently digresses into religious and historical minutiae. The cholent, for example, was a rabbinical diss track between Jewish sects, the Pharisees way of sticking it to the Sadducees, those stuffed shirts.
While Wex maintains a scholarly tone, Horowitz, though no less extensively researched, is more of a storyteller. His book veers toward 20th-century pop culture, providing linear answers to satisfy the curiosity of anyone who's asked about who decides what is or isn't kosher, how animals are to be killed according to shechita and what is the meaning of that U in a circle symbol on Coca-Cola Ⓤ.
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"Coke, as one of the first iconic American foods to seek kosher certification, was a testing ground for how kosher law could change modern food – and how, in turn, modern food would change the practice of kosher law," Horowitz writes.
The offending element was glycerin (derived from non-kosher animal byproducts), present to the extent of 0.01 per cent in the popular soft drink, sparking debate over whether the animal byproduct could be considered bitul (a nullification of the rules). Widely respected Atlanta Rabbi Tobias Geffen ruled that the glycerin did not qualify as bitul, based on a precedent set of 12th-century Rabbi Samuel ben Meri. The glycerin was well below the 1/60th acceptable level of treif contamination, but did not qualify for the exemption because its use was purposeful and not accidental. And if this starts to sound like deleted scenes from a dry courtroom drama, welcome to Judaism. We saved you some latkes. They're cold.
Coca-Cola began making kosher batches using cottonseed oil glycerin. In 1957, it was discovered that the two glycerins were running through the same pipes, which an offended Rabbi Eliezer Silver compared to "frying ham in a skillet, then placing kosher meat in the same skillet." The company made the necessary investment to satisfy complaints. But the real conflict was not between the soda maker and rabbis, but among rabbis.
"The discordant debates in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, fought out in public among feuding rabbinic factions, were brought inside new institutions – the certifications organizations – and resolved behind closed doors between hierarchically organized rabbinic associations," Horowitz recounts.
That's the meaning of the various logos and symbols you might find on packaged food, stamps of approval from the Orthodox Union, Star-K, the Chicago Rabbinical Council or Organized Kashrut Laboratories, which study, govern and certify issues of kosher status.
These overlapping groups, paragons of extrajudicial law banding together to enforce a higher power of morality, have a familiar ring to anyone who has read an issue of the Avengers or Justice League.
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In Hebrew school, an X-Men or Alpha Flight comic always tucked into my desk, I mostly ignored our teacher's lessons on language, politics and ethics. But I paid attention during the Passover story of Exodus. It had flaming hail, secret identities, spies, giants, honey wafers falling from the sky and a river that parts to form a walkway. As a devoted student of fantastical history – the Dark Phoenix Saga, the Kree-Skrull war – these were stories I could relate to.
I have the same fun reading Horowitz's book. His heroes are also locked in eternal combat with supernatural opposition. Except unlike in the Torah or comic books, Horowitz's characters are just trying to drink an ice-cold Coke or buy a kosher brisket from an ethical butcher (amid a lot of fraud).
There are still elements of Jewish cuisine that I delight in foisting upon friends: the greasy kishke, a sausage made of matzo meal and schmaltz (think of buttery, chicken-flavoured mashed potatoes); the babka, a loaf cake containing a Jorge Luis Borges poem's worth of chocolate labyrinths; my grandmother's pickles (the other one, not the boiled chicken one), a recipe she forbade me from ever sharing.
But mostly, our food, as defined by these books, is about what we refuse to eat, our mealtimes spent kibitzing over those rules.
"Centuries of rigorous schooling in dietary laws have helped to ensure that statutory principles and the arguments they provoke will almost always take precedence over matters of taste," Wex writes.
Nevertheless, halfway through Horowitz's book, I get nostalgic. Devoting an entire chapter to Manischewitz, he recounts how the Monarch Wine Company licensed the name to appeal to kosher buyers. In the 1950s, they capitalized on the burgeoning African-American market (the Concord grapes of New York were similar to Scuppernong grapes, grown in the south, both requiring additional sugar for fermentation) with print ads in Ebony magazine and TV spots featuring Sammy Davis Jr., until that secondary market outgrew the Jewish clientele. Ultimately, Manischewitz lost the Jewish audience to Kedem, when the competitors figured out how to make kosher wines that tasted good. Their one simple trick: temporarily staff an established old-world winery with observant Jews to produce a batch.
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Horowitz's storytelling succeeded in worming the notorious Jewish sizzurp into my imagination.
When you ask at the liquor store for Manischewitz, and it's not Passover, they give you the same look of pity and derision we usually reserve for people standing on the left side of escalators.
I haven't drunk Manischevitz since my aunt's Passover table. At the age of 12, it was the first wine I ever tasted. Back then, I found it as drinkable as the not-dissimilar Kool-Aid.
Opening a bottle of as an apperitivo before a Chinatown dinner with friends, they're quick to review the scent. Swirling the $6.95 wine with the respect you'd grant pinot noir, they decry the nose and aftertaste as cough syrup.
But in between those two notes, there's a literal and figurative sweet spot. Helping to drain more than my share of the bottle, I'm transported back into the body of a little boy, enjoying an otherwise forbidden glass of wine, before settling in to watch the third hour of The Ten Commandments, the part with all the plagues, on Channel 11.
That's the rightful place of much of this food. As nostalgia. Best left in the rear-view because it was never that good to begin with.
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Corey Mintz is the author of How to Host a Dinner Party.by Larry Lee
WAUSAU, Wis. (WSAU) -- As expected, the January 21st trial date has been changed for a Wausau woman accused of torturing her ex-boyfriend’s dog.
21-year-old Sean Janas will face a judge and jury for allegedly poisoning, torturing, and eventually killing Mary, the four-year-old lab-shepherd mix back in June of 2012. After several motions and delays, the new trial dates begin March 17th before Judge Greg Grau in Marathon County.
The defense tried unsuccessfully to move the trial due to publicity. Janas’ attorney also tried unsuccessfully to have his client’s diary ruled inadmissible in court. That diary is said to contain graphic details of Janas’ actions and the enjoyment she got from watching the dog suffer. Just last week, the court decided to allow the diary as evidence.City Councilor Tito Jackson (above) marketed Kadian for New Jersey-based Alpharma when he worked for the company from 2004 until 2006.
City Councilor Tito Jackson has made the drug addiction epidemic a centerpiece in his campaign for mayor, lamenting “an opioid crisis which has not been addressed.”
But long before the scourge of widespread opioid abuse fully came into public view, Jackson worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative, and it was his job to convince doctors, pharmacies, and medical experts that one opioid in particular — the morphine-based Kadian — was an alternative to better-known drugs like OxyContin.
Jackson marketed Kadian for New Jersey-based Alpharma when he worked for the company from 2004 until 2006. The Food and Drug Administration describes Kadian as a “long-acting (extended-release) opioid pain medicine that can put you at risk for overdose and death.”
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In a recent interview, Jackson described his pharmaceutical sales work as long in the past.
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“For two years over a decade ago, I marketed a pain medication to doctors who provided care for end-of-life and cancer patients,” Jackson said. “And I was proud to work with talented doctors to help ensure patients received the best care they deserved.”
“I haven’t been in that world for well over a decade,” he said.
In addition to Alpharma, Jackson previously worked in pharmaceutical sales for a year at Eli Lilly and three years at Ortho-McNeil, where he marketed other products.
Regarding his work for Alpharma, Jackson described “huge potential for Kadian growth” in his territory in a document laying out market opportunities and weaknesses for the drug. He said his short-term marketing strategy would be to “identify and develop local thought leaders to promote and educate the advantages of Kadian” and “try to get it stocked in at least one pharmacy in each town covered.”
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That document became part of a lawsuit Jackson filed in 2007, claiming that he and others were underpaid for their work. In the document, Jackson noted that one challenge to the pharmaceutical company’s business was “docs’ shyness because of issues... with Oxy and also law enforcement.”
Now, as he mounts a campaign for mayor, Jackson’s role as a pharmaceutical salesman more than 10 years ago has not been widely discussed.
The opioid epidemic is seen as a significant health crisis — nearly 2,000 died of overdoses in Massachusetts last year — and public officials and health experts are desperate to find ways to eradicate it.
Policy makers recognized the dangers posed by the pain-relieving drugs in the mid-2000s, though the issue wasn’t as prominent as it is now. State lawmakers established a commission in 2004 aimed at “OxyContin and other drug abuse.” From 2004 until 2006, when the commission released its report, the state’s opioid deaths rose 29 percent, from 494 confirmed deaths to 635.
But the problem had drawn nowhere near the public attention that it has in recent years. In 2016, the state estimated that unintentional opioid-related deaths had reached 1,979.
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Several medical professionals contacted for this article were unfamiliar with Kadian.
‘We were wrong. But there was also this tremendous pressure from people who were making a lot of money to get us to [prescribe] them.’ Dr. Barbara Herbert, referring to opioids
But discussing opioids broadly, Dr. Barbara Herbert, director of addiction service at Commonwealth Care Alliance, said: “They do help people get out of pain, so the coming consequences were not immediately apparent, because [doctors] were able to help people, and we wanted to believe — and it was very much in the drug industry’s interest to have us believe — that we could make people better.”
She added: “We were wrong. But there was also this tremendous pressure from people who were making a lot of money to get us to [prescribe] them.”
Opioid use has been widely linked to addiction to heroin, which can be purchased more cheaply on the black market than the prescription drugs.
In 2014 Senate testimony, Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called “aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies” one of several factors that probably “have contributed to the severity of the current prescription drug abuse problem.”
Jackson was fired from Alpharma in 2006 after failing to meet company standards for administrative work, including his expenses, according to court documents. Pressed last week on the reasons for his termination, Jackson replied, “The company noted that it was a performance issue.”
The company itself ran into significant trouble, too.
In 2010, Alpharma settled for $42.5 million with the Department of Justice to resolve False Claims Act charges that the firm had paid providers to encourage Kadian prescriptions and misrepresented the drug’s safety and effectiveness. The settlement resolved a 2006 whistle-blower lawsuit in which Jackson was not named. Two years later, the company was acquired by another firm, King Pharmaceuticals, which itself was later purchased by Pfizer.
Jackson, who was elected to the Boston City Council in 2011, is challenging Mayor Martin J. Walsh, arguing that the first-term mayor is too cozy with big business and has not done enough to help improve public schools.
He has also ripped Walsh for closing the Long Island bridge, which connected the mainland to substance abuse treatment programs on the island.
And recently he called a decision by Walsh to shutter a 40-bed drug treatment facility on Southampton Street this month a “disgrace.” The administration maintains that it intends to place residents in permanent housing and continue their treatment services.
“Boston is facing an opioid crisis which has not been addressed,” Jackson says on his campaign website.
Walsh enters the race with the significant advantages of incumbency; no Boston mayor has lost a campaign for reelection since 1949.
To Jackson’s $78,000 in campaign funds, Walsh claims more than $4 million.
But Walsh also brings some of the vulnerabilities of the office, including a federal investigation that has entangled his administration.
In addition to his work in pharmaceutical sales, Jackson worked in Governor Deval Patrick’s economic development office and, later, as political director of Patrick’s reelection campaign.
Jackson’s LinkedIn profile says he was promoted to regional specialist after just six months with Alpharma, where he was “responsible for creating and accelerating sales.” He developed national, regional, and local thought leaders to “support product market penetration” and facilitated education for “key physicians... to inform them about Kadian.”
Jackson’s 2007 suit against Alpharma, filed in federal court in New Jersey, alleged that he and other sale representatives were not paid “for all hours worked as required by law.” It was ultimately dismissed.
Jim O’Sullivan can be reached at jim.osullivan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @JOSreports2 cops plead guilty in park stomping Veteran Bridgeport officers face up to a year in prison
A screen grab from a video, posted on YouTube on Jan. 6, 2013, showing three Bridgeport, Conn. police officers kicking a man in Beardsley Park on May 20, 2011. Officers Elson Morales, Joseph Lawlor and Clive Higgins were put on the paid administrative leave Jan.18, 2013 pending an investigation of the incident by the city's Office of Internal Affairs. The man, who has not been identified, is lying on the ground after being Tasered by one of the officers when two of the officers begin kicking him. A third officer then gets out of his patrol car and walks over to where the other two are still kicking the man and then he too begins kicking him. less A screen grab from a video, posted on YouTube on Jan. 6, 2013, showing three Bridgeport, Conn. police officers kicking a man in Beardsley Park on May 20, 2011. Officers Elson Morales, Joseph Lawlor and Clive... more Photo: Contributed Photo Photo: Contributed Photo Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close 2 cops plead guilty in park stomping 1 / 17 Back to Gallery
BRIDGEPORT -- Two veteran city cops, caught on video in what has been called the most flagrant act of police brutality in city history, face up to a year in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to civil-rights violations.
After a video went viral showing veteran Officers Joseph Lawlor, Elson Morales and Clive Higgins kicking and stomping a prone Orlando Lopez-Soto on a spring afternoon in 2011 inBeardsley Park, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other community groups held protests and demanded justice.
But it was in a very quiet federal courtroom that first Morales and then Lawlor pleaded guilty to one count each of depriving a person of their civil rights -- a misdemeanor -- before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyer, ending a year of social turbulence in the city.
Under the plea bargain, the officers each face up to a year in prison when they are sentenced Sept. 2. As a condition of the plea they have agreed to resign from the Police Department. They had been on paid administrative duty pending the investigation. Both are eligible to collect pensions from the city.
"Their actions were appalling and the judicial system has to send a strong message that police officers should be held to a higher standard and this conduct will be dealt with swiftly and severely," said state NAACP President Scot X Esdaile.
Police Chief Joseph L. Gaudett Jr. said the Bridgeport Police Department cooperated with the federal authorities since the video surfaced.
"As chief, I am satisfied with the outcome of the criminal prosecution and with the fact that these individuals will no longer serve as Bridgeport police officers," Gaudett said. "Their actions are not reflective of the good work done day-in and day-out by the overwhelming majority of the men and women of the Bridgeport Police Department. The Bridgeport Police Department will continue to cooperate fully with the federal authorities until they conclude their investigation."
By pleading guilty, the officers avoided indictment, Morales' lawyer, Michael Fitzpatrick said.
"Although there was a reasonable explanation for some of the actions depicted in the video, the case as a whole was too emotionally charged for my client to risk the potential consequences of an indictment and trial," Fitzpatrick said.
Officer Clive Higgins has not yet been charged in the incident, and his lawyer, Edward Gavin, declined comment.
Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch said in a statement that the incident was an aberration.
"Every single day, hundreds of hardworking police officers across Bridgeport keep our streets safe and secure, and do so in an honorable manner," Finch said. "But this isolated incident stands in stark contrast, and the actions by these officers are unacceptable. That's why I'm glad we're seeing some resolve in this case, and that these two officers are paying a price for their violation of the public trust."
On the video, recorded May 20, 2011, by a passer-by but not released to YouTube until January 2013, Orlando Lopez-Soto, 28, is seen running from the right side of the frame when the electrical sound of a stun gun is heard. Lopez-Soto falls face down in the grass and officers Joseph Lawlor and Elson Morales run up to him and begin kicking and stomping on him.
Higgins then pulls up in his patrol car, gets out, and leaning on Morales for support, also begins kicking Lopez-Soto.
Despite the now viral video showing him stomping a prone man on the back and head, Lawlor, 41, steadfastly refused to admit what he had done to the federal judge Tuesday or apologize for his actions.
"My physical contact might have been more than the law allowed," Lawlor told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyers.
"Might have been?" the judge retorted.
"I, I, I, unnecessarily struck him once," Lawlor resumed. "Because of adrenaline, anger, the danger he put me in. I was angry with the guy for the danger he put everybody in."
"Everybody in the room can see the point in time where Mr. Lawlor's actions became unlawful," added his lawyer, John R. Gulash.
Morales, 43, was more candid with the judge. "I apologize," he told the judge. "When he (Lopez-Soto) fell on the ground he had his hands behind him and I Tased him unnecessarily."
Both men, 12-year veterans of the police department, told the judge they started undergoing counseling after the video surfaced in January 2013, worried they were going to be prosecuted. Gulash said Lawlor was out sick the last four days from the police department because he was so stressed about what was going to happen.
Lopez-Soto, who did not suffer major injuries from the incident, is serving a five-year prison term after being found guilty of criminal possession of a firearm, possession of narcotics with intent to sell and failure to appear in court for the crime that led to the chase by |
Internet Ecosystem" and invited the heads of edge providers Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon and Netflix, and ISPs Comcast, Verizon and AT&T.
But E&C ranking member Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Communications Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) said the witness list must extend beyond the big companies. In order to ensure that members of the committee hear a broad variety of views from a more diverse group of people other than just CEOs, we have selected eight people to be invited that are prepared to testify and provide the Committee with their perspectives on the impact of the FCC’s actions," they wrote to Republican Committee leaders in a follow-up to their earlier suggestion the GOP list was lacking in small business leader and entrepreneur input.
The eight witnesses on the Democrats' list:1971: Salyut 1, the first operational space station, is launched.
As they often were during the space race, the Soviets were out in front of NASA in concept and launch. But just as often, they were bedeviled by technical glitches and failures, and so it was with Salyut 1.
Beaten to the moon by the Americans, the Soviet space program turned its attention to the deployment of a working space station, which had been on the drawing boards since 1964. Salyut 1 was essentially a lash-up, its components assembled from spacecraft originally designed for other purposes.
The April launch went smoothly and Salyut 1 entered orbit, but it was all downhill after that. The crew of Soyuz 10, intended to be the first cosmonauts to take occupancy of Salyut 1, couldn’t enter the space station because of a docking mechanism problem.
The crew of Soyuz 11 spent three weeks aboard Salyut 1, only to be killed on the return trip to Earth when air escaped from their craft.
Finally, it was curtains for Salyut 1, which fired its rockets for the last time Oct. 11, 1971, to begin its planned re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and disintegration over the Pacific Ocean.
Source: PBS.org, Wikipedia
Photo: Salyut 1/NASA
This article first appeared on Wired.com April 19, 2007.
See Also:DPA A wels catfish on display in a Mönchengladbach museum: Berlin bathers are terrified of a giant catfish said to be living in a local lake.
After cooling off from the summer heat in one of Berlin's many lakes, a young German woman now has a 17-centimeter (6.7-inch) bite to show for it. Local animal experts suspect a giant catfish lies behind the attack and swimmers are now avoiding the lake out of fear of being bitten.
"We were in the water and just swimming around," Katharina Saxe told television station Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) Monday. "Then (my friend) asked me if I'd felt it, too. And that's when it latched onto my leg. It felt like a bite. We bolted away. And then it started bleeding, too."
Saxe was swimming in Schlachtensee, one of many small lakes around Berlin's Grunewald forested area, when the incident happened. She was taken to a hospital where she received minor treatment for a 17-centimeter-long (6.7 inch), crescent-shaped bite on her calf. The RBB footage shows countless pinprick-like red marks on Saxe's leg, rather than any deep puncture or laceration wounds.
And Katharina is not alone. Jonas Wegg, a teenager who lives near the lake, was recently swimming at night when he had an unpleasant underwater encounter. "I was suddenly bitten on my right calf," Wegg told the mass circulation daily Bild. "I only felt something huge and slippery. It was a shock."
Reports like these have apparently led many swimmers to stay on dry land. "We don't go in the water any more," Berlin student Stephanie Kahl told Bild. "We just stay near the shore, where the catfish can't go."
Susanne Jürgensen, the head of Berlin's fisheries department, told RBB that, based upon the shape of Saxe's bite, the culprit was most likely a wels catfish. The species has a large, broad mouth with very small teeth.
DDP Bathers at Wannsee lake in Berlin: Swimmers are avoiding the nearby Schlachtensee lake.
Jürgensen estimated that Schlachtensee has a dozen such fish. "It's right before their mating season now," Jürgensen said. "They're probably just marking their territory."
Wels catfish inhabit warm lakes and some rivers in central, southern and eastern Europe and western Asia. They are the second largest freshwater fish in the region behind the beluga sturgeon.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the species can reach a length of 4.5 meters (15 feet) and a weight of 300 kilograms (660 pounds). The largest catfish recorded in Germany was caught in 2000 in Kiebingen, near Rottenburg. It was 2.39 meters (7.84 feet) long and weighed 89 kilograms (196 pounds).
Something Fishy
Despite swimmers' fears of giant catfish, it might turn out that they aren't so giant after all. Leading catfish expert James Holgate estimates that the Schlachtensee fish was about 1 meter (3.3 feet) in length, judging by the size of the bite mark on Saxe. "That isn't really big by catfish standards at all," says Holgate, who has been fishing for catfish throughout Europe for over 15 years and is the co-author of "Big Catfish in Europe."
And it might turn out they're not that dangerous, either. "I got bit by one inadvertently one time," Holgate told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "You have to understand, though: Their teeth are more like sandpaper than real teeth. It didn't hurt at all."
Holgate also said that, based upon his 20 years as a catfish expert, instances of catfish attacking humans are "extremely rare."
"And if you do get bit," Holgate added, "your biggest danger is infection from the dirty water."Facebook post raises new questions in Delphi double murders Copyright by WISH - All rights reserved Video
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) -- A social media post has caught the attention of the Indiana State Police officers handling the Delphi double murder case.
The Facebook posts claims to be from Katelyn Nations, wife of Daniel Nations, the 31-year-old man arrested in Colorado last month and considered a potential suspect in the Delphi murders in February.
The post claims an impending divorce and disgust at Daniel Nations. State police Sgt. Kim Riley told 24-Hour News 8 he is aware of it, but couldn't confirm if it's really from Katelyn Nations or if the content in it is true.
In the post Katelyn Nations says she is currently married to Daniel but writes "that isn't going to be for much longer."
She writes that she is as disgusted about the deaths of the Abby Williams and Libby German as everyone else and is heartbroken for their families.
She adds in the post, "Now I know the biggest question has been did I know about his possible involvement..or did Daniel tell me he did it?. No. If he did y would have been like any other mother and called the police on him so he could be punished for said actions. However I don't know of anything more than what I have told Police."
Officers haven't confirmed that they've spoken with Katelyn Nations as part of Daniel Nations' investigation, but said the team went to Colorado and "talked to who they needed to talk to."
The post continues saying she is "disgusted with Daniel and with all he has done to me and put me through. I am in no way protecting him."
Daniel Nations' arrest affidavit says his wife, Katelyn, was in the red Chevy Prizm on Sept. 23 when Colorado police pulled him over arrested him for allegedly threatening people with a hatchet near a trail. It says two children were also in the vehicle.
Daniel and Katelyn Nations used to live in Indiana, and Daniel had registered as a sex offender in Johnson County.
The Katelyn Nations who posted to Facebook hasn't responded to our requests for further comment.
Full content of the post is as follows:This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We are broadcasting from Denver, Colorado, from Denver Open Media. When I flew in to Denver yesterday, on Thursday, I went directly to the First Unitarian Society Church to meet Arturo Hernández García. He’s an undocumented immigrant and father of two girls. Since October, he has sought sanctuary at the church as he fights his deportation. I also met his nine-year-old daughter Andrea, who’s a United States citizen. Her status means he may be allowed to stay in the country under President Obama’s new deferred action program starting in May—if he’s not deported before then. Andrea was with her father when I went to interview him last night.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve just arrived at the Unitarian Church in Denver, and we’re coming to see Arturo Hernández García, who has taken refuge here. He’s taken sanctuary here, the first one to do this in Denver since the 1980s.
Hi, I’m Amy Goodman.
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Good to meet you.
AMY GOODMAN: Good to meet you.
Can you tell me how you ended up living in this church?
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: It is hard, because I have a long time in here. I have 115 days already.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did you come here?
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Because I am risk to deportation. October 21st, I have my final order for deportation. And the reason I’m coming here is because I want to fight my case.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me what happened? How did you end up going into deportation proceedings? You had a tile business?
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Yeah, I’m working on constructions, usually big constructions like apartments, 100, 200, 300 apartments, and hundreds of people working in there. And I had trouble with one person, and I have that discussion with him. And they called the police, and the police, they arrest me. And after that, immigration put—the hall, immigration hall.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened after that?
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: I’m be in detention center for immigration for 15 days. And I pay a bail bond. I am a good person. I am working hard here by 16 years in Colorado. I never be in trouble. I never be arrested. I never stay in jail before, here or in Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: You had your two children here in the United States?
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: I have one daughter that is 15 years old. She was born in Mexico. And she’s in DACA. It’s the deferred action for students. She’s now get a—permits job for her. And I have Andrea, is nine years old. She’s a citizen.
AMY GOODMAN: So what has it been like for you? You’ve been here for many months now, for November, December—for four months.
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Yeah, three months and a half already. It’s hard, hard for me and for my family, too. I want to come back in my life, normal life, and come back to work and still in home with my daughters and my wife.
AMY GOODMAN: So we’re here in the sanctuary with Arturo Hernández García, and his nine-year-old daughter Andrea has just joined us. Hi, Andrea.
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Hi.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you come here—do you come here after school?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: What grade are you in?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Fourth.
AMY GOODMAN: Fourth grade. How do you feel about your father living in the church?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Sad. I want him to go back home with us.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you hoping for your father?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: For him to go home and to give him a stay, for ICE to give him a stay.
AMY GOODMAN: For ICE to give him a stay. Did you also go to Washington, D.C., with your mother and your sister?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you do there?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: We were at the—
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: With the officers, ICE officers.
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: —with the ICE officers and—
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Homeland Security.
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: —Homeland Security, and we were telling them that we wanted our dad to go home with us.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it will happen?
ANDREA HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re standing in the sanctuary, and behind you is a banner that says “All souls are sacred and worthy. There is unity that makes us one.” And we’re standing in front of the organ.
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: We come here, United States, to work and the future for the family. We are not criminal. It’s not true what the people, the government say on TV. So, I come here to, yeah, like I say, just to work and a better future for my kids. And I’m contributing for the stay. We work and pay taxes. And so, everything I do, I do for my family, so…
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to thank you for taking this time to talk to us, Arturo, and your daughter Andrea. We’re here at the Unitarian Church in Denver, where Arturo Hernández García has taken sanctuary now for three-and-a-half months. I believe this is the first time someone has taken sanctuary in a church in Denver since the 1980s, during the sanctuary movement, people fleeing political persecution and violence in Latin America. Thank you.
ARTURO HERNÁNDEZ GARCÍA: Thank you. Thank you for coming, and thank you for interesting in my case. I appreciate it.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell me your name?
BETH CHRONISTER: My name is Beth Chronister, and I work here as the assistant minister at First Unitarian Society.
AMY GOODMAN: And what has it been like to give sanctuary to Arturo, first time sanctuary has been given in Denver since the 1980s?
BETH CHRONISTER: It’s really been a experience that has expanded the congregation. It has been an experience that has brought people together in a way to do justice. This congregation has a long history of being committed to justice, but I think, in walking with Arturo and his family through this experience, it’s been a—doing justice through companionship, in a way that we have learned so much.
AMY GOODMAN: What was the decision you went through to do this?
BETH CHRONISTER: So the process was actually about a six-month-long process. And there wasn’t instant agreement in the congregation, but it was a long process of dialogue, speaking from the pulpit, of doing small group work, and educating ourselves about immigration to figure out what was the way that we felt, as a community, that we could best affect the situation, which all ended in a big congregational vote, which was overwhelmingly positive.
AMY GOODMAN: How many?
BETH CHRONISTER: Oh, my goodness, I think was about a 90 percent yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And how many people in the congregation?
BETH CHRONISTER: Oh, how many people in the congregation? We have a congregation of about 370.
AMY GOODMAN: Can’t ICE just walk in and arrest him?
BETH CHRONISTER: So, the history with sanctuary and respecting sanctuary in churches is that they don’t, that they—it would just look so bad, that they probably wouldn’t. I think that there’s the same sort of respect for schools and hospitals that they have for churches.
AMY GOODMAN: And how long do you think this will go on for?
BETH CHRONISTER: Oh, my goodness. We are hoping that Arturo and Ana and his children are able to get—to all be reunited as soon as possible, hopefully in this next week. But we’ve been hoping for this next week for quite some time. But we’re in it as a community of commitment around him.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, thanks so much.
BETH CHRONISTER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Beth Chronister. She is assistant minister at the First Unitarian Church here in Denver, Colorado, where Arturo García Hernández has taken sanctuary as he seeks to stay in the United States with his wife and his two daughters. I was with him last night here in Denver. Special thanks to Denis Moynihan for helping to film our interview.
Well, we’re joined right now by Jennifer Piper. She helped Arturo Hernández García enter sanctuary. She coordinates the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition, is an interfaith organizer for American Friends Service Committee.
Welcome to Democracy Now! Very quickly, explain the circumstances under which Arturo ended up at this church.
JENNIFER PIPER: Yeah, the circumstances are actually really common and represent a lot of people in the community, because of the strong link between police and sheriffs and immigration in our country. So, he was laying tile at a job site. Another—
AMY GOODMAN: He runs a tile-laying company with his brother here in Denver.
JENNIFER PIPER: Yeah, and they employ six people. And so, they were—it was a huge job site, and they were laying tile, and a guy wanted to hang windows. And that gentleman didn’t like that they refused him entry into the work area, because—
AMY GOODMAN: Because they didn’t want him to walk on the tile that they just laid.
JENNIFER PIPER: Yeah, it was not safe for him. It would ruin the tile. It would waste money and time. And they had it roped off. And the gentleman was white, and he started yelling racial slurs at Arturo and his crew. And they said, “Well, you need to talk to the supervisor. If the supervisor says you can come in the area, we’ll let you.” The supervisor, of course, said he couldn’t. He said he wasn’t going to take orders from any Mexicans. He went right up into Arturo’s face, and Arturo gently pushed him away, because he thought he was going to hit Arturo. The guy went off and left, called the police, accused Arturo of threatening him. Everyone on the scene, including the supervisors, general contractors, testified in court that Arturo did not instigate the argument and that he didn’t threaten this guy in any way. And he was—Arturo was found not guilty by a jury of 12 people.
And despite that, immigration continued deportation proceedings against him. That was almost five years ago now. And so, he has exhausted every legal avenue open to him in fighting his case and been denied discretion over and over again. So, now things have changed a little bit in the legal argument in his case because of the deferred action program that President Obama announced in November.
AMY GOODMAN: Why would he become eligible under it?
JENNIFER PIPER: So, he has a U.S. citizen daughter. He’s been here more than 10 years—well, he’s been here more than the five years that’s required by the program. He has no criminal record. He’s paid taxes. He meets all the requirements. The only issue is he has a deportation order that was issued last year, and that means that we’ll have to ask the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to grant him discretion and allow him to qualify. But otherwise, he completely qualifies.
AMY GOODMAN: Quite something, this church has become a sanctuary church for a new wave of sanctuary from the ’80s.
JENNIFER PIPER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, in this last minute that we have, how this story of Arturo fits into the national picture and what’s happening around immigration rights?
JENNIFER PIPER: Yeah, well, we really see our immigrants organizing and finding ways to further resist a system that is widespread throughout our country. We spend $18 billion a year on immigration enforcement, which is more than all the other federal law enforcement agencies combined. And as long as we keep spending that amount of money on immigration enforcement, we’ll see families like Arturo’s being separated. We’ll see people like Arturo being deported, because we have this immense amount of resources that we’re putting into deportation. And we have to ask: Is that really the priority of our country? Because that’s what the spending priority is right now. And as long as we see that and we see continued links between police and immigration, we’ll continue to see key members of our communities deported. And so, what we also see are allied communities who realize they know people who are undocumented, who are in deportation, stepping up to accompany and experience a little bit of the risk that people like Arturo are living every day.
AMY GOODMAN: And this sanctuary movement, is it growing?
JENNIFER PIPER: The amount of churches who have committed to sanctuary is growing. The number of people actually taking sanctuary isn’t. And some of that is because of this new program and some new opportunities for people that attempt to stay in the country legally. But even if they implement that fully, it will only cover five million of the 10 million or so people who are here.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jennifer Piper, we will continue to follow Arturo’s case. You know, it’s interesting, Jessie Hernandez and Arturo Hernández García, they’re not related—
JENNIFER PIPER: No.
AMY GOODMAN: —but their stories have intersected with their daughters.
JENNIFER PIPER: Yeah, Arturo’s oldest daughter, Mariana, actually went to school with Jessie, and his family has been very impacted by the violence of the Denver Police Department and the way that there’s no accountability. And I think that the lack of accountability with the Denver Police Department is the same lack of accountability we see in the immigration enforcement system.
AMY GOODMAN: Jennifer Piper is interfaith organizer for American Friends Service Committee here in Denver, coordinating the Metro Denver Sanctuary Coalition. She helped Arturo Hernández García enter sanctuary at the First Unitarian Church in Denver.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, journalist David Sirota. Stay with us.Evan Vucci Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson listens as President Barack Obama speaks at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center in Arlington, Va
Last week the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) owned up to being breached by hackers. No concrete facts have surfaced since, and the extent of the hack’s damage remains unclear.
We just know it’s worse than anyone is willing to say.
Now, databases containing private federal employee data are being dumped on the Dark Web. One such database includes over 23,000 government emails addresses, reports Motherboard.
So what’s going on here?
The hacker behind the 23,000.gov emails dump goes by the name of Ebolabad. He has taken credit for the huge OPM breach, posting in broken English “Is not China. Is me I am sell [sic] for highest bid.”
Motherboard asked experts to analyse the data Ebolabad posted on the Dark Web forum, and believed the names and addresses to be real.
Another cybersecurity expert, however, told Business Insider that he does not believe Ebolabad’s data trove to be from the OPM.
“To me, it would not make sense that this is from the same database,” said Dave Aitel the CEO of cybersecurity company Immunity. “In particular, the database that the OPM had was a list of all the background information of the federal employees.” What was just posted for sale online, explained Aitel, included passwords. It doesn’t appear that the OPM had access to passwords.
“That would,” Aitel went on, “indicate it’s from a forum or some other source.”
What, then, should we think about the OPM breach?
Even so, for the last week many have characterised the OPM hack as one of the biggest government data breaches to date.
On Thursday, the American Federation of Government Employees sent out a letter blasting the OPM for its poor security posture. The letter wrote:
Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees. We believe that hackers have every affected person’s Social Security number(s), military records and veterans’ status information, address, birth date, job and pay history, health insurance, life insurance, and pension information; age, gender, race, union status, and more. Worst, we believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous.
That sounds bad.
In short, nothing is safe.
This, explained Aitel, is because there are hundreds of government databases that aren’t considered classified. And, when it comes down to it “any business data is accessible to a hacker.”
OPM is currently in the hot seat for not properly securing its data. Yet this problem transcends just one inept federal agency and involves how the federal government treats this sort of information. The data wasn’t secured not because OPM is lazy but because “in some cases it’s not feasible to encrypt everything,” said Aitel.
The only way to make it feasible to treat this sort of personal data with such care is to create a sea change in security posturing.
So perhaps OPM will turn itself around and institute an overhauled security protocol. But then, what’s going to stop Ebolabad from breaching the hundreds of other government databases?
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Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Americans have a love affair with credit cards. Many Americans have more credit cards in their wallets than they do dollar bills. When 8,000,000 credit cards were yanked from circulation many consumers realized that this was a new era of austerity. Credit card debt otherwise known as revolving debt, peaked in September of 2008 at a stunning height of $976 billion. Nearly a trillion (with a t) was reached during the peak and a spike in borrowing occurred because of good and bad times. Americans were attempting to balance their short-fall in wages with debt during the recession but during the boom, credit cards were seen as a form of wealth. As long as access to debt was available, it didn’t seem like much of a problem to many.
Now with nearly 1 out of 5 Americans eligible for work being unemployed or underemployed the usage of credit cards was trying to spike but credit card insurers have cut back access to debt:
*In billions
Since the peak in September, revolving debt has been on a steady decline. Since that point, some $50 billion in credit card debt has been removed from the system. At the same time, the average credit card interest rate has gone up from 12.72 percent in 2004 to a current rate of 13.31 percent. This is happening in a time when the Federal Reserve is holding rates near their zero bound yet very little of this is making its way to the consumer. Banks are not lending because they realize that for an entire decade they have been giving too much debt to people highly unlikely to pay it back. Under the guise of helping the consumer, banks and Wall Street intimidated the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve to give them access to cheap and plentiful amounts of debt. Remember the argument of keeping the life blood of America going linking credit to this premise? Well as you can see, access to debt is becoming more and more restrictive.
But the game is radically changing. Credit card companies cannot squeeze more juice out of a turnip so they are now going after borrowers on good terms and playing fast and easy with contracts and terms:
“(MSNBC) When James received a great credit card offer two years ago – a 4.99 percent interest on balance transfers for the life of the card – he jumped at it. He used the cheap money to remodel the kitchen of his Los Angeles-area home.
He never expected the new kitchen would turn him into a pawn in a chess match playing out among Congress, bank regulators and credit card firms.
The offer, from JP Morgan Chase had only one obvious stipulation: No late payments. Because the rate was far lower than a home equity loan at the time, James used the credit card for the construction project, borrowing around $20,000. His monthly payments were very affordable – just under $300. Paying the minimum 2 percent each month, he’d pay off the loan in about 8 years.
James, who requested anonymity because he’s uncomfortable discussing his personal finances in public -made sure to pay on time each month, jealously guarding the terms of his cut-rate loan. Little did he realize that Chase could find a way to make his life miserable without raising his interest rate.
But Chase recently threw James– and perhaps hundreds of thousands of other consumers – a huge credit card curveball. The firm sent letters to customers beginning in late June indicating that minimum payments would be raised from 2 percent to 5 percent. In August, his monthly payment will spike to $750.”
Now imagine someone who has lost their job or has had their hours cutback. For most Americans finding an additional $750 a month is not an easy task. I can speak from my own experience that credit card companies are doing these kind of tactics. I had a 4.99 percent balance transfer offer that I went after in 2007 for the life of the entire balance. During that time, the credit card company continually tried to advertise great deals and how I should use the card to purchase goods. Of course, doing this would force the new debt onto the higher 20 percent area. And when you pay back this credit card, your payment would go to the 4.99 percent balance and not the new 20 percent purchase. These are the kind of gimmicks they use but I never purchased anything beyond the balance transfer. However, the system they used switched to paperless and they stopped sending a statement to my home recently. When they sent an e-mail bill it was spam blocked along with Nigerian scams and a few days later I noticed the entire balance was up to 20 percent.
Now I don’t recommend carrying a balance. This is a bad move. But I had figured that at 4.99 percent the money was a good deal. Yet I talked with my attorney and wrote the credit card company a note which brought the promotional rate back. Either way, credit card companies can do what they want. They are not in the business of charity. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve are looking out for banks and Wall Street. American consumers are on their own. You need to be vigilant.
Most of the credit card companies are trying to jack up their rates before new legislation makes it harder in 2010 to pilfer the American public:
“Tens of millions of Chase customers have taken advantage of our promotional low rate financing over the last five years,” she said. “Most of these loans have been paid back in less than 24 months. However, there have been a small percentage of customers that have not made as much progress in paying down these loans. Our desire is to have these balances paid back in a reasonable period of time.”
Bill Hardekopf, who runs LowCards.com, said banks are following through on warnings that credit card expenses for consumers would rise after passage of the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act.
“From an issuer standpoint, they are looking at their default rates going up, they are in tremendous economic distress and they are trying to minimize their risk as much as possible,” he said. “Issuers feel they need to find ways to make up for revenue they are projecting they are going to lose once the legislation takes effect.”
Chase told msnbc.com that it would work with consumers who are unable to make their new payments, but James said that’s merely an invitation into a lion’s den. The only offer he received was a severe change in terms to his account with a much higher, variable interest rate.
When the new federal regulations take effect next year, they will severely limit banks’ ability to change rates unless cardholders have variable-rate agreements, so banks are trying to steer consumers away from fixed-rate cards. Bank of America, for example, recently sent notices to cardholders with fixed rates telling them their accounts will be changed to variable rates starting next month.”
So for the moment, they’ll be changing rates at will for the tiniest infractions. Or because they feel like it. Also, I have gotten a few letters where you actually have to call to opt-out of a rate increase. I have a credit card with a fixed 6 percent purchase rate but recently, the issuer sent out a notice stating that they would raise the rate to a variable rate of 15 percent if I didn’t opt-out. I nearly tossed the letter into the junk mail bin but did a double-take. Who in the world would sign on to this? They are betting on many, like I almost did, tossing the letter into the trash and one day waking up seeing the rate skyrocket to 15 percent. This is the new reality.
The massive amount of debt created by the multi-decade long housing bubble created a cultural psychology and love with debt. The last generation from the Great Depression knew the slippery slope of debt and many stayed away from it or at the very least, were very skeptical. That was not the case for the past 20 years. Credit cards were glorified and even became a designer symbol. A gold card used to mean something. Now, everyone has a gold card, platinum card, or some titanium card. Who really cares? The real value comes from the terms which have become more onerous. Yet psychology is a big player here because people “feel” richer with a titanium card in their wallet even though they are flat broke and in massive debt.
If you want a sample look of where things are going, take a look at FDIC insured charge off rates for California:
The charge off rate went from $12 million in 2006, to $17 million in 2007, to $30 million in 2008. The current rate is tracking over $40 million for the year and keep in mind late payments are shooting up. This may seem tiny but these are highly leveraged products and banks have these items as assets on their books. More losses coming down the pipeline and more pressure for banks to squeeze the American public so make sure you stay vigilant.
If you enjoyed this post click here to subscribe to a complete feed and stay up to date with today’s challenging market!Player ratings for all 17 Maroons players from their 28-4 loss to the Blues in State of Origin I.
Match Draw Widget
[2017] State of Origin - Round 1: Maroons vs Blues
1. Darius Boyd
He's the best in the business at creating overlaps out of nothing but struggled to impose himself against a resolute defensive line. Almost reached out to score a consolation try at the death but was held up in goal. Safe as houses at the back but could be shifted to the wing if Billy Slater is recalled. 6/10
2. Corey Oates
Was rewarded for his surety under the high ball in defence with a spectacular four-pointer off an inch-perfect Cooper Cronk kick. Played the role of battering ram coming out of trouble and won his individual duel with Blake Ferguson. 6.5/10
3. Will Chambers
Wreaked havoc in the first half with 103 metres and caused opposite number Josh Dugan all sorts of problems in defence. Wasn't as effective in the second stanza and could come under scrutiny for his shot on Mitchell Pearce. 7.5/10
4. Justin O'Neill
Came up with a disastrous error bringing the ball off his own line that led to Andrew Fifita's match-sealing try. Rarely threatened the defensive line and missed a whopping eight tackles. Could be the man to drop out if the Maroons decide to bring Slater back into the side. 4/10
5. Dane Gagai
Made plenty of tough metres coming out of trouble and was Queensland's most threatening player when given space. Ran for a game-high 220 metres and produced a brilliant tackle to deny Brett Morris late in the first half. 8/10
6. Anthony Milford
Might not remember his Origin debut after colliding with Corey Oates midway through the second half. Handled himself well in defence and showed Fred Astaire-like footwork every time he got in space. 6/10
7. Cooper Cronk
Produced a spectacular cross-field kick to find Corey Oates for Queensland's only try and his general-play kicking was exemplary as always. His forwards didn't give him enough time or space to hurt the Blues. 6/10
8. Dylan Napa
Had the honour of returning the kick-off and backed up his strong carry with another run later in the set. Didn't look out of place in his first stint but appeared to be hampered by an ankle injury. 6/10
9. Cameron Smith
Worked the shortside well to put Gagai into space in the play preceding the Oates try. Schemed well out of dummy-half but didn't control the game like we've come accustomed to over his record-breaking career. 6.5/10
10. Nate Myles
He's been a magnificent servant for the Maroons but was outshone by New South Wales' mobile pack. Produced a poor attempted tackle on Andrew Fifita for the first try of the game and then conceded a ruck penalty moments later. Managed just 27 metres in his first stint and dropped the ball with his first touch back on the field. 4.5/10
11. |
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